Obama’s Choice for Defense Secretary Favors Possible Military Response in Iran, More Spending

Former Deputy Secretary of
Defense Ashton Carter is President Barack Obama’s official choice
to replace Chuck Hagel. Though leaked earlier, the formal
announcement came today at a White House ceremony. Here’s how
USA Today describes his
background:

From 2009 to 2011, Carter — a Yale graduate with a degree in
physics — worked as undersecretary for acquisition, where he
supervised the procurement of equipment to meet emerging
threats.

Before he left the Pentagon, Carter was the military’s top
weapons’ buyer and pushed hard for gear that troops needed to stay
alive on the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan: Mine Resistant
Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles to protect them from roadside
bombs, surveillance equipment to spy on insurgents and
bomb-sniffing dogs to find the buried mines that killed and maimed
troops on foot patrols.

Regarded as smart, capable, and wonkish, Carter also led the
Pentagon review of its budget with a look toward cuts.

That’s one way to describe his attitude toward the Pentagon’s
budget cuts. If you are skeptical that the guy in charge of buying
stuff for the military was all about fiscal responsibility, the
progressive peaceniks over at Institute for Policy Studies have a
counter-narrative. Carter helped perpetuate the nonsense that the
sequestration
cuts were devastating to the Department of Defense:

Carter used his Pentagon perch to publicly criticize mandated
defense budget cuts provided in the 2011 Budget Control Act. In an
op-ed for Defense One, Carter argued that sequestration
forced “deep, essentially mindless, additional cuts in the defense
budget.” He argued that the defense department will be “driven to
make inefficient and unsound near term funding choices that will
reduce our buying power” and harm “our readiness.”

And yet, we keep handing over that military equipment Carter
bought to our police departments. As folks like Nick Gillespie and
Veronique de Rugy noted about the sequestration last year at this
time, those cuts only slowed the massive growth of defense
spending.
Refresh your memory here.

In Institute notes that Carter is a big advocate against nuclear
proliferation and advocates the use of force if necessary. That may
get him through some of the warhawk conservatives in the Senate. He
contributed to a report that pushed for consideration of potential
military strikes against Iran. The Institute’s analysis of the
report:

[I]f the new administration agrees to hold direct talks with
Tehran without insisting that the country first cease enrichment
activities, it should set a pre-determined compliance deadline and
be prepared to apply increasingly harsh repercussions if the
deadlines are not met, leading ultimately to U.S. military strikes
that would “have to target not only Iran’s nuclear infrastructure,
but also its conventional military infrastructure in order to
suppress an Iranian response.”

That was a report written by several parties. In a different
report from 2008, Carter expressed concerns that military strikes
on Iran might not actually stop nuclear proliferation. But reading
through the report, he really means that only military
strikes won’t work, which I don’t think is anybody’s plan, not even
Sen. John “Bomb, bomb, bomb … bomb, bomb Iran” McCain’s. Carter
instead discusses a
containment strategy that uses the possibility of military
force to contribute to pressure against Iran to give up its nuclear
ambitions:

The alternative to the diplomatic table, broadly speaking, is a
strategy of containment and punishment of an Iran that ultimately
proceeds with its nuclear program. A variety of military
measures—air assault, blockade, encirclement, and deterrence—could
be elements of such a containment strategy.