Obama to announce Defense pick Friday

President Obama will announce Ashton Carter as his pick for Defense secretary on Friday, according to a White House official. 

If Carter accepts the nomination, he will face a new war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a military drawdown from Afghanistan, an increasingly aggressive Russia and China, and continuing threats from terrorists and Ebola, all while facing budget constraints and a White House with a strong grip on defense policy. 

{mosads}He will also manage the president’s goal of closing the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, the integration of female forces into jobs previously closed to them, tackle military sexual assault, and pursue other reforms, such as of the nuclear enterprise. 

Carter, 60, will be Obama’s fourth Defense secretary and is expected to be easily confirmed by the Senate, facing no major opposition by Republicans. It is not clear when he might be confirmed. Congress is scheduled to leave next week for the year. 

Carter has vast experience managing defense policy at the Pentagon and became the most viable candidate to takeover for Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, after he announced his resignation last week. 

Carter served as the Pentagon’s No. 2 from 2011-2013, spent two years previously as the department’s technology and weapons-buying chief, and served as assistant secretary of defense for international security policy from 1993-1996, responsible for policy regarding the former Soviet states, strategic affairs and nuclear weapons policy.

Carter graduated with bachelor’s degrees in physics and medieval history from Yale University in 1976, and received a doctorate in theoretical physics from Oxford University in 1979, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. 

He has held positions as a physics instructor at Oxford, a postdoctoral fellow at Rockefeller University and M.I.T., and an experimental research associate at Brookhaven and Fermilab National Laboratories. 

Carter is currently a distinguished visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and a lecturer at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and a senior executive at the Markle Foundation. 

Carter was in consideration for the position after Panetta stepped down in 2013, but the administration had decided to instead nominate Hagel, who had little prior Pentagon experience, but served as an Army sergeant in the Vietnam War. 

Hagel said Thursday that he and the president decided over several discussions that it was the appropriate time for him to leave and for new leadership to take over. Obama announced Hagel’s resignation on Nov. 24.

Hagel would not confirm reports he was pushed out, that he resigned over policy differences with the White House, or that he was frustrated by its micromanagement of the Pentagon.  

“There were no major differences in any major area. Sure, there are always issues of style, and how you get things done, and are things moving fast enough,” Hagel told reporters on Thursday. 

“It’s not one defining issue for me. It would be different if there was one thing, [that] I just could not accept — or I just couldn’t do — or whatever it would be. No, it wasn’t that at all,” he said. 

“But it’s a combination of things, as you think through these things, and the president and I talked about it, so I’m very comfortable with my position and my decision. I think the president feels good about it; I feel good about it,” he said.