Report: Senator says Obama has chosen Ashton Carter to lead Pentagon

A senior Republican senator says President Obama has chosen former Pentagon official Ashton Carter as his nominee for Defense secretary.

The 60-year-old Carter was deputy Defense secretary from October 2011 to December 2013, a role that is essentially the agency's chief operating officer.

If confirmed by the Senate, Carter would be Obama's fourth Pentagon chief in his roughly six-year administration. The development comes eight days after Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel abruptly resigned under White House pressure, after less than two years on the job.

Carter has extensive experience in the national security arena. Before he served as deputy Defense secretary, he was the Pentagon's technology and weapons-buying chief for more than two years.

His academic and government credentials give him the reputation of being one of the brightest minds in the national security establishment.

During the administration of President Bill Clinton he was assistant secretary of Defense for international security policy. Before that he was director of the Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School.

Carter has bachelor's degrees in physics and medieval history from Yale University and received his doctorate in theoretical physics from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He has served on the advisory boards of MIT's Lincoln Laboratories and the Draper Laboratory. He has extensive knowledge of the inner workings of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

In national security circles Carter is closely associated with a concept he and former Defense Secretary William Perry championed in the 1990s. They called it 'preventive defense.' Its basic premise is that in the aftermath of the Cold War the U.S. could forestall major new security threats by using defense diplomacy - forging and strengthening security partnerships with China, Russia and others.

Carter's view of U.S. defense priorities appears to fit well with the Obama agenda, including better minding of defense alliances and partnerships in Asia and the Pacific, as well as more attention on cyber-defense and countering the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

In remarks in July 2013 at the Aspen Security Forum, Carter said the country was ready to move beyond the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and to look harder at future threats, including cyber attacks. That was one month before Obama announced the start of a bombing campaign against the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq.

Carter's point was that the Pentagon had entered an era of transition that requires fresh thinking. He said that effort could be stymied by across-the-board budget cuts in 2016 if Congress does not act to erase the budget-cutting law called sequestration.

'First of all, we need to get back to some issues that we've taken our eye off a little bit over the last decade,' he said, adding, 'We need to reinvest and get back in the game.'

news3blog.blogspot.com contributed to this report.