On the late defense intellectual, who headed the Pentagon for two years.
On the late defense intellectual, who headed the Pentagon for two years
A sh Carter was a brilliant fellow who devoted himself to education and public service. (Education, too, is a public service.) He held several positions in the Department of Defense. He was secretary from February 2015 to January 2017. He passed away this week, at 68.
Carter was born in 1954 and grew up in the Philadelphia area. He went to Yale, majoring in history and physics, both. He had a special interest in medieval history. He went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and earned a doctoral degree there in theoretical physics. He taught off and on at Harvard. And he worked in government off and on, from Reagan through Obama.
I podcasted with him in December 2017. He was working, once more, at Harvard, and he told me he very much liked being around young people — whether they were students or troops. “Helps keep you young,” he said.
In our conversation, we talked about many things, including the U.S. defense budget. I told him I did not believe in “holidays from history,” “peace dividends,” and the like. I thought our defense ought to be robust all the time, as a matter of preparedness — preparedness and deterrence. (When a nation is prepared, it tends to deter potential enemies.)
Carter said the following (and I will paraphrase here, though closely, as I will do throughout this article):
When people asked me, “Why do we have a $600 billion defense budget? Why are you asking for that much?,” I would point to the threats of the day. But I would also say, “I am the secretary of defense not just of today but also of tomorrow, and I need to make sure that we are laying tracks to be the best in the future, and that means we are investing adequately in technology and people.”
That is an arresting thing to say: “the secretary of defense not just of today but also of tomorrow.” That is exactly right.
Carter knew a lot — a lot — about nuclear weapons, and other matters nuclear. As of now, there are nine nuclear states — only nine. I regard this as astonishing, given that the relevant technology dates from the 1940s. There are almost 200 nations in the world. And only nine are nuclear? How did we get so lucky?
“It’s a miracle,” said Carter, “and one that we should not take for granted.” Any country, he said, is capable of making an A-bomb once it gets the materials. It doesn’t matter how backward the country is: Just look at North Korea.
We have to be ever vigilant, Carter emphasized. And U.S. leadership is critical. We have alliances with Germany, Japan, others — and they are not nuclear because we are. But if our leadership in the world sagged . . .
One can imagine a free-for-all.
When we talked of North Korea, Carter laid down three D’s (as I think of them): deterrence, defense, and diplomacy. You have to deter. But if that fails, you have to defend. You have to fight and win. What about diplomacy? That should be a “coercive” diplomacy, said Carter. More on that in a moment.
In the early years of the Obama administration — before he was deputy secretary and before he was secretary — Carter was the “weapons czar” (a colloquial title, obviously). In this time, he oversaw an increase in our missile defenses: an increase in their sophistication, an increase in their number. He took criticism for this, from people who said, “It’s not like a North Korean nuke can reach our shores.” Carter replied, “Maybe. But I’m paid to provide an insurance policy. What if, before long, a North Korean nuke can?”
Back to diplomacy (and a particular kind). People speak of “military options” and “diplomacy,” said Carter. They keep those things separate. But they should not. Military options and diplomacy, said Carter, ought to be “woven together into a coercive diplomacy, where you proceed step by step,” offering carrots and sticks. If you continue your missile tests, we will do X to you. If you discontinue them, we will reward you with Y.
When Carter talked in this vein, I thought of Frederick the Great: “Diplomacy without arms is like music without instruments.” (Frederick was not only a vaunted military leader but also a musician, a flutist.)
Is Iran deterrable? That is, if Iran went nuclear, could we deter it? I have put this question to many people, including Bernard Lewis, the late Middle East scholar. No, said Lewis. To Iran’s rulers, mass destruction — the devastation of Iran — would be an inducement, not a deterrent. They are religious zealots.
What said Ash Carter? “Deterrence is a strong force, but not an infallible force.” Deterrence worked, he said, with Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, or appears to have worked. But the rulers of Iran? The rulers of North Korea? They are wild cards. When it comes to the Iranians, and other such actors, it is not wise to say, “Let them get nukes. It will be okay, because it will be like the Cold War, when everyone behaved.”
On the subject of Russia, I would like to quote from Carter’s obituary in the New York Times, written by Clay Risen:
Mr. Carter clashed with other members of the cabinet over the renewed threat posed by Russia, at a time when many experts inside and outside the government still held out hope for better relations. Among his first steps as secretary was to increase America’s military presence across six former Soviet bloc states, including the Baltic countries.
“We do not seek a cold, let alone a hot, war with Russia,” he told reporters in 2015. “But make no mistake, the United States will defend our interests and our allies, the principled international order and the positive future it affords us all.”
On the subject of China, I will quote the obit once more:
He believed in the importance of hard power — America’s ability to use its military prowess to shape global politics — a position that also sometimes put him in tension with others in the Obama White House. In 2015, he announced that in the face of Chinese encroachment into the South China Sea, the United States would “fly, sail and operate wherever international law allows.”
That statement was stronger than some in the administration would have liked, but it has since won bipartisan support and become a cornerstone of America’s new, more hard-edged policy toward China.
In our podcast, I said that I did not like the phrase “lean and mean.” For years, I had heard that from people who wanted to cut defense. They loved that rhyming phrase “lean and mean.” “Oh, let’s just make it lean and mean! We’ll save a bundle and we’ll be better. Less is more!” I always bridled at this. In my view, the U.S. military ought to be big and muscular and mean. And if there’s redundancy, if there’s fat — so be it. Defense is the first job of government.
Ash Carter tempered me on the subject. He said,
Size trades off with other variables that are very important. With a given amount of money, you can have a larger force; you can have a more ready force, which is to say, a more intensively trained force; or you can have a more modern, sophisticated, up-to-date, futuristic force.
The best of militaries has three ingredients: size, readiness, and modernness. And we are most lacking in the second two.
It was my understanding that it takes a long time to effect important changes in the U.S. military. You can’t turn an aircraft carrier around on a dime, people like to say. It takes time. So it is with changes, or reforms, in our military.
Very politely, Carter gave me a bit of a schooling on this:
Every time someone talks about the pace of change in defense, I say, “Don’t underestimate us.” We have to keep up. We have to be different every year, because our enemies are different every year. It’s not like the Cold War, when we said, “We’re going to take ten or fifteen years to build this system, because the Soviet Union will still be around. We can take our sweet time and make the system perfect.” In today’s world, you have to iterate constantly, just as a tech business has to do, to stay competitive. I am particularly passionate about the need to do that in wartime, and we are in wartime. [This was 2017, remember.] War surfaces needs that must be satisfied today.
Carter gave me the example of the protective vehicles known as “MRAPs.” “MRAP” stands for “Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected.”
We discovered that the MRAPs we had used in Iraq didn’t work in Afghanistan, because Afghanistan is too mountainous. We had to build a new version of the MRAP. Our troops needed that immediately, and in a short period of time, we built 8,000 of the vehicles, put all the secret stuff in them, shipped them to Afghanistan — which is the most godawful place to fight a war from a logistics point of view — and trained troops on them. So, there are kids who are alive today, or have legs today, because of the MRAP.
I rebel against the aircraft-carrier language when it comes to the lives and limbs of my troops. We need to be better than that.
At the end of our conversation, I asked Carter about a phrase you often hear: “Thank you for your service.” Is that phrase appropriate, when said to our men and women in uniform, or our veterans? Is it nice? Has it become a cliché? Is it condescending? Does it depend? (Surely it depends, on context, tone, etc.)
I don’t like indifference to our servicemen, and I certainly don’t like the disdaining of them. But neither do I like the sentimentalization of them.
Anyway, there has been a debate in recent times.
“If you mean it, you should say it,” said Carter. He further said,
I’m so glad that I wasn’t secretary of defense during the Vietnam period, because it would have broken my heart to see our troops treated the way they were, as though they were decisionmakers. I understand a lot of people didn’t want to be in that war — and, by the way, a lot of the troops didn’t want to be in that war — but they had done their duty, and they did not deserve to be disrespected when they came home, and they were.
Before we said goodbye — before we concluded our podcast — I said to Ash Carter — I wanted to, and I meant it — “Thank you for your service.”
And thanks to everyone else who does the hard work of keeping innocent people safe in a world of terrors.