By Emelie Rutherford
President Obama announced yesterday he intends to nominate Harvard professor Ashton Carter to be the Pentagon’s under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics.
If the nomination is confirmed by the Senate Armed Services Committee and full Senate, Carter would replace John Young, who held the high-profile post in the end of the Bush administration and has remained on the job in a temporary status.
Defense sources have buzzed about Carter’s expected nomination since early last month. Some have noted his lack of acquisition and defense-industry experience.
Carter is a physicist and current Chair of the International & Global Affairs faculty at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
He also is co-director, with former Defense Secretary William Perry, of the Preventive Defense Project, a research collaboration of Harvard and Stanford Universities.
Carter has spent his entire career in academia and government, and served as assistant secretary of defense for international security policy in the Clinton administration, from 1993 to 1996.