WASHINGTON — As chief weapons buyer for the Pentagon, and later its No. 2 officer, Ashton Carter regularly made time to talk.
Especially if the subject was protecting troops in combat.
Whip
smart and loquacious, Carter would delve into the nuts and bolts of the
keeping soldiers and Marines safe from harm, particularly from
improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Attention from his lofty perch sent
a message: After years of dithering, nothing would get higher priority
at the Pentagon.
That included the programs costing
hundreds of billions like the F-35 fighter or lofty plans that never got
off the drawing board, such as the billions wasted on the Army's Future
Combat System, a fleet of vehicles killed by former Defense Secretary
Robert Gates because it didn't offer adequate protection from IEDs.
Instead,
Carter focused on balloons with cameras to stare at road insurgents
seeded with bombs. Or on the Labrador retrievers he visited during their
training for deployment with troops walking dangerous foot patrols in
Afghanistan.
"I never knew I'd be so interested in dogs," Carter told me.
White House officials said Tuesday that Carter is a "leading candidate" to be named Defense secretary.
ellingly, Carter's military adviser was then-Army colonel Ron
Lewis. A spit-and-polish officer with a firm handshake and direct
manner, Lewis had spent the better part of his post-9/11 career
commanding helicopter attack pilots in some of the hairiest parts of
Iraq and Afghanistan.
No doubt Lewis' experience
informed Carter's decision to accelerate the program Gates had put in
motion: rushing Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles to
troops patrolling paved highways in Iraq and dirt roads in Afghanistan.
Carter,
with degrees in physics and medieval history from Yale and a doctorate
in theoretical physics from Oxford, also demanded data on their
effectiveness.
In
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