President Obama on Monday announced his intent to nominate Harvard physicist Ashton Carter as his choice to be the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer. Carter would replace John Young who has been in that post since November 2007 and stayed on after the Bush Administration left power to ease the Presidential transition. Carter is currently chair of the international and global affairs faculty at Harvard’s Kennedy School. He served under the first Clinton Administration as assistant secretary of defense for international security policy from 1993 to 1996. According to the short biography in the White house release, in his earlier DOD post, Carter directed military planning during the 1994 North Korean nuclear crisis; was instrumental in removing all ex-Soviet nuclear weapons from Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine; and managed the cooperative threat reduction program. (For more, read AFPS report, and Monday’s Politico report and Boston Globe report.)
The Pentagon abruptly relieved Air Force Gen. Timothy D. Haugh, head of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, and his NSA civilian deputy, Wendy Noble, on April 3.