Ash Carter

Early life

Ashton Baldwin Carter was born on September 24, 1954, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to William Stanley Carter Jr., a World War II veteran, United States Navy neurologist and psychiatrist, and longtime department chairman at Abington Memorial Hospital; and Anne Baldwin Carter, an English teacher. He had three siblings, including children's book author Cynthia DeFelice.

Carter was raised in Abington, Pennsylvania, on Wheatsheaf Lane. At age eleven, working at his first job at a Philadelphia car wash, he was fired for "wise-mouthing the owner."

Education

Carter was educated at Highland Elementary School (class of 1966) and at Abington Senior High School (class of 1972) in Abington. In high school, he was a wrestler, lacrosse player, cross-country runner, and president of the Honor Society. He was inducted into Abington Senior High School's Hall of Fame in 1989.

Carter attended the University of Edinburgh in Scotland in 1975. In 1976, Carter completed his Bachelor of Arts (BA) in his double-major of physics and medieval history at Yale College, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa. His senior thesis, "Quarks, Charm and the Psi Particle", was published in the Yale Scientific Magazine in 1975. He was also an experimental research associate at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in 1975 (where he worked on quark research) and at Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1976.

Carter then became a Rhodes Scholar and studied at the University of Oxford. He received his Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) in theoretical physics on Hard processes in perturbative QCD in 1979 and was supervised by Christopher Llewellyn Smith. He was a member of St John's College, Oxford.

Carter was subsequently a postdoctoral fellow research associate in theoretical physics at Rockefeller University from 1979 to 1980, studying time-reversal invariance and dynamical symmetry breaking. He coauthored two papers on CP violations in B meson decays with A. I. Sanda, which were used as one of theoretical basis to build B factories.

Carter was then a research fellow at the MIT Center for International Studies from 1982 to 1984, during which time he wrote a public report assessing that the Reagan-proposed "Star Wars" initiative could not protect the U.S. from a Soviet nuclear attack.

From 1993 to 1996, Carter served as assistant secretary of defense for international security policy during President Bill Clinton's first term. He was responsible for strategic affairs, including dealing with the threat of weapons of mass destruction elsewhere in the world, nuclear weapons policy (including overseeing the U.S. nuclear arsenal and missile defenses), the 1994 Nuclear Posture Review, the Agreed Framework signed in 1994 which froze North Korea's plutonium-producing nuclear reactor program, the 1995 extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the negotiation of the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, and the multibillion-dollar Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program and Project Sapphire that removed all nuclear weapons from Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus. Carter directed military planning during the 1994 crisis over North Korea's nuclear weapons program. In addition, he was responsible for dealing with the establishment of defense and intelligence relationships with former Soviet countries in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and its nuclear arsenal, and was chairman of NATO's High Level Group. He was also responsible for the Counter proliferation Initiative, control of sensitive U.S. exports, and negotiations that led to the deployment of Russian troops as part of the Bosnia Peace Plan Implementation Force.

From April 2009 to October 2011, Carter was Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, with responsibility for DOD's procurement reform and innovation agenda and completion of procurements such as the KC-46 tanker. He also led the development and production of thousands of mine-resistant ambush protected (MRAP) vehicles, and other acquisitions. He instituted "Better Buying Power", seeking smarter and leaner purchasing. From October 2011 to December 2013, Carter was Deputy Secretary of Defense, serving as the DOD's chief operating officer, overseeing the department's annual budget and its three million civilian and military personnel, steering strategy and budget through sequester, and directing the reform of DOD's national security export controls.

He was confirmed by Senate voice vote for both positions.

In an April 4, 2013, speech, he affirmed that the 'Shift to Asia' initiative of President Obama was a priority that would not be affected by the budget sequestration in 2013. Carter noted that The Shift to Asia was principally an economic matter with new security implications. India, Australia, and New Zealand were mentioned as forthcoming security partners. His Pentagon arms-control responsibilities included matters involving the START II, ABM, CFE, and other arms-control treaties.

Carter was married to Stephanie DeLeeuw Carter. He had been previously married to Clayton Spencer, the eighth president of Bates College, with whom he had two children, Ava and William.

Carter died from a heart attack at his home in Boston on October 24, 2022, at age 68.