Boston Globe:
WASHINGTON — President Obama late this afternoon nominated Harvard professor Ashton B. Carter, a leading authority on arms control, to take on a surprising new role, according to top administration officials — as the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer.
The choice of Carter to run the office that oversees hundreds of billions of dollars for new weapons and research — and the focus of intense lobbying by defense firms, retired generals, and members of Congress — has been rumored for weeks. And word of his pending nomination has already sparked concern within the defense industry and some of the Pentagon bureaucracy.
But that may be exactly what Obama and Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates want.
Unlike most of his predecessors selected to be under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, Carter has no professional ties to America’s arms makers or manufacturing industry, nor has he spent his career in government procurement. Instead, from his perch at Harvard’s Kennedy School, Carter has been criticizing the Pentagon for buying too many armaments it doesn’t need, decrying what he calls a lack of discipline and “failure to take account of cost growth in weapons systems and defense services.”
