Todd Jacobson
NS&D Monitor
1/9/2015
Ash Carter, President Obama’s nominee to be the next Secretary of Defense, is set to appear before the Senate Armed Services Committee in early February, giving him time to recover from back surgery in December, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) told reporters this week. McCain said the Committee was ready to immediately have a hearing for Carter, but Carter had said he’d be ready to appear before the panel the first week of February because of a long-planned operation on his back.
Carter left the Defense Department in 2013 after serving two years as Deputy Defense Secretary and as Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics from 2009 to 2011. He has significant experience with nuclear weapons issues having led the first Nuclear Posture Review in 1994 and serving on the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States. He is not expected to face significant opposition from the panel, a sentiment that McCain reinforced this week. “The guy is well known to all of us,” McCain said, according to Politico. “What we’re going to probably be focusing on is a number of issues, like the need for acquisition reform, like a policy toward Afghanistan, those kinds of things. As far as the nomination itself, I don’t think that there’s a problem.”
