Ashton Carter was fired from the very first job he ever held. As an 11-year-old employee at a Philadelphia-area car wash, the man in line for President Barack Obama’s new secretary of defense was canned for “wise-mouthing the owner,” as he later wrote in a personal essay.

That bit of biographical trivia might not surprise either admirers or detractors of the 60-year-old Carter, a defense intellectual who is often the smartest person in the room — and, even some boosters say, always knows it.


“He is brilliant and driven, a policy wonk equally adept at mastering the bureaucracy,” says a former White House official. “He’s also arrogant and doesn’t suffer fools gladly.”

That could be a warning sign in an administration that has already burned through three defense secretaries who resented White House micromanagement of their affairs. In Carter, Obama would be choosing a strong-willed independent thinker who believed the U.S. should have left a robust residual troop force in Iraq and believes the military has been asked to swallow dangerously large budget cuts. Carter’s record on nuclear nonproliferation also suggests he could take a harder line on Iran policy than Obama favors.

( Also on POLITICO: Carter's no yes-man)

A bona fide scholar whose pursuits have ranged from the monks of 12th-century Flanders to quark theory to nuclear terrorism, Carter has surely earned his self-confidence. But as he prepares for the top military job amid uncertainty in Iraq and Syria, the question is whether a wonk is what America needs in wartime.

“Ash Carter is widely recognized as one of the country’s sharpest policy minds, which leads some to question whether or not he can actually run a war,” says Julianne Smith, a former deputy national security adviser to vice president Joe Biden now at the Center for a New American Security.

To Smith and others in Carter’s large fan club, the answer is a resounding yes: “He has an EQ that matches his larger than life IQ,” Smith says. But Carter’s background as an academic and a supporting bureaucratic player would make him something of an experimental, if not risky, pick for a job often held in modern times by former elected officials with high public profiles. Four of the five most recent individuals to hold the job previously served in Congress.

Not to worry, say Carter’s allies — who contend he is no pocket-protector nerd and call his political skills sharper than those of the ineffectual outgoing Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel. Indeed, Carter, who served as deputy secretary of defense from 2011 to 2013, is in many ways a contrast to Hagel. Where Hagel, a former senator, was aloof and unfamiliar with the Pentagon’s machinations, Carter was a fearsomely well-briefed manager.

( Also on POLITICO: Carter tapped as defense secretary)

Hagel’s predecessor, Leon Panetta, likened Carter to Scotty, the famed USS Enterprise engineer from “Star Trek.” “I worked on the bridge, while he manned the engine room,” Panetta wrote in his recent memoir.

While Hagel is the type to spin folksy anecdotes about his past, Carter insisted that meetings end with clear decisions and plans for their execution, says a former Pentagon aide who worked under Carter. Woe betide anyone who failed to follow through. “He would point to some guy sitting in the back of the room and say, ‘Six months ago you said you would do X. Have you gotten it done?’”

Those who hadn’t usually regretted it. And some could be left feeling patronized.

But several sources said, bruised feelings aside, Carter is more popular within the military than Hagel, even though Hagel was a combat veteran and Carter has never worn a uniform. Carter took care during his previous Pentagon tenure to leave the building to visit U.S. military bases abroad, including multiple trips to Afghanistan. On weekends, he often made unpublicized visits with his wife to Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

At least some of the vets there were familiar with Carter’s efforts, as the Pentagon’s top acquisitions official in Obama’s first term, to supply them with body armor and jammers against improvised explosive devices. In a January essay for Foreign Affairs, Carter recounted meeting the father of a veteran who had stepped on an IED while wearing special protective undergarments that were designed to minimize catastrophic genital injuries. The father approached Carter in a Walter Reed hallway and hugged him, saying: “My son will always have to use prosthetics to walk, but at least I still have a chance of being a grandfather.”

Carter’s views on the fight in Iraq and Syria are not clear, and the challenge doesn’t neatly match his skill set. | AP Photo

“He’s respected by the military and that’s hugely important,” said Jane Harman, a former Democratic congresswoman and close friend of Carter’s who now heads the Wilson Center. “I don’t know that Hagel ever got to that level.”

At least as important, however, will be Carter’s relationship with the White House as the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant grinds on, and the U.S. prepares to escalate its role in Syria’s civil war. Critics in both parties have complained that Obama’s pursuit of ISIL seems to lack conviction and clarity, and shortly before being forced out by the White House last month, Hagel himself penned a memo warning that Obama needed sharper strategic focus.

On paper, the signs are auspicious. Carter shares Obama’s analytical intellectual style as well as his Ivy League pedigree: Carter attended Yale as an undergraduate and has served as a faculty member of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He also earned a degree in theoretical physics as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where he studied, among other things, “the structure of the sub-atomic zoo of particles,” as he later wrote in a personal essay for a Kennedy School faculty profile.

Ash Carter on the record Some of Carter's past positions might cause trouble inside the administration or during his confirmation hearing: On North Korea In a 2006 Washington Post op-ed written with former Defense Secretary William Perry, Carter staked out a position that’s already raising some eyebrows: He urged the Bush administration to preemptively strike North Korea if the country continued with plans to conduct a test launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile. “Diplomacy has failed, and we cannot sit by and let this deadly threat mature,” the pair wrote. On Iraq During his last tour at the Pentagon, Carter fought alongside Defense Secretary Leon Panetta for Obama to authorize a robust U.S. troop presence in Iraq past 2011, something Panetta now says Obama never took seriously. On Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative In a 1984 report, Carter said the “Star Wars” technologies pushed by Reagan to protect the country from Soviet nukes had little chance of becoming a reality. Lasers and other devices needed for the system “have not yet been built in the laboratory, much less in a form suitable for incorporation in a complete defense system,” Carter wrote. He would later boast in an autobiographical essay that his report found its way into the Oval Office and was the “first authoritative report to say that the emperor had no clothes.” On sequestration Carter is a critic of sequestration who’s likely to continue the department’s policy of requesting more funding than allowed under the spending caps put in place under the Budget Control Act of 2011. “Sequester was never intended to be implemented, and is very disruptive because it gives us very little managerial flexibility in where we take budget adjustments this year,” he said during a trip last year to the Asia-Pacific region.

But Carter is an independent thinker whose views may conflict with the president’s. He was a believer in a strong residual U.S. force in Iraq before Obama withdrew from the country in 2010. (The White House says the Iraqis would not agree to a continued U.S. presence on acceptable terms.) At the Pentagon, he pushed to restore cuts to the military budget implemented by Obama and Congress.

Carter’s views on the fight in Iraq and Syria are not clear, and the challenge doesn’t neatly match his skill set. When he left the Pentagon last December, ISIL was not yet on official Washington’s radar. He has a relatively thin background in Middle Eastern affairs and is better-versed in Soviet nuclear doctrine than Islamic radicalism.

“He will have to demonstrate his bona fides here,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a military analyst with the Brookings Institution. “It’s the area we need the greatest creativity, especially in regard to Syria and to an extent Iraq, and the area where the White House may be most resistant to fresh thinking.”

But one senior administration official cautioned against expecting any dramatic new strategic vision from Carter. “You can’t make the case that if we need a fundamental change you’re going to get it with him. The challenge of Syria — I don’t think any one individual is going to solve that. He’ll be a steady hand.”

If nominated and confirmed, Carter could be more consequential when it comes to Obama’s plans for dealing with Iran’s nuclear program. With a new deadline for Obama’s nuclear talks with Iran coming up this summer, Carter would be a critical voice as Obama weighs a military option if he can’t strike a deal with Tehran. Carter’s record suggests that he could urge a hawkish response.

A leading member of a clique of defense intellectuals long concerned with the possibility of a nuclear terrorist attack, Carter has counseled strong — even risky — action to prevent the spread of nuclear materials and know-how. In 1994, he was among Clinton administration officials who favored striking a North Korean nuclear reactor to prevent Pyongyang from developing nuclear weapons. Years later, Carter acknowledged to PBS that such a strike risked a war involving “horrific” loss of life — but added that a nuclear North Korea would be “such a disaster for our security” that it was worth taking “substantial risks” to prevent that outcome.

North Korea backed down in the moment — but eventually developed nuclear weapons, something Carter later called “a stunning defeat for the United States.”

In June 2006, Carter also argued for a dramatic surgical strike against a North Korean ballistic missile platform just before a planned test launch. “We won’t know whether North Korea’s ambitions can be blunted by anything short of the use of force unless and until the U.S. takes the danger seriously and gets in the game,” according to an article he co-authored for Time.

Carter has supported diplomacy with Iran and written about methods of containing a nuclear-armed Tehran. But he also authored a 2008 think tank report exploring a possible strike on Iran’s atomic infrastructure.

It’s one thing to write academic papers, however, and another to advise the president to take military action. No one can say how the wonk will respond to the responsibility of managing strategic dilemmas he has analyzed for decades.

Carter’s friends insist he’s up to it.

“He’s not a wonk; he’s not a narrow technical person — he has a much broader view of life,” William Perry, who was secretary of defense under former President Bill Clinton, said, citing Carter’s collegiate study of medieval history. “He’s a man for all seasons.”

He’ll need to be.

“It’s going to be a brutal job,” said Harman.