The U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously endorsed President Barack Obama’s nominee for defense secretary on Tuesday, signaling the designation will be easily confirmed in a plenary session as early as this week.
The nomination of former Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter passed through the 26-member committee in a 25-0 vote. One member did not attend the voting. The Senate is expected to put his nomination to a plenary vote as early as Wednesday.
Obama named Carter in December to replace Chuck Hagel as defense secretary.
Carter, a nuclear physicist who earned his doctorate from the University of Oxford, has no military experience. But he has a good reputation across the political spectrum and his nomination has been widely expected to win confirmation without difficulty in the Republican-controlled Senate.
Carter has had three stints at the Pentagon, most recently as deputy secretary from 2011 to 2013.
His two other previous stints at the Pentagon are as under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics from 2009 to 2011, and assistant secretary for international security policy from 1993 to 1996. As assistant secretary, he also participated in negotiations to defuse the first North Korean nuclear crisis.
Carter’s nominations for the Pentagon’s No. 2 and No. 3 jobs were all approved unanimously at the time.
He is considered a hawk on North Korea’s provocations and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.
During his confirmation hearing last week, Carter pledged to significantly beef up missile defense, including deploying more ground-based missile interceptors in California and Alaska, saying North Korean missiles could pose a “direct threat” to the country.
In 2006, Carter openly called for a preemptive strike on a North Korean long-range missile that was being readied for a test-launch, claiming that the risk of inaction in the face of North Korea’s race to threaten the U.S. would be greater than the risk associated with a preemptive strike. (Yonhap)
