Washington, D.C. Ash Carter, who served as defence secretary for the last two years of the Obama administration, has passed away at age 68. During that time, he removed a prohibition on transgender persons serving in the military and opened combat professions in the military to women.
According to a statement released on Tuesday by Douglas Elmendorf, dean of Harvard University’s Kennedy School, Carter passed away following a heart attack on Monday night. Carter had served as director of the school’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
Before Carter was named the Defense Department secretary, he served in President Barack Obama’s administration as its top procurement officer and oversaw the department’s effort to speed more than 24,000 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles to Iraq and Afghanistan. Thousands of American soldiers were being injured or killed at the time as a result of roadside bombs because the trucks they were driving lacked sufficient safety measures.
Carter usually cited the quick creation and acquisition of those vehicles as one of his greatest successes.
“At its height of manufacturing, the United States sent over a thousand MRAPs to theatres each month. At a ceremony to celebrate the end of the vehicle’s manufacture in 2012, Carter remarked that there, people had saved lives. And as you are well aware, I would have driven one in if I could have gotten it through the door today.
” In December 2015, after three years of study and debate, Carter ordered the military to open all jobs to women, removing the final barriers that kept women from serving in combat, including the most dangerous and grueling commando posts.
Carter lifted the prohibition on transgender service members in the US military the following year, seeing it as the morally correct course of action.
Carter stated in June 2016 that “Americans who want to serve and can fulfil our requirements should be offered the opportunity to compete to do so,” and he outlined a one-year timetable to put the shift into action. “Our mission is to defend this country, and we don’t want barriers unrelated to a person’s qualification to serve preventing us from recruiting or retaining the soldier, sailor, airman, or Marine who can best accomplish the mission.
As the 25th defence secretary, Carter, a native of Philadelphia, “liked nothing more than spending time with the troops, making regular visits to Iraq and Afghanistan to visit U.S. personnel with his wife Stephanie,” his family said in a statement. Over the course of five administrations, Carter served presidents from both parties, always putting politics aside.
Death of Ash Carter, the defence secretary who hired women
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