MIB: Ash Carter, Secretary of Defense


 * Interviewed: Ash Carter
 * Date: November 15, 2019
 * Link: https://ritholtz.com/2019/11/mib-ash-carter-secdef/
 * Link: https://ritholtz.com/2019/11/mib-wrestling-the-pentagon-under-control/
 * Transcript: https://ritholtz.com/2019/11/transcript-ash-carter/

Books by Ash Carter

 * Inside the Five-Sided Box: Lessons from a Lifetime of Leadership in the Pentagon by Ash Carter
 * Preventive Defense: A New Security Strategy for America by Ash Carter and William Perry
 * Ballistic Missile Defense by Ash Carter and David Schwartz
 * Managing Nuclear Operations by Ash Carter
 * Directed energy missile defense in space by Ash Carter
 * Keeping the Edge: Managing Defense for the Future by Ash Carter and John White
 * Soviet Nuclear Fission: Control of the Nuclear Arsenal in a Disintegrating Soviet Union by Kurt Campbell, Ash Carter, Steven Miller, and Charles Zraket
 * A New Concept of Cooperative Security by Ash Carter, William Perry, and John Steinbruner

Books Barry Mentioned

 * A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age by William Manchester
 * The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy by Michael Lewis

Favorite Books
RITHOLTZ: Quite interesting. Let’s talk about some of your favorite books. What do you enjoy reading? You’re a bit of a historian.

CARTER: It’s funny, Barry, I am and I’m all nonfiction because I love to learn about something I’ve never seen, never done, never will do. That’s why I wrote the book I did about the Pentagon. If you’ve never been in the Pentagon and you want to know how all the parts work …

RITHOLTZ: It paints quite a vivid picture.

CARTER: It’s an executive guide or a citizen’s guide to the Pentagon. It’s not about me, it’s about the Pentagon. I like reading books like that that’s why I wrote a book like that.

I read, and this may surprise you, textbooks.

RITHOLTZ: Okay.

CARTER: That may sound boring but here’s why. A text — if you want to learn something, a textbook is designed, it’s written to teach you.

RITHOLTZ: Sure.

CARTER: So, from a good textbook, you can learn a lot about a subject you don’t know and second, if you don’t like — if something doesn’t come through to you in the first textbook, get another textbook. I always get three or four of the same subject.

RITHOLTZ: Really?

CARTER: I like Mathematics. I like Physics. I like History and Language and so forth, too. Because then you can say, well, I’m going to — this — I didn’t get this guy’s explanation of a certain subject. So, I go to the corresponding chapter in the other one and read that and they’ve got a better explanation and you go back and forth.

I like doing that and it may sound like an odd — it should to people. But if you like to learn, try textbooks.

Tweets
https://twitter.com/ritholtz/status/1197153601539493888 Here is a funny thing: We are about an hour into the interview, and that far into the discussion, everyone tends to drop their guard and get into the moment (both guest and host).

This is especially true of both sides are enjoying the discussion and having a little fun

So when the issue of the Iraq War comes up, and he mentions WMDs, I kinda forgot who I was and who I was talking to. ..

My knee-jerk immediate reaction is to blurt out:

“We all knew its nonsense; Anytime a VP has to create a shadow intelligence agency in basement of White House to disagree with career pros at NSA/CIA – its obviously a scam and a pretense to go to war with Saddam...”

Nothing radical, just bluntly honest pushback to a Sr pentagon official who supported Iraq War.

The words are still hanging in the air. . . like a cartoon bubble over my head. . . When it slowly dawns on me WhaTF I just said, and WhoTF I just said it to. ..

Oops, a little embarrassing.

To his credit, he handles my outburst gracefully. And says he wishes we did not go in on false pretenses.

Regardless, Carter is polite and forthcoming and we move on to the next issue.

We discuss why the F-35 Lightning II might be the last manned fighter plane the US military uses.

The future of warfare will look very different than the past -- drones, robots, electronics, technology will be the key drivers of future conflicts.

Carter describes what he was doing on 9/11, and his subsequent role in coordinating US Intelligence and why he opposed creating a separate bureaucracy of Homeland Security, and preferred instead a coordinated Intelligence, Defense and Law Enforcement standing joint operation.

All told, he is a spectacularly knowledgable person about all things ,military, defense and warfare related. MUST LISTEN

The future of warfare will look very different than the past -- drones, robots, electronics, technology will be the key drivers of future conflicts.

Masters in Business: Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense on Apple Podcasts

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ash-carter-discusses-the-business-of-defense/id730188152?i=1000456936995