Ash Carter
25th United States Secretary of Defense
Ashton Baldwin Carter (September 24, 1954 – October 24, 2022) was an American government official and academic who served as the 25th United States secretary of defense from February 2015 to January 2017. He later served as director of the Belfer Center for Science & International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School.
Carter began his career as a physicist. After a brief experience as an analyst for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, he switched careers to public policy. He joined the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 1984 and became chair of the International & Global Affairs faculty. Carter served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy during President Clinton's first term, from 1993 to 1996, responsible for policy regarding the former Soviet states, strategic affairs, and nuclear weapons.
During President Obama's first term, Carter served first as Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics and then Deputy Secretary of Defense until December 2013. In February 2015, he replaced Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense and served in that capacity until the end of the Obama administration. During his tenure, he ended the ban on transgender officers in the military.
For his service to national security, Carter was awarded the DOD Distinguished Public Service Medal five times.
The public source identifies “Ash Carter” as 25th United States Secretary of Defense. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Carter, 25th and United.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4806029. VIAF identifies the subject as 41940395. The Library of Congress control number is n83135227. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1954, 2022, 2015 and 2017.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ash Carter” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.