He opened up the American army more to women and also to transgender people: Barack Obama’s Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter died of a heart attack at the age of 68.
Ashton Carter in a 2015 recording.
(dpa)/cov. Former Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter is dead. The 68-year-old died on Monday as a result of a heart attack, said the dean of Harvard University’s Kennedy School, Douglas Elmendorf, on Tuesday. Carter taught at the facility. “The United States and the world know Ash Carter for his lifelong commitment to serving this country, defending this country’s best values, and building a safer world for all people,” Elmendorf said.
Carter headed the Pentagon from 2015 to 2017 under then-US President Barack Obama. Under him, the United States opened up its combat troops to women as well. “We cannot afford to forego 50 percent of the country’s opportunities and talents,” he said at the time. Carter also admitted transgender people to the ministry. He was deputy secretary of defense from 2011 to 2013. He gained important experience, for example, as Secretary of State in the Pentagon in arms procurement, in logistics and in the field of new technologies.
Born in Philadelphia in 1954, Carter had already held a senior position in the Department of Defense in the 1990s and eventually climbed the career ladder in political Washington. He previously studied physics at the elite universities of Yale, Oxford and Harvard, among other things, and later taught at various universities.