YouSaid · the spoken record

Ash Carter

lines on the record: 147
first: 2019-11-15
most recent: 2019-11-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“But it needs to, the national security council is basically intended to put decisions in management form that are ready for the president to make a decision that the people at the table can't make because that would involve bossing one another around, which they can't do. That's a functional system. And when Tom Ridge came in as Homeland Security Director, he was setting up something that was a replica of that. I think if they'd stuck with it longer, it would have worked out.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a model, which is the National Security Council. It's been in effect since Eisenhower's days, as is worked better and worse in different times, but it's now got kind of, well, I can't speak to right now, but it did for a number of years and really very, very efficiently in the first Bush administration work to get all of the people involved in foreign affairs, whether it's economic foreign affairs or military foreign affairs or diplomatic foreign affairs working together every day. And there are meetings at junior levels. There are cabinet member meetings, and they try to work everything out. And then only when they have met and tried. Does the president is his precious time used? Because remember, he's the only one who can tell everybody what to do.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You got to get them to work together. So the managerial question, I always looked at it as a manager. The managerial question is cooperation, not consolidation. And your managerial mind, you say, how do I get different things that I cannot mush together and it's not the right approach to mush them together to work together? That's a different management approach.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The president decided to create a department, and off he went to do it. But I did. I opposed that at the time. I also opposed the creation of a director of national intelligence for the same reason. Really? Just created another guy in the top of six separate departments. And if the problem is you got a bunch of people who you can't get rid of any of them, you can't put any of them on top of each other, really, because law enforcement really is different from the military.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Carrie can't make me do anything and I can't make Carrie do anything. Only the president can make us work together. Well, the president's a busy guy and he can't watch after everything. So interagency work is inherently difficult for a president because he's got to knock together the heads of cabinet members who all have their own proud traditions and laws and committees of Congress and all this stuff. And he's a busy guy. So I thought there was a better way of doing counterterrorism interagency out of the White House.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the president, if you think about the president, if I'm Secretary of Defense as I was, and there's John Kerry as Secretary of State and there's these other cabinet members, there are only two people who sit atop us, the president and the vice president. There are only two people outrank us.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“bureaucracy that tries to pace together some organizations that haven't worked together in the past and they spend all this time on themselves and not on the enemy. So I thought I wouldn't have done it, but we did do it. And then I tried to help it make it And for the defense department to begin to play a stronger role in counterterrorism, you got to decide, we thought we needed to decide, is terrorism a crime Disaster or an attack. If it's a crime, you send the FBI. The disaster you send FEMA, and if it's an attack, you send the Department of Defense. But in the real world, they're all three.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it doesn't because you still have the problem that DHS doesn't include the Defense Department. It doesn't include the intelligence community, it doesn't include law enforcement, so the issues still remains how do you bring everybody together so that”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You were pretty into the million volts. I offered an alternative to that. I was not in favor of setting up a formal department. I thought that the Office of Homeland Security. Could be improved. But when you created a Department of Homeland Security in people's mind, that brought together all our...”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'd known that. But remember, for most Americans, this was like the Martians had land, you know, Osama who and where did he come from? Why on earth is he doing this? I knew right away. And so I began to try to help as best I could. One of the issues was Tom Ridge became the security secretary and I tried to help their Get our government better organized”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a huge, you hit an office building. You get is a big plume of paper. So I thought, well, that's odd, but I didn't know what the reason. Then I walk up the ramp, look at the TV screen in the terminal, and I see two towers. And then I know exactly. Not only did I know what was going on But I did it right away. And I knew it was bin Laden.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The tower. I must have been in that same line waiting to take off. I landed at National Airport and I looked out the windows, we taxied, and there was a huge cloud of smoke over the Pentagon. Playside worked for years in and out of for years and years.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With some unfinished business. And so, in retrospect, it seems that that was an ingredient in the decision to invade and all the stuff about weapons of mass destruction and so forth, which I think was the ordinary citizens reason for supporting the 03 invasion. We turned out not to be a reason at all.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then when that was done, President Bush said, now there were some, and Dick Cheney was the Secretary of Defense, and advisory board to Dick Cheney at that time, and I knew him at that time. And he wanted to go all the way to Baghdad and said, let's finish this off once and for all. The president overruled him. And that was controversial at that time. Now fast forward a little bit more than a decade. Dick Cheney is now vice president. With”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because its intention in 03 was specifically to topple Saddam. Remember the intention of the war in 91 was to recapture Kuwait?”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Take away the government of Iraq and what was left was no government at all. And we've been dealing with the consequences of that ever since.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, not only wouldn't I say that because I didn't see that at the time. I'm just being honest. Okay. I'd like to say I was prescient, but I actually bought what Colin Powell said. I thought in my experience in government with that much smoke, there had to be fire somewhere. And so I was surprised, I was disappointed. And of course, it didn't turn out very well because we did...”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A country that kept order within its borders that was not capable of major aggression against its neighbor, which Iraq was, you'd otherwise leave alone as long as it wasn't doing anything to us, America. What we thought might become a threat to us was the whole weapons of mass destruction thing. We knew that was not.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that a fair? No, that was our actually conscious view during the Iran-Iraq war, which is a pox upon both houses. Let them fight each other into the ground. And that seemed like a good outcome. And looking back now, what the Middle East has become,”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that is why I thought I didn't object to the agreement. I supported the agreement because as Secretary of Defense, it took a headache off my plate. But I had lots of Iran headaches on my plate. And I said to Marty, let's keep working on all the other headaches that Iran is. This is not, could never be a grand bargain.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I said it changes nothing. We have a strike plan that will destroy the Iranian nuclear program by force if we have to. We're going to keep 65,000 troops in the Gulf as a deterrent against Iran also carrying out the war against ISIS. We'll continue. We have to continue to counter Iranian malign influence everywhere else, which is lots of places. Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and so forth. So I said, don't change anything. What this does is take off our plate. A headache that we would otherwise have, which is somewhere down the road, we would have to face in Iran that had nuclear weapons.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The morning after that agreement was concluded by Secretary of State Kerry, I sat down, as I always did with the chairman of the Joint Jesus Staff, a little round table in the Secretary of Defense also been there since George Marshall's day. And I would sit there with Marty or later with Joe Dunford every morning that we were both in town and also with the vice chairman and the Deputy Secretary of Defense. And we'd say, okay, what do you need today? And Marty said to me, Ms. Secretary, apropos this Iranian agreement, what are your instructions to the department? And I said, change nothing.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Iran. Yeah, which turned out not to be as much as the Iranians wanted. So maybe in time they would have left the anyway. What's done is done. At the time that that agreement was negotiated, I was Secretary of Defense. And as I tell a story in the book, which is indicative of how we looked at things in the Pentagon,”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, obviously, the treaty was controversial and the United States has rejected it in the meantime, however, it bought us some time because while they were abiding by it and while it was in force, the Iranians were obliged to destroy a bunch of centrifuges. Send a bunch of plutonium to Russia. I mean, uranium enriched uranium to Russia and destroy a reactor. And they did all that before we backed down to the treaty. So we got some goodies, so to speak. In exchange for us,”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No other society had that many generations. What that means is that your parents don't tell you stories of how things used to be different. Your grandparents don't tell you stories. There's nowhere if you're a child. That memory is gone. That memory is gone that there's a different kind of world. So I think the evidence suggests these people are brainwashed deeply enough that they'll fight really hard before they get tempted by all the goodies out in South Korea.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In South Korea who have been preparing sabotage and other things that they intend to do in the course of the war like that, very few of them, they're all so brainwashed. that they do not turn compliant, they don't come down into this well lit, wealthy society and change their views, even though all of their propaganda and all of their media and so forth have told them that it's a poor and backward place. If you think about it, Barry, they're in their third or fourth generation of Stalinism.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's interesting. You don't have much evidence on your side if you have that view. Pure speculation. Well, here's some evidence that it all goes the other way. North Korean agents, military agents captured.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is a very dangerous move. Remember the exercises are how we keep us and our South Korean partners sharp to make it the North Koreans absolutely clear that if they start a war, they will be destroyed. And that'll be the end of the regime. And that's what those exercises Demonstrate to not keep up that proficiency and not keep demonstrating it risks a war on the Korean Peninsula, which, as I said, would be a war we would win, but would not look like anything our people have seen since the last Korean War. I mean, the intensity of the violence is unbelievable in that war.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of a superpower. So when you're dealing with a potential enemy, you don't, in Ash Carter's book, you don't give away anything for free. So I wouldn't give away a meeting with the president for free.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“because they knew that to the North Koreans that was a huge gift. A meeting with the American president. Because in North Korean propaganda, they can tell their people everything's okay in our system, which is a disaster for the North Korean people, is actually successful because I got to meet with the American president.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's not unfortunately going anywhere. I don't object to talking to the North Koreans. As I said, we've done it in the past. No president that I worked for, going back to Reagan, would meet with the North Korean leader unless and until there was an agreement.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we signed that agreement and it stayed in force for five, six years. The North Koreans under his son slowly began cheating. And the whole thing kind of began to fall apart later. And then we bought ourselves sort of five, six years. Then we had talks again in the late 90s. I was part of them. Then let's see Kandy Rice and Colin Powell had some more in 2006. So I've seen various cycles of this.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Kim Milsung rather unexpectedly said, okay, I'll give up this reactor at Yang Beyond. If you build me some real Western reactor.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At soul would change hands twice and it's an ugly baby as a war to contemplate. But I thought that was going to happen. And Clinton was through? Yes, and he was threatening that to the grandfather of the current guy, Kim Jong-un, that you see meeting with President Trump. His grandfather, Kim Il-sung, was running the place then.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because the certain result of that would be the North Korean Army streaming over the DMZ And a war beginning which I was confident we would win”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I built that plan to destroy that reactor, which I was at the time, Barry, and this is just the pride of the artist, I guess, proud of, because it would have destroyed an operating nuclear reactor without creating a radioactive plume. Maybe I was pretty certain. Now, of course, I didn't want to do that.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they had finished their fueling cycle, and the North Koreans could, if they wanted to, take those fuel rods out, extract the plutonium, and they had enough in there to make one bomb. We thought that was a cause of war.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's like the third layer down Working on strike plan against the North Korean reactor, which is all they had. The reactor at a place called Yang Beyond. And it had the fuel rods that had plutonium in them in them.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. But I think we need them to defend ourselves and basically the only way you can defend yourself against nuclear weapons is through deterrence. And we haven't built any for 25 years. I think I am a strong supporter of recapitalizing our nuclear weapons arsenal. And anybody who thinks that's going to start at arms race, I would say, well, you don't have 25 years of history on your side because we haven't done anything for the last 25 years. And they've been racing anyway. So we can't be the cause of them.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And let's think about that a little bit because that is something that because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the fact that many people, not myself among them, but many people recognized too late that China and Russia were not turning out the way everybody had hoped in the 1990s. We hope they were going to turn out okay. They didn't turn out okay. And for both those reasons, we stopped. Improving or really just keeping up our own nuclear arsenal. And in the meantime they kept building, kept building, kept building. These things aren't going anywhere. Now, I don't think we need new types. Nuclear weapons are just brutally simple. Obama.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wire cutters Very dangerous thing to be doing. And so, why not have a little robot do so, you see now, I think that they'll be inch by inch more and more of that taking away some of the more mechanical and more dangerous jobs, but they'll still be a squad commander, I think, making the decisions about fire and maneuver and when to do things and when not to do things. One thing that's not going to go away, we're talking about things that are going to go away. One thing that's not going to go away. nuclear weapons”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There'll be one or two robots that carry oh all the batteries that weigh down soldiers today. They have so much electronics and they have spare batteries for everything that carry the electronics and also that if they're, let's say, clearing a house. Is the first thing through the door of the house You see a little of that already because what disarms an IED now, those little treaded, small roombutts I worked? I worked on them because we had people walking out in suits with a pair of...”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are we going to still have man chips? Take the aircraft carrier. Now, aircraft carriers are getting harder and harder to defend. Against countries like China and Russia. And people ask me, is the aircraft carrier going to go away? And I say no, because an aircraft carrier is good for a different kind of circumstance. An aircraft carrier is still good with the respect to Afghanistan. Counter ISIS campaign, environments in which nobody's going to sink the ship. They provide America a floating air base. And that's an important thing. But I don't think we'll be trying to use them against China. Russia decades from now. Soldiers, you just said are robots going to be soldiers. I think what will happen first is that in an infantry squad,”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let's take a few of the pieces. I ran the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program. It started the new B-21 stealth bomber. And I think those are once you get them under managerial control, important things. But Barry, they're the last manned fighter and manned bomber we'll ever build.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we picked at what was bad. And there's plenty of things that are bad, and I think the government ought to be as high quality as it can be. But there was a little bit of that in our society. And then some of the people who are in government today seem to be looking at it as something to pillage at last rather than a sacred trust that's hard for me to relate to, let alone condone. But I think it's enabled in part by people taking for granted what the government does for them and also by government not living up to public expectations. So both sides of the equation need to change their attitude because we do need a competent government. It's a competitive world. It's a dangerous world. And we need things that only government can do.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think that in part it is a reflection of the attitude that some Americans have had that the government is a thing apart from them. And I've obviously been in and out of government my whole life. I don't have that feeling, but I can well imagine if I were someone who'd been outside of the government, that idea that it's a thing apart, gaining ground in my mind. But to me, the government is just us. It is the way we do things that have to be done that can't be done by individuals or by companies. Who's going to build the roads? Who's going to educate people? Who's going to fight for us and win against enemies unless we do it all together? Now, I learned that by association with the defense department, which most Americans really understand, okay, that's a part of the government I really get. But the other parts, the regulatory parts and all that, there came to be an attitude that we took all the good for granted.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the time, fortunately, I need to live in that year. I live in an era where most people have the attitude that you do, which is these guys deserve a good job.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, one of the most moving things you can do as a current Secretary of Defense is to talk to Vietnam era veterans and a line that not only I use, but others including the president used was just in case nobody said this to you when you came home the first time, welcome home. And there are tears in the eyes. I could imagine. Some of these guys because of the way they were treated. That would have broken my heart”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Treated that way. I mean, now you go to the airport and they're boarded first on the plane and all, you know, and that kind of thing.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And go back even further to the Vietnam era. Well, different sources. And I don't know what I would have done as Secretary. I couldn't have stood to see our people.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source