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

“Barry, you know, that's new. And I always 10 years because I started working on veterans employment when I was the undersecretary, the number three job back in 2009. And employers would say, okay, Ash, we promised to hire 5,000 veterans, a big company. Right. And they'd put it.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the third was continuing education if you want to get on the GI bill some further education. So we turned it from your life in the future is one of dependency upon the VA and getting benefits to what you too. You've got a life ahead. Let us help you prepare. And of course, there's still qualified to get the benefits. They still deserve them. But just to teach them right away to get that it's all about social safety net when they get out, that's no way to treat someone.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we designed a new transition program that had three tracks. One was get a job track. If you've never had to get a job, let's tell you how to make a resume. Let's tell you how to get on some of these social media where you can describe what you're good at. Let's tell you how you can describe your in civilian terms the skills you got as a military person. Second track goes entrepreneurship. Like how do you run a McDonald's franchise?”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is because remember, some of these people have never done anything else but be in the military. Some of them are kids that came out of high school, went in for a few years. They've never had a civilian job. I discovered that our separation program, what we did with soldiers and sailors, airmen and marines before they left service, was essentially to teach them how to get on welfare. Yes, and Chris, I was revolted by that. It's not good for them and it's not good for the public that's paying for these things.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What we were doing a bad job of, I discovered when I started to run the place was the transition from a soldier to a vetter now. Which is a very transition.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It may be that if we could start over again, that would have been a better way to manage things. But now I think mushing to, or organizations, remember we tried that in the Department of Homeland Security. And it took 10 years or so before it began to show any results. But anyway, so the VA has a difficult job of taking care of what is largely a geriatric medical population. Whereas our medical system, which is huge in the Defense Departments, the largest in the country, and so you run the largest medical center in the medical care system in the country if you're the Secretary of Defense. But it has a lot of pediatric work, right? Because our young people have children, so they're completely different populations. That makes sense.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the VA is a very, very complicated bureaucracy. It's separate from the Defense Department. And in most countries, they would be managed together, but they're managed separately. Oh, really? That's interesting. Yeah, and it would be part of the defense budget, but it's not part of the defense budget in this country. But it's a separate cabinet department”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a sign of character and character is an aspect of leadership and you can't give somebody leadership over troops if they don't have conduct and they don't have character.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But her son is sending that to someone. I need to look like the guy who deserves to be sending her son. War. That was important to me. And that's a small example of how behavior, comportment, conduct matter a lot. I think they matter not only in the largest organization in the world, the Pentagon, but in any kind of organization. And I obviously Dismayed at times these days about conduct I see and I held people to a higher standard and I fired people for things that you see today we fired people for lying for having sex with subordinates all of these things were were unfortunately happened but there was no doubt I was harsh on people but they were even harsher on subordinates our rules are very strict about that and our ethos is one of where conduct”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mom would frame it and put it by her bedside? Or on the mantle, and I wanted to look the part. I wanted to look like my suit on and my flag, and I wear, and I would wear the same thing out there because I thought it was important that their mother understand that, of course, see, she doesn't know me. She doesn't know the secretary. She doesn't care. She cares about her son.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“120 degrees sweating like a wheel of cheese out there and my staff would say hey sir you can take your jacket off and the troops would say hey it's just us secretary you can relax and i always kept my suit on and here's why because every time i shook one of those soldiers hands we had a photographer take a picture”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and conduct is really important. In the profession of arms, honor and trust matter a lot. And if you can't trust people in small things, how can you trust them in big things like war? So for us, it was a big deal. And when you're at the top, You have to show example, and so it was, I always watched over my conduct and comportment and tried to make an example. Let me give you a particular instance of that that I describe in the book, Barry, when I, in many, many, many times was in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it's hot, it's 120 degrees. If I was Secretary of Defense, you'd see the CFN leaders, you'd talk especially to our commanders of what we're doing and give them the direction that they needed. And then I'd meet with hundreds and hundreds of troops and you'd shake their hands and so forth. And I'd wear my suit out in the desert”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You did that. No, I went through four Senate confirmations, which was really what I was talking about in that particular passage. And that's a time of great vulnerability in Washington because anybody who doesn't like you can take a shot at you that or try to persuade some senator to put a hold on. You came up.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I got used to it after a while. I was there for 37 years on and off and associated with the department uninterruptedly since 1990. So they never really released them.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, their noses, I went to DARPA, our high-tech research arm, looking for better noses, electronic noses than a dog's nose. And the people who know about electronics noses say they're not. Years and years, decades away. You got a war to fight now. Just go out and buy yourself a dog”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not enough, but many. The sad case were when the dog died, which happened, but especially if dogs were wounded or even if they were in the vicinity of an IED, it was impossible to use them anymore. They become very nervous at that point in all their training would go out the window. They had their own PTSD. We'd either have to sadly put them to sleep or take them and try to find a home for them in the United States.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's go global and find these dogs. Yeah, it turns out that the guy who is usually buying fighter aircraft and aircraft carriers and satellites and so forth, namely me, and drones and balloons and so forth, ended up learning how to buy dogs. And I learned a lot. And you're right. In fact, there's more than one kind of sniffer dog. There are some sniffer dogs. On leash and off leash. On leash and off leash, and some that work better in confined areas and some that are comfortable with open areas. And different breeds have different predilections. And so you learn that. And then you had to source them, as you said. And the United States has kennels, but there weren't enough kennels to supply. So we did globally source dogs. And they did a great job, thousands of dogs with great, great, great, and became, and this was a good side and a bad side of this, but became really good friends of the troops. They loved them as people tend to.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When MRAPs first started to be fielded, there was another attitude, which was, hey, look, this war is going to be over in a while. I only buy something that's going to be good for the Army will be around for a long time. We need to be thinking about what we're going to want in 20 and 30 years.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that is, I need that tomorrow. And it would be in the stack, this bureaucrat stack of papers. And as soon as they became aware, that this was a matter of life or death for literally yeah they'd pull it out of the stack but you'd be amazed at how much of that i had to do every single day even when i was secretary of defense wow to push the system but but we we did at least take the mrap which is the vehicle you're talking about right”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Part of it was the bureaucracy was still working on that Cold War lumbering enemy mode where we'll deliver the perfect thing in five years. You'd be amazed. I would call people up when I was in the so-called acquisitions are and I would say, do you realize that on your desk is a contract that you're supposed to sign or audit”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Microphones on that could identify. Yes, triangulate. And so if you took a shot at one of our balloons, a mortar shell fell on you a few seconds later.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's it. It's got to be. But the enemy, the bad guys would, when it went up, not knowing that, take pot shots at it, we began to put...”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The whole spectrum exactly now. The kind of cameras that are on the helicopters that fly around looking at car accidents and traffic patterns, that kind of stuff.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very different. We came up with the idea of just putting a balloon up and you put a helium-filled balloon over the base. It's got a camera on it. And the feed goes right down to the captain. Who is commanding that little outpost? And the reassurance that those guys had that when they went out on patrol, they knew what the locals were. This is full video information.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are going by satellites are zipping buying and their over Australia when you really need them. Drones you can do, but you have to, they're much more expensive and you have to fly them around in circles. And you need to potentially potentially”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did, and I enjoyed working with him. I don't know what happened later. I lost touch with him. But anyway, when I began, I said, geez,”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a very short period of time. So I get on the phone and I talk to Stan's intelligence head. That time, who was General Mike Flynn”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On everything. It began one morning when Bob Gates was secretary. He was the number one. I was the number three at that time. And we were having a video teleconference, secure video teleconference with Kabul. And up on the screen was Stan McCrystal, who was our commander there. And Stan says to Bob that he needs, he has only 15% of the drone coverage he needs. And Bob Gates looks at me with that I was his top supply weapons buyer with that, what are you going to do about that ash? And I thought to myself, how on earth am I going to get seven times the number of drones? In a very”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Issues like amputations and prostheses, PTS, all the things we had to learn. But we also learned something about agility in the course of Iraq. And then, of course, Afghanistan as well. And I was all in when I was in the defense department. I know some people don't agree with those wars and we can talk about that later. But when you're there and you're responsible for them. That was my highest priority every day. I went to bed thinking about him. I woke up thinking about him. There's no choice.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And people are getting killed, or kids are coming back with no legs, and my wife and I are at the hospitals every weekend, meeting with them and talking to them. Then you're working day by day. That's a very different pace. It's much better suited to today's competitive world. Because now as we turn back to China, Russia, as we much do. We have, if we did that and tried to compete with them today in the old mode, that wouldn't work because people are moving faster today. Technology is moving faster. So again, nobody likes to be in a war for that long. Nobody likes to be dealing with.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I count myself among them and I'm not proud of that, but I can't say I had better wisdom than anyone else. Anyway, we found ourselves in Iraq. And of course, when I became first the number three in the department, then the number two, then the number one, during all that time, we were still fighting in Iraq. And here's what we got out of it that was in a way useful to today's very different strategic situation. We learned to stop Working in the old Cold War mode, which was, that is, was very superpower versus superpower. Superpower versus superpower. Moreover, the Soviet Union was this slow, lumbering, very predictable thing. And so you could have many year programs where you slowly built the perfect thing. When you're at war,”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had to learn. Yes. So the first thing was we had to learn that. By the way, I should back up a little bit, Barry, and say, of course, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 didn't turn out very well. History says. I have to say I didn't have the wisdom to oppose that at the time. I believed.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, from a managerial point of view, which is the point of view that the book takes, it was a counterinsurgency war rather than a war of one country with another. Asymmetrical.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that's what got me caught the bug of defense. And I've been devoted to defending our country and making a better world for our children ever since. But it could have gone a different way. But for those two people who inspire me, it's a good lesson to all of us. And now I teach people at a university, that's my way of continuing to contribute. But you give them a little nudge in the direction of public purpose and public spirit is a good thing.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yes. After I did this, I wrote it, which is essentially a technical book on that subject. Two things happen to me there, Barry, which I think is important to anybody who's choosing a career or at a crossroads in their career. I found that in these Washington conversations, I had something to offer that nobody else in the room had, namely I understood how it all worked technically, and the decisions were very consequential. So for a young person to be able to make a contribution to feel like they're able to make actually a contribution, not just watch, but make a contribution, and that the issues they're dealing with really matter. That's a wonderful, you know, it's a hugely inspiring combination.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Because if we took the MX missile and we put them out where the Soviets could hit them, then in a crisis, they'd say, well, our only way of surviving is to go first. And that would be incentive for them to go first. And we seen them thinking that way would say, well, we better get better launch these before they destroy them. So one or the other of us is going to start a war under those circumstances. We wanted to avoid that situation. So anyway, that was the project's all in the past now. And that was effectively your first.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was certainly very unpopular because it would have paved over. That looked like a Rube Goldberg thing. Right. So that was to him a pretty ugly baby, this idea of digging all these holes and then hiding missiles in them. So he began. And this is all under.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, and those happen to be the two who said to me, why don't you go to Washington for just one year? It turned out to be 37. Just one year. And work on a problem that was a big deal at that time, Barry, which was a Cold War problem of what to do with the MX missile. I recall.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Missiles and so forth. So that was the guy who was instrumental in turning that film system into a digital system. So they were the two, that's the two specific people. Richard Garwick.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Powerful. And the other guy was the person who was very instrumental in putting the first essentially cell phone type cameras, digital cameras onto our spy satellites. Our old spy satellites in the old days would take pictures on film, big rolls of film, and then when the film was all exposed, they would separate it from the satellite, put a little rocket on it. The rocket would slow it down. It would fall down to Earth, deploy a parachute, and we'd fly an airplane next to the parachute with a hook on it. And the hook would grab the parachute, reel in the film. We'd fly it to, in those days, the CIA did all of that interpretation right outside of Washington, Anacostia, Washington. They'd fly it, they'd develop it, and they'd count how many Russian...”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The like. I traveled once with Europe with Edward Teller, the particular people I was speaking of was Richard Garwin, with Edward Teller, but it was really Garwin's design, designed, I said the first thermonuclear bomb, that is one that combined fission and fusion. And it blew up an island in the Pacific Ocean. It was very successful.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Said to me, a guy who was involved in satellite reconnaissance, another guy who designed the first thermonuclear weapon, said to me, Ashley, wait.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Big laboratories. Those guys were all the Manhattan Project generation, and they had in their veins the idea, first of all, that when you should have a relationship with the government, that doesn't mean that they always did what you wanted to do, but it was natural to try to help out your country. And second, that With respect to technology and disruptive technology, which the nuclear weapon certainly was, that the people who built it had some responsibility to essentially control the technology so that we got the good out of it, which was ending the war with Japan, winning the war with Japan, and keeping the peace for 50 years with the Soviet Union without blowing ourselves up. So they taught me that we had some responsibility. So one day, two of those seniors.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was, remember, the people who taught me physics and were the seniors in the field that I was starting out in, which was elementary particle physics, the big accelerators at Fermi Lab and Brookhaven outside of New York here and so forth. I worked at those.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A totally other side of the brain thing. It's clean. Logical. And I liked that. And then I had to make a choice for further training in the beginning of my career. And that was for physics. And then I got into the whole defense. Business by accident.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the bad things. Of course, the joke is that I had the perfect, my job was the perfect combination of medieval thinking and physics thinking. Physics was...”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It turned out to be useful more on that in a moment. But at the time, it was just a right brain-left brain thing. I was fascinated by history and particularly by medieval history, because if you think about it, the Middle Ages was a thousand years long. So if you call yourself a medievalist, you've just gotten yourself a whole millennium of territory. And I like the languages, Latin, Greek, French, German to speak. And it was the time when the church developed, when the university developed, when the English common law developed, when the nation-state developed. So a lot of things we lived with today. And I found later in life as I started working in the Pentagon in 1981 and all the way until I left. And in 2019, that that was useful training. Physics is totally evil history.”
2019-11-15 · Masters in Business · Ash Carter Discusses the Business of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source