[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 2]
[Senate]
[Pages 2225-2226]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           CARTER NOMINATION

  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I rise to express my support for the 
President's nominee, Dr. Ashton Carter, to serve as our Nation's 25th 
Secretary of Defense.


                    Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel

  Let me first say a few words of thanks to Chuck Hagel, our former 
colleague in the Senate, who has served as Secretary of Defense. He is 
a friend, he has had a long career in public service,

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and he is a veteran of Vietnam. The people of Nebraska rewarded him by 
asking him to represent them in the United States Senate.
  As our Nation's first person of enlisted rank to serve as Secretary 
of Defense, he had a unique, ground-level view on matters of war and 
peace, and a strong commitment to our troops. I thank Chuck Hagel for 
his service and his family for their sacrifices over the last 2 years.
  Dr. Carter has an impressive and distinguished record of service as 
well in government, as an adviser and as a scholar. He has what it 
takes to be a great Secretary of Defense.
  His credentials as one of our Nation's top security policy experts 
are well established. He earned a bachelor's degree in physics and 
medieval history from Yale and his doctorate in theoretical physics 
from Oxford. He has served as faculty chair at Harvard and is the 
author of 11 books.
  As singularly impressive as this is, Dr. Carter is also very much a 
doer. He has served no fewer than 11 Secretaries of Defense, including 
Leon Panetta and Chuck Hagel. He has four times been awarded the 
Department's Distinguished Service Medal, as well as the Defense 
Intelligence Medal.
  As an assistant secretary during the Clinton administration, he was 
instrumental in removing nuclear stockpiles from the former Soviet 
states of Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus.
  As Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and 
Logistics, he was renowned for breaking through bureaucratic logjams to 
get our troops what they needed, when they needed it. We talked about 
this at some length when we met in my office a few weeks ago. How can 
we continue, I asked him, to reform DOD so that it will be able to rise 
to the occasion of today's challenges?
  As part of the discussion, I was pleased to hear his appreciation for 
the organic industrial base of the Department of Defense, especially 
one near and dear to my heart, the Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois.
  He recalled his experience in Afghanistan as he tried to bring our 
troops the body armor and armored humvees they needed. He also recalled 
working alongside the great dedicated employees at the Rock Island 
Arsenal as they delivered the necessary lifesaving equipment to our 
troops and rolled it off their assembly lines in record time.
  I am confident Dr. Carter can steer the Department of Defense through 
difficult times and provide the President with the best policy advice 
to deal with our Nation's challenges. He has my full support.

                          ____________________