|
|
|
Frank C. Carlucci, who had served as Caspar Weinberger's deputy
secretary between 1981 and 1983, succeeded him as secretary of defense.
Carlucci was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on 18 October 1930. After
graduation from Princeton University in 1952, he served two years as a
lieutenant in the U.S. Navy. In 1956 after study at the Harvard Graduate
School of Business Administration and a short stint in private business,
Carlucci joined the Department of State as a foreign service officer.
His State Department assignments took him to South Africa, the Congo,
Zanzibar, and Brazil between 1957 and 1969. He left the State Department in
1969 to join the Office of Economic Opportunity as assistant director, and
moved up to director late in 1970. He then became associate director and
deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget (1971-72) and under
secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (1972-74). At
both places he worked under Caspar Weinberger.
In 1975 Carlucci returned to the State Department to serve as ambassador
to Portugal until 1978, when he went to the Central Intelligence Agency as
deputy director, staying until January 1981. The next month he joined
Weinberger at the Department of Defense as deputy secretary. Strongly
supported by Weinberger, Carlucci was selected for the post even though
some of President Reagan's advisers opposed him because he had served in the
Carter administration. As deputy secretary he worked closely with
Weinberger, assuming responsibility for the day-to-day management of the
Pentagon and overseeing the defense budget and procurement. He created the
Defense Resources Board and proposed the "Carlucci initiatives"
to bring more stability and order into the defense procurement process.
Carlucci left the Pentagon in January 1983 to become president and later
chairman and chief executive officer of Sears World Trade, Inc., in
Washington. He stayed with Sears until 1986, when he moved to the White
House as assistant to the president for national security affairs. In
1985-86, while still with Sears, he served on the President's Blue Ribbon
Commission on Defense Management, chaired by David Packard. Carlucci worked
particularly on the issues of long-range planning and the budgeting and
programming process.
Carlucci did not undertake extensive organizational changes in DoD,
probably because he entered office toward the end of the Reagan
administration. Although he had earlier been skeptical about the provisions
of the Goldwater-Nichols Act giving the JCS chairman more power, he
concluded eventually that the changes had worked out well.
Carlucci did much to promote foreign and military policies on his many
visits abroad. During his 14 months as secretary of defense, he made 13
trips overseas, devoting about 25 percent of his time to visiting Europe,
the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. The first incumbent secretary of defense
to visit the Soviet Union, he went there twice: from 29 May to 1 June 1988
to attend a Reagan-Gorbachev summit meeting, and again early in August 1988
for meetings with his counterpart, Soviet Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov.
Carlucci established what he termed a "bridge of communications"
with Yazov, but he saw no evidence to support the Soviet claim that they
had adopted a defensive strategy. Carlucci concluded that the United States
should continue to strengthen its own military capacity and that of the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
The Defense budget confronted Carlucci with his most important domestic
issue. As soon as he took office in November 1987, he had to deal with the
DoD budget request for fiscal year 1989, beginning on 1 October 1988.
Shortly after the stock market crash in October 1987, the administration
and Congress agreed on limiting the FY 1989 DoD budget to about $299
billion, some $33 billion less than President Reagan had requested earlier.
Carlucci established priorities for allocating the reduced funds among the
military services and other units of the Defense Department. He chose to
reduce personnel levels in order to protect a proposed military pay
increase, and to reduce the force structure rather than cut training and
support. In addition he terminated uneconomical or marginal programs and
deferred or delayed others.
To help accommodate to the tighter budget Carlucci wanted to close
wasteful and unneeded military bases in the United States. Disposing of
these bases was difficult, in large part because individual members of
Congress resisted shutting down military installations in their own
districts and states. To circumvent the usual congressional obstacles,
Carlucci proposed the creation of the Commission on Base Realignment and
Closure. The commission, established in 1988 with a bipartisan membership
selected by the secretary, submitted a list of nearly 90 bases to be
eliminated. Carlucci endorsed the entire list, and Congress subsequently
accepted it. Carlucci actually thought the matter ought to be exclusively
in the hands of the secretary of defense, but he proposed the commission
approach as a politically viable way to achieve the result.
Carlucci worried about proposals in Congress to provide quick fixes in
the procurement area including establishment of an independent procurement
control agency, a special inspector general to investigate reports of
Pentagon corruption, and strengthening the "revolving door" laws
involving the Pentagon and military contractors. He set new guidelines for
procurement emphasizing multiyear buying, adoption of a total quality
management program for procurement, fewer auditors, and strengthening of
the position of under secretary for acquisition, established in 1986. In an
important speech in September 1988 Carlucci proposed a five-point program
to streamline the procurement process, urging Congress to (1) combine the
authorization and appropriations processes; (2) reduce the number of
committees and subcommittees having overlapping oversight of DoD budgeting;
(3) revise procedures to make it impossible for individual members to
introduce amendments to the budget bill forcing the president to buy items
not in his budget request; (4) shift to a biennial Defense budget; and (5)
adopt reforms to further stabilize the procurement process, including
funding more programs on a multiyear basis.
As a firm supporter of SDI, Carlucci opposed negotiations on arms
control that might limit U.S. choices in developing, testing, and deploying
SDI systems. State Department arms control negotiator Paul H. Nitze and
Admiral Crowe, among others, thought that it might be possible, in the
interests of securing a new arms control agreement, to negotiate with the
Soviet Union some limits on SDI testing without compromising the SDI
program. Carlucci consistently opposed any such agreement.
After signature of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in
1987, the State Department hoped to move rapidly on a strategic arms
reduction treaty (START). Carlucci again argued against negotiating
limitations on SDI research and development, and Reagan made it clear that
he would not trade SDI for a START agreement. Carlucci publicly defended
SDI technological progress, observing that the major obstacle to securing
the system was likely to be political rather than technical. He
acknowledged the unlikelihood of achieving a perfect antimissile defense
system, but argued that SDI would strengthen the U.S. deterrent at a time
when the nation had no real defense against incoming missiles. He also
portrayed SDI as a defense against rogue countries, such as Libya, that
might be able to obtain nuclear-armed missiles capable of reaching the
United States. Although he did not get as much money as he wanted for SDI in
the FY 1989 budget, he secured enough to keep research and development work
underway.
His stand on SDI did not detract from Carlucci's support of the efforts
of the Reagan administration to negotiate arms control agreements with the
Soviet Union. Some arms control advocates saw his appointment as secretary
of defense to succeed Weinberger in 1987 as a sign that the Pentagon would
soften its hard line approach on the issue. Carlucci testified strongly in
favor of the INF Treaty, which he saw as enhancing NATO security in several
ways. The treaty would reduce the Soviet military threat to Western Europe
by removing an entire class of missile systems from the area and
demonstrate to the USSR that NATO nations had the political will to make
and support decisions necessary to ensure their security. He also
emphasized that the INF Treaty included stringent verification provisions.
To implement the verification process of the INF Treaty, Carlucci created
the On-Site Inspection Agency on 15 January 1988.
The long war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s threatened the interests
of the United States and its friends in the Persian Gulf region and
confronted Carlucci with a major crisis. The United States began to convoy
Kuwaiti tankers, carrying the U.S. flag, in the summer of 1987, shortly
before Carlucci arrived at the Pentagon. He had played a central role in
the development and implementation of the reflagging and convoy policy as
Reagan's national security adviser before he became secretary of defense.
Carlucci left office on 20 January 1989 with the advent of the Bush
administration. In an interview with reporters shortly before his
departure, Carlucci said he was most proud of three accomplishments:
persuading Congress to agree to streamline base closing procedures, the
conduct of the successful tanker escort operation in the Persian Gulf, and
the development of a new, positive relationship with Soviet military
authorities.
After he
left the Pentagon, Carlucci joined the Carlyle Group, a Washington
investment partnership, as vice president and managing director; he later
became chairman. In the ensuing years, he wrote, spoke, and testified
frequently on defense issues.
http://www.defenselink.mil/specials/secdef_histories/index.html
[Home] [Schedule] [Secretaries] [Archives]
[Hoover Institution] [Press Releases] [Contact
Information]
|
|
