Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter to give Drell Lecture, focus on cybersecurity and innovation

CISAC — Tue, 21 Apr 2015 21:19:54 GMT

Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter will deliver CISAC’s annual Drell Lecture at Stanford University next Thursday, giving a major speech to unveil the Pentagon’s updated policies on innovation and cybersecurity.

Carter was the Payne Distinguished Visitor at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a Distinguished Visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, until President Barack Obama nominated him as the 25th secretary of defense earlier this year, calling him “one of our nation’s foremost national security leaders.”

Carter will speak at 11:10 a.m. at the CEMEX Auditorium and will be streamed live on this page. The lecture is free and open to the public; tickets can be obtained here.

Stanford President John Hennessy will introduce Carter, whose speech is entitled, “Rewriting the Pentagon: Charting a New Path on Innovation and Cybersecurity.”

The Pentagon said Carter would focus on the importance of Silicon Valley as a hub for innovation — and as a target of disruption — and build on Obama’s cybersecurity policies outlined by the president at the White House Summit on Cybersecurity and Consumer Protection at Stanford in February.

Carter, who has a doctorate in theoretical physics, has strong connections with the valley. He was a senior partner at Global Technology Partners, where he advised major investment firms on technology and defense. Most recently, he was a consultant for several tech companies until he was called back to Washington.

“Ash Carter’s focus on cybersecurity is closely tied to some of our most timely research at FSI and Hoover, and we are looking forward to having him address the issue when he returns to Stanford to deliver the Drell Lecture,” said FSI Director and Senior Hoover Fellow Michael McFaul.

After his speech, the secretary will take questions from the Stanford and Twitter audiences in a session moderated by CISAC Co-Director and Senior Hoover Fellow Amy Zegart. Various Stanford Twitter feeds will be live-tweeting during the event at #SecDefAtStanford.

“We are delighted to welcome Dr. Carter back to Stanford as Secretary Carter,” said Zegart. “Having a sitting secretary of defense give a major policy address on campus is a rare and exceptional event, and it signals just how much the world’s toughest problems need the best minds to come together across academia and government.”

Carter stepped down from his post at the Pentagon in 2013 after serving two years as the deputy secretary of defense. As the agency’s second-ranking civilian, he oversaw a $600 billion budget and 2.4 million uniformed and civilian personnel. From 2009 to 2011 Carter was the undersecretary for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics and helped develop and deliver mine-resistant tanks to American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Though he has no uniformed military service, Carter is an expert at strategic military affairs and nuclear weapons policy. He earned his bachelor’s degrees in physics and in medieval history from Yale in 1976. He was a Rhodes Scholar and received his doctorate in theoretical physics from Oxford in 1979.

“We are honored to welcome Secretary Carter back to Stanford,” said Hoover Director John Raisian. “Cybersecurity continues to be a pressing national concern. This is a war that we must win in order to ensure our personal freedoms. Our best hope toward combatting this threat is innovation — and our nation is fortunate to have a formidable leader in this role.”

Carter joined the Defense Department from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he was a professor and chair of the International Relations, Science, and Security faculty.

Since being sworn in as the defense secretary in February, Carter surprised American troops in Afghanistan and made headlines by indicating the White House may slow down troop withdrawals from the base of our nation’s longest-running war.

Earlier this month, Carter made his first trip as secretary to Japan and Korea, where he said he would launch the next phase of the Obama administration’s “rebalance” toward Asia by investing in modernized weapons, tightening its defense alliance with Japan and expanding the free trade agreement known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership of 12 nations.

And he takes on the leadership of the Department of Defense as digital technology and cyber crime expand at breakneck speeds.

“The world in which our nation and the Department of Defense now find themselves has changed significantly, in terms of greater technological opportunities as well as more potent and diverse security threats,” said CISAC Co-Director David Relman, who is a professor of medicine, microbiology and immunology,

For more details about obtaining tickets, see this page.

Media should contact Jenny Mayfield for credentials at jennymayfield@stanford.edu by 4:00 p.m. PDT on Tuesday.

The talk will be livestreamed here and you can follow on Twitter at #SecDefAtStanford

Watch live streaming video from stanforduniversity2 at livestream.com

Originally published at cisac.fsi.stanford.edu.

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Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter to give Drell Lecture, focus on cybersecurity and innovation