President Barack Obama announced Monday that he will nominate Paul Stockton '76 to be the assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense and Americas security affairs. Stockton is currently a senior research scholar at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation.
Stockton will report to the undersecretary of defense for policy and oversee the offices of the deputy assistant secretaries of defense for homeland defense, western hemisphere affairs and crisis management and mission assurance. Stockton declined to comment because the nomination is pending.
Stockton's research at Stanford focuses on how to make U.S. security institutions more effective in monitoring and responding to changes in the U.S. threat level, according to Stanford's web site. He has also studied how Congress interacts with the executive branch to restructure national security budgets, policies and institutional arrangements.
Virginia Tech international affairs professor Patrick Roberts, who with Stockton co-authored the 2008 paper, "Homeland Security in the Bush Administration: Next Steps for Building Unity of Effort," said Stockton is "remarkable" in both his kindness and intelligence.
"He has moral qualities: good sense and a commitment to fairness and justice," Roberts wrote in an e-mail to The Dartmouth.
Stockton was formerly the associate provost at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., and the founding director of its Center for Homeland Defense and Security. Stockton co-founded and began editing Homeland Security Affairs, a quarterly academic journal, in 2005. He served as a legislative assistant for former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., in the late 1980s.
Some of his recent work focuses how the Department of Homeland Security can change the way it interacts with municipal and state governments. He has also proposed that the Homeland Security Council, which was created in 2002 by former President George W. Bush, should be reformed, but not merged with the National Security Council, as many critics have recently suggested.
"He's one of the people behind the formation of homeland security as not just a policy field but an academic field," Roberts said.
The Senate Armed Services Committee will hold hearings and vote on whether to allow Stockton's nomination to proceed to the full Senate for confirmation. Spokeswomen for Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chair of Armed Services Committee, and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the ranking Republican on the committee, declined to comment for this article.
While at Dartmouth, Stockton majored in government, played in the orchestra and was a member of Chi Heorot fraternity. He received a Ph.D in government from Harvard University in 1986.
The White House also announced that Obama will nominate Eric Goosby to be Global AIDS Coordinator for the State Department. Dartmouth President-elect Jim Yong Kim was considered to be a leading candidate for the post prior to his appointment as the College's next president, according to media reports.
"The American people will be well served by the addition of these skilled and dedicated individuals," Obama said in a statement about the two selections.
The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
