Legacies of Jimmy Carter’s Presidency: Building Jihadist Armies and Introducing the World to Stealth Planes

<p >On December 29 former U.S. president Jimmy Carter passed away at 100 years old, almost 44 years after ending his term in office in January 1981. After graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1946, Carter was in active duty in the Navy from 1946 to 1953, before serving in the reserves from 1953 to 1961. One of Carter’s most lasting legacies as president was the beginning of U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan, with his administration having overseen the arming and training of Islamist insurgents against the Soviet-aligned government in the country from 1978, paving the way for the rise of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, while also provoking Moscow into launching a costly military campaign to support the Afghan government against the jihadist threat. The pioneering of the strategy of destabilising Moscow’s strategic partners through support for Islamist groups would become a staple of Western Bloc policy across subsequent decades, including in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and in <a href=" target="_blank">Syria in the 2010s and 2020s</a>, in both cases highly successfully. Carter’s administration also marked the beginning of hostile relations between the United States and Iran, following the overthrow of the Iranian Pahlavi Dynasty in 1979 and the formation of an Islamic Republic, with the White House forming a close strategic partnership with the new Iraqi government of President Saddam Hussein that went on to invade Iran in 1980. Relations between Washington and Tehran have remained poor ever since, with the year 2024 seeing by far the largest series of <a href=" target="_blank" >armed clashes</a> between U.S. and Iranian <a href=" target="_blank" >missile</a> and air assets in history. </p><p ><img src=" title="U.S. Air Force B-1B (top) and B-2 Strategic Bombers"></p><p >A less well known legacy of the Carter administration was that it was the first to reveal to the world the development of stealth bombers for the United States Air Force. On August 22, 1980 the existence of stealth technology was announced by Secretary of Defence Harold Brown, who stated: “It is not too soon to say that by making existing air defence systems essentially ineffective, this alters the military balance significantly.” The decision to announce the development of the new technology was considered a response to criticisms of the administration’s decision in its first year in office to cancel the development of the B-1 supersonic bomber, which was cited by political opponents to argue that President Carter was compromising America’s defences. The modernisation of Soviet air defences, however, had left aircraft such as the B-1 designed to penetrate Warsaw Pact airspace effectively obsolete, with Carter’s administration instead allocating funding to develop the <a href=" target="_blank">F-117 strike fighter </a>and <a href=" target="_blank">B-2 strategic bomber</a>. These programs both of which pioneered advanced stealth capabilities that made the aircraft much more survivable. Although Carter may be most remembered for his administration’s actions in Afghanistan, where new and highly unconventional offensive methods were pioneered, the fact that stealth capabilities are today synonymous with cutting edge manned combat jets makes his administration significant for moving the technologies through their first flight testing stages and into serial production stages under the <a href=" target="_blank" >F-117 program</a> in particular. </p>