The Sage of the Pentagon

Strategy studies the relationship between time, positions, means and different interests, and takes every factor into account. This is the province of dialectics, that is to say reasoning, which is the highest faculty of the mind. — Paul Gideon Joly de Maizeroy, Théorie de la guerre (1777)

In October 1999, I participated in a major conference on the future of warfare at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington. Much of the focus was on the collective impact of long-range precision munitions, microprocessors and stealthy systems, often shorthanded as representing a “Revolution in Military Affairs” (RMA). At the conference’s working lunch, an elderly, balding and softly-spoken man named Andrew Marshall, the director of the Office of Net Assessment (ONA) in the Pentagon spoke with an unassuming but quiet intensity on the changes he believed lay ahead in armed conflict. Then aged seventy-eight, Marshall was already a living legend in the field of strategic studies both for his deep knowledge and for his long service as ONA director—a tenure that had begun in 1973 during the presidency of Richard Nixon. Few people present that October day at Georgetown would have expected Marshall to continue serving as head of the ONA for another decade and a half until January 2015 when he finally retired, aged ninety-three.

In a sixty-year career as a defence intellectual, Marshall helped to shape American strategy for an era of nuclear weapons, the Cold War and for the rapid changes of the early twenty-first century. While many American defence specialists often cultivate public profiles as “action-intellectuals”, Marshall trod a different path, forging a cult of anonymity as the trusted Pentagon insider whose task became to study the contours of future warfare for successive administrations. In the process, Marshall became the exact opposite of a celebrity “scientific strategist” in the mould of his friend the physicist Herman Kahn. In the early 1960s, Kahn’s television appearances and baroque books on “thinking the unthinkable” about thermonuclear war made him the inspiration for both Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove in the film of the same name and Sidney Lumet’s Dr Groeteschele in the unnerving movie drama Fail-Safe. In sharp contrast, outside of specialist defence circles, Marshall continues to remain largely unknown or, as some Western strategists remark, “the most influential man you have never heard of”.

In the four decades from Nixon to Obama, Marshall made the ONA a bastion of intellectual activity in a vast Pentagon bureaucracy where innovation is all too often the prey of bureaucratic fads, inter-service politics and election cycles. In the process, the ONA director became not only an architect of official strategy but a mentor to two generations of American defence analysts—so ensuring that the US strategic studies community renewed itself by continuously fostering younger talent and new ideas.

Rarely in the history of any modern defence organisation has one man been so invisible and yet so intellectually influential for so long. To many Western defence specialists Marshall is America’s Yoda, the grand master of a philosophy of competitive strategy that contributed decisively to the fall of the Soviet Union; he is the American seer of twenty-first-century military innovation and the unsentimental analyst of a rising China.

To non-Westerners, however, the Marshall mystique is less benign. He is, as one Russian analyst put it, the “Grey Cardinal” of the Pentagon, an éminence grise who—like Puzo’s Tom Hagen in The Godfather—ran a semi-secret forty-year practice serving only one powerful client: the Secretary of Defence. Finally, to some American sceptics such as the Notre Dame scholar Michael Desch, Marshall is a neo-conservative hawk, a civilian version of Admiral Hyman Rickover, “father of the nuclear navy”, who was at once the longest-serving and most controversial officer in US naval history. Rickover’s statement, “I have little tolerance for mediocrity, none for stupidity,” is sometimes compared to Marshall’s utterance, “There is only so much stupidity one man can prevent.”

Given these divergent views, it is timely that, on the occasion of his retirement, Marshall’s career is the subject of a pioneering analysis titled The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy by two of his protégés, Andrew F. Krepinevich and Barry D. Watts. The book is by no means a comprehensive account of Marshall’s career. This is impossible since most of Marshall’s work in the Pentagon continues to remain highly classified. For their sources, the authors are dependent on scattered and incomplete documentation, and upon interview material. Given restricted data, The Last Warrior is presented as an intellectual biography, an interpretation of American defence strategy as seen through the prism of one key participant’s intellect. As a former US Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, puts it in his foreword, the book “offers a unique perspective on the history of the Cold War, as well as the quarter century that has passed since the Berlin Wall’s fall”.

The book is also a reminder that we have passed from seeing the Cold War as a permanent feature of international relations to a curious situation where, in the words of historian Carole Fink, the struggle has taken on a “patina of antiquity” that is reminiscent of the Peloponnesian War. In hindsight, given its political strength and technological superiority, the West’s victory over the Soviet Union seems an inevitable outcome. Yet this is a retrospective judgment. Western success was never pre-ordained; it had to be conjured from original strategies developed over four decades and in the ominous shadow of nuclear destruction. Moreover, that success has not, so far, been repeated in the twenty-first century. Since the 9/11 attacks much of Western strategy has been short-term and lacking in wisdom with the pursuit of ends unmatched by ways and means. A study of Andrew Marshall’s career in the Pentagon demonstrates the need for liberal democracies to invest in patient, long-range strategic thinking as an intellectual counterweight to the vagaries of day-to-day politics driven by personalities and electoral cycles. Herein lies the importance of The Last Warrior.

Marshall was born in 1921 in Detroit of lower-middle-class English parents and from his early childhood onwards exhibited a fascination with self-education. In his teens he read the works of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Liddell Hart and Toynbee and in early manhood worked as a machinist in the aircraft industry during the Second World War. After the war, Marshall studied for a master’s degree in economics at the University of Chicago where his teachers included Milton Friedman and Frank Knight. While at Chicago he also worked part-time at the Institute for Nuclear Studies where he had the good fortune to be selected as an assistant to the great physicist Enrico Fermi.

On college graduation in January 1949, Marshall joined the new Research and Development (RAND) organisation established by the US Air Force to draw upon the best American scientific and industrial minds for the new fields of missile science and atomic weaponry. It is important to note that Marshall did not join the new think-tank as a strategist but as a statistician, since in 1949 the field of strategic studies was yet to be invented. Once immersed in the research atmosphere of RAND in Santa Monica, California, with its eclectic group of physicists, mathematicians and social scientists, Marshall soon gravitated towards studying the problems of emerging Soviet-American nuclear rivalry.

As the missile age dawned and the Cold War began, Marshall was, to use Dean Acheson’s famous phrase, “present at the Creation”. The early nuclear age of the 1950s and 1960s with its demand for skills in physics, mathematics, engineering and economics was a period of intellectual revolution that led to the rapid sidelining of the professional military as the masters of strategy. The ensuing policy vacuum was filled by talented civilian experts—who began the enormous intellectual challenge of mastering the atomic weapons revolution—and who were memorably described by Fred Kaplan as “the Wizards of Armageddon”. Many of the best wizards were located at RAND and Marshall soon became part of a brilliant set that included Herman Kahn, the economist Charles Hitch, the political scientist Bernard Brodie, and the mathematician Albert Wohlstetter along with his wife Roberta, a talented historian.

For Marshall, the 1950s were a critical apprenticeship in the evolving field of nuclear age strategy. He served on the 1957 Gaither Committee alongside such luminaries as Paul Nitze to investigate American vulnerability to nuclear attack and became a consultant to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The future Pentagon strategist involved himself in a wide range of original research ranging from nuclear deterrence theory and warfighting through the diagnostics of strategic warning and communications intelligence to Soviet organisational behaviour. Marshall also began what became one of his later trademarks in the Pentagon—intellectual support for colleagues and the mentoring of rising scholars and analysts. For example, he was a moving spirit in persuading Roberta Wohlstetter to write her classic study of American intelligence failure in 1941, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (1962)—a book that in the wake of the 9/11 attacks remains of enduring importance.

In the 1960s Marshall developed an interest in the analytical challenge of measuring the relativities of military power and in the problem of long-term strategic competition under conditions of nuclear stalemate. He was an early critic of the RAND concept of systems analysis based on the quantification and rationalisation of resources which was adopted by the Pentagon when the Kennedy administration took office in 1961. Systems analysis as a form of quantifiable management cost-effective decision-making was used by American defence planners to link strategy to capability choices. Marshall believed such an approach was far too narrow and technocratic to be realistic for developing America’s strategic options in the nuclear era.

In 1966, in a RAND paper, Problems of Estimating Military Power (P-3417), Marshall argued that quantitative metrics were incapable of measuring an adversary’s actual fighting performance, nor did they illuminate the complex uncertainties arising from geography, logistics, military doctrine and, above all, human error. In contrast, he advocated the use of more qualitative methods of strategy derived from politics, social science, organisational studies and psychology. As Krepinevich and Watts put it:

Marshall wanted to do more than simply catalog the limitations of systems analysis. He wanted to develop analytic tools that could begin to take into account the higher-level aspects of strategic choice.

In his work on strategy at RAND, Marshall drew increasingly on inter-disciplinary research ranging from political history through business studies to social anthropology. He also collaborated with leading scholars as varied as the economist James Schlesinger, the historian Richard Neustadt, and the political scientists William Kaufmann and Graham Allison.

By the late 1960s Marshall had risen to the position of Director of Strategic Studies at RAND, where he pursued the idea of a long-term strategy aimed at bolstering the West’s geopolitical position against the Soviet Union. Marshall believed that US-Soviet strategic competition, emanating from the unique combination of Cold War ideological differences, and nuclear stalemate needed to be carefully assessed and codified in a search for Western advantage. This conviction led him to develop the closely related, but nonetheless distinctive, approaches to strategy known today as net assessment and competitive strategic advantage. Since Marshall’s reputation as a world-class strategic thinker is based on the application of these two approaches we need to examine them theoretically before going on to analyse their practical use inside the Pentagon.

For Marshall, net assessment came to represent an approach to strategic analysis that is focused on the complex interaction between adversaries. In turn, net assessment formed the intellectual foundation for a competitive-strategies approach to countering the Soviet Union.

It is important to note that Marshall’s notion of net assessment with its focus on dynamic interaction and intellectual breadth remains very different from standard techniques of intelligence analysis and military threat assessment. He wanted to incorporate not just tangibles such as arsenals and force ratios but also a vast array of intangibles ranging from the impact of culture, resource constraints, geography, logistics, training regimes and economics. Marshall’s approach to assessment employed a broad-based, comparative analysis of national security establishments in peace and war with the aim of identifying “critical domains of competition” that could be exploited for long-range strategic advantage.

Under Marshall, net assessment became a form of eclectic and interdisciplinary analysis which drew from fields as varied as economics, military history, political science and sociology. Three particular characteristics came to distinguish net assessment from the 1970s onwards: comparative analysis; a concentration on diagnosis; and long-term trend identification. As a comparative analysis of “friend and foe” capabilities, net assessment sought to identify strategic asymmetries between the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact. The optimum output of a good net assessment became a strategic diagnosis in the form of a comprehensive picture of a competitive relationship between two adversaries. Finally, identifying long-term trends provided a basis for estimating the levels of continuity and change in an adversary’s force posture and weapons programs. Perhaps the best description of net assessment is that given by defence analyst Thomas Skypek in 2010:

Net assessment is a multidisciplinary approach to national security analysis that is comparative, diagnostic, and forward-looking. More precisely, net assessment is a framework for evaluating the long-term strategic political-military competitions in which states engage. As the word competition implies, net assessors view the interaction of states as inherently competitive rather than inherently cooperative. The aim of net assessment is to diagnose strategic asymmetries between competitors and to identify environmental opportunities in order to support senior policymakers in the making of strategy.

In many respects, net assessment is less a strategic methodology than a way of strategic thinking that requires high intellectual application across multiple academic disciplines. As a field it defies codification into common routines. Attempts by military hierarchies in the United States and Europe to align net assessment with bureaucratic procedures have all been unsuccessful.

The practice of net assessment became the foundation for Marshall’s related philosophy of competitive strategies. In 1972 Marshall published a RAND paper, Long-Term Competition with the Soviets: A Framework for Strategic Analysis (R-862-PR) which has been described by strategist David J. Andre as “a seminal contribution to US strategic thinking in the post-World War II era”. The paper sought to outline a method of strategy that transcended electoral politics, budget cycles and service rivalries. It outlined a system of competitive strategy based on long-term interaction between national security establishments along with an advanced understanding of organisational dynamics. In his thinking, Marshall was strongly influenced by cutting-edge business studies to the effect that effective strategy between adversaries is always based on “competitor analysis”—and that countries, like corporations, possess certain “core competencies”—which if correctly exploited lead to success.

Seen in retrospect, Long-Term Competition with the Soviets is Marshall’s free-market answer to the challenge of the Marxist-Leninist dialectic with its “correlation of forces”. While the idea of competitive strategy was not new—it is outlined in the ancient texts of Sun Tzu and Thucydides—Marshall’s achievement was to codify a modern approach in Cold War conditions. He saw competitive strategy as both a method and a guide to long-term advantage based on identifying and aligning enduring US strengths against enduring Soviet weaknesses. The overall aim was to drive the engine of US-Soviet military competition into areas of cost-imposition that were unfavourable to Moscow. In the 1980s, just such a competitive-strategies approach was adopted by the Reagan administration in its waging of the Cold War.

Much of Marshall’s thinking on net assessment and strategic competition became attractive to the Nixon administration in the early 1970s. Confronted by the twin challenge of withdrawing from Vietnam and the Soviet Union’s relentless drive to achieve nuclear parity, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger decided to recruit Marshall from RAND into government service as head of a long-range net assessment group. At the end of 1971, following a directive from President Nixon approving the formation of Marshall’s group, the Office of Net Assessment was established and tasked with undertaking analysis of intelligence, military capabilities and the future strategic environment for the National Security Council (NSC). However, in September 1973, the Nixon administration decided that Marshall’s office was best situated not in Kissinger’s NSC but as part of the Pentagon where it fell under the direct control of James Schlesinger, the Secretary of Defense.

Marshall’s intellectual approach to his new position was outlined in an August 1972 memorandum, “Nature and Scope of Net Assessment”. In this document he argued that the USA could no longer rely on expenditure to retain strategic superiority over the Soviet Union. The dilemma the Americans faced with the growth of the Soviet nuclear arsenal in the 1970s was summed up by Defense Secretary Harold Brown, when he remarked in January 1979: “Soviet spending … has shown no response to US restraint—when we build, they build, when we cut, they build.” Marshall became convinced that the Soviets had to be out-thought by recourse to “inventive approaches to defense problem solution[s], and [by] carefully calculated risk taking” that aimed to identify and exploit US strategic advantages.

As Krepinevich and Watts note, Marshall was less interested in providing policy prescriptions than in providing a diagnosis of emerging strategic problems to arm the minds of senior decision-makers. As a long-range research organisation, the ONA deliberately distanced itself from the hurly-burly of everyday bureaucratic processes and internal politics in the Department of Defense. The ONA was never tasked with making critical strategic decisions but rather with incubating, evaluating and promoting a range of future strategic ideas which the Pentagon bureaucracy was ill-suited to pursue. As Marshall put it, “the single most productive resource that can be brought to bear in making net assessments is sustained intellectual effort”. In such an analytical endeavour, the important and the long-term assumed precedence over the urgent and the short-term. From 1973 onwards, four long-term areas of Cold War confrontation became ONA priorities: the US-Soviet strategic nuclear balance; the rival NATO and Warsaw Pact alliances in Europe; the maritime balance of global power; and the estimation of comparative defence spending between the USA and the USSR. To ensure high-quality research in all of these areas, Marshall concentrated on forging a wide-ranging inter-disciplinary program. While he drew where possible on the resources of the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the armed services, he placed much greater emphasis on attracting the best and brightest minds from business, industry and academia to work for the ONA.

Marshall was fortunate during the early years of his tenure that his office had bipartisan political support from three able defence secretaries: James Schlesinger (1973–75), Donald Rumsfeld (1975–77) and Harold Brown (1977–81). Schlesinger, in particular, helped cement the foundation for ONA’s work. Not only were Marshall and Schlesinger both former RAND defence experts, they were also personal friends with a shared conviction that net assessment could provide far better long-term guidance to US strategy. Indeed, Schlesinger came to view Marshall as a seer, a man who, he said, could “see things without the data”. Schlesinger made the key decision that all ONA assessments would be unfiltered “best judgments” that went directly from Marshall’s think-tank to the office of the Secretary of Defense. This avoided the Pentagon’s bureaucracy, where useful ideas could be corrupted by any number of special interest groups. In effect, Schlesinger ensured that net assessments became strategic documents for the eyes of only the most senior officials.

Schlesinger’s enlightened approach to managing the ONA was followed by his successors Rumsfeld and Brown. Such top-down cover was important, for as Krepinevich and Watts point out, the formation of the ONA as a kind of “super think-tank” was treated with suspicion by many inside the Pentagon. This situation was not improved by Marshall’s cerebral aloofness and his proclivity for long silences. The ONA head’s “sphinxlike” demeanour, combined with his belief that his hand-picked defence researchers from Ivy League universities, think-tanks and areas of the military were intellectually superior to regular staffers, did not endear him to the bureaucracy.

Over the years, Marshall developed what can only be described as a cult following among the cadre of defence analysts he recruited from leading universities such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford to work in his office. They came to see themselves as an exclusive intellectual elite known as “St Andrew’s Prep” in deference to their mentor. Several members of “St Andrew’s Prep”, such as Eliot Cohen, Stephen Peter Rosen and Aaron Friedberg, later became senior officials in the Clinton and two Bush administrations.

Marshall’s work in the Pentagon on net assessments was soon translated into a competitive-strategies approach against the Soviet Union. An early example was Marshall’s support for building the new nuclear-armed B-1 bomber which he presented to the Carter administration in the late 1970s. The ONA argued that ever since the German attack of 1941—when the Soviets had lost 4000 aircraft in a week—Moscow had been obsessed with effective air defence. Accordingly, fielding the B-1 was a way of forcing the Soviets to place more of their defence resources into air defence rather than into their favoured capability of offensive SS-18 strategic missile forces. In Marshall’s view, if the USA fielded a new nuclear-armed bomber it would “reinforce the USSR’s propensity to continue investing heavily in territorial air defenses along borders that stretched across eleven time zones”. Although the Carter administration decided to cancel the B-1 on the grounds of cost, Marshall’s strategic logic was later adopted by the Reagan administration.

Part of Marshall’s determination in pursuing competitive strategies during the Cold War was his long-held conviction that the CIA was guilty of vastly underestimating Soviet defence spending and the burden it placed on its command economy. In the 1970s and 1980s the CIA, using evidence from satellite intelligence and its in-house Kremlinologists, variously estimated that the Russians were spending from 7 to 14 per cent of their national gross domestic product (GDP) on defence. In contrast, Marshall believed the figure was closer to 30 per cent or higher, and he drew on alternative sources—notably interviews with Soviet émigrés—in order to contest the CIA’s figures. The Soviet “burden ratio” became a hotly contested subject inside the Pentagon for, as Krepinevich and Watts point out, it was an issue that went to the very sinews of effective national power:

If, in fact, the USSR could generate substantially more military capability than the United States with an economy half the size, all while maintaining the defense burden at 6 or 7 percent of gross national product, the prognosis for the United States would be bleak indeed.

However if, as Marshall suspected, the Kremlin’s fiscal burden was much higher then the situation was more favourable to America because the increasingly sclerotic Soviet economy could not win an extended military competition.

The heyday of competitive strategies came in the 1980s under the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Unlike most of his predecessors, Reagan believed that the Soviet Union was doomed to end on the rubbish heap of history and he was determined to force that country to pay a higher price for its rivalry with the West. In particular, his belief in the growing vulnerability of Soviet political economy became a major factor in his decision to compete with the Russians through arms technology. Reagan’s overall strategy was to build up the US military in key areas while forcing Moscow to spend ever-increasing amounts of resources not only to maintain military parity with the United States but also to support its surrogates abroad from Afghanistan to Angola. Under Reagan, the B-1 bomber program, the Advanced Technology Bomber (the B-2 stealth bomber), new land-based MX Peacekeeper intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) or “Star Wars” scheme of ballistic missile defence were all initiated. Pershing II intermediate range ballistic missiles and cruise missiles were deployed into Europe to support NATO, and arms and money were provided for anti-communist forces globally.

While it remains unclear how much the SDI owed directly or indirectly to Marshall, the scheme was a variant of his competitive-strategies approach in that it forced the Soviet military into an area of high-end electronics where it was clearly deficient. As Daniel Gouré, a former senior Pentagon official, noted in 2012, “by seeking to devalue the ballistic missile, Reagan struck at the heart of Moscow’s sole competitive advantage vis-à-vis the West”.

In 1987, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger announced in his department’s annual report: “I have decided to make competitive strategies a major theme of the Department of Defense during the remainder of this Administration.” Weinberger and his successor, Frank Carlucci, fostered a Strategic Concepts Development Center (SCDC) at the National Defense University to closely examine the dynamics of long-term military competition. A competitive-strategies philosophy was also instrumental in shaping the US Navy’s new Maritime Strategy which aimed at enclosing the Soviet fleet in its home waters. As Gouré observes:

while not the singular reason for the collapse of the Soviet Union, the competitive strategies approach, particularly as applied by the Reagan administration, did much to set the stage for subsequent events and for the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact.

There can be little doubt that the superpower arms competition of the 1980s was one of the main reasons for the disintegration of Soviet power. In 1992 Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, the Chief of the Soviet General Staff, recalled that “the Soviet Union could not continue the confrontation with the United States and NATO after 1985. The economic resources for such a policy had been practically exhausted.”

Marshall was by no means the only American strategist to perceive the Kremlin’s growing economic weakness—nor did he foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991—which surprised him with its “rapidity and completeness”. To understand just how intellectually challenging an accurate diagnosis of Soviet weakness was in the 1980s, and how swift the communist state’s demise was, it is worth quoting John Lewis Gaddis from his book We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (1997):

To visualize what happened [to the USSR between 1985 and 1991], imagine a troubled triceratops. From the outside, as rivals contemplated its sheer size, tough skin, bristling armament, and aggressive posturing, the beast looked sufficiently formidable that none dared tangle with it. Appearances deceived, though, for within its digestive, circulatory, and respiratory systems were slowly clogging up, and then shutting down. There were few external signs of this until the creature was found with all four feet in the air, still awesome but now bloated, stiff and quite dead. The moral of the fable is that armaments make impressive exoskeletons.

With his framework for competitive strategy, his scepticism about Soviet economic strength, and his dogged pursuit of an accurate estimate of the Soviet defence burden, Marshall made major contributions to US strategy in the Reagan and George H. Bush years. As Robert Gates has written, Marshall’s work in these areas “led to a fundamental rethinking of our long-term competitive position in the Cold War”.

It comes then as a surprise that in the pages of The Last Warrior, the 1980s emerge as years of mixed blessings for Marshall. While key elements of his competitive-strategies approach were adopted by the Reagan administration, the ONA’s institutional influence inside the Pentagon appears to have declined between 1981 and 1985. Part of the difficulty seems to have been Caspar Weinberger’s belief that the flood of money for American rearmament obviated any need for the kind of net assessments produced in the locust years of the 1970s. Flooded with resources, Weinberger saw little use for the ONA and in the early 1980s Marshall appears, temporarily, to have lost direct access to the Secretary of Defense. The ONA director’s frustration at the treatment of his office is captured in The Last Warrior through a vignette concerning his response to the ceremony for the unveiling of Weinberger’s portrait in the Pentagon. Marshall refused to attend, quipping, “I would have gone if they were hanging Weinberger instead of his picture.” It is a rare glimpse of Marshall the man as opposed to the legend.

Following the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and American military success in the Gulf War of 1990-91—all of which suggested the arrival of a new strategic era of unchallenged American superiority—few would have begrudged Marshall a well-deserved retirement in the glow of victory. Yet, while many Americans saw the 1990s as an era of triumph and “the end of history”, Marshall perceived only the arrival of a “new interwar period” with looming challenges, and he continued in government service. Although the ONA faced difficulties in identifying plausible state adversaries along with a lack of useful data on prospective “rogue states” such as Iran and North Korea, Marshall was not deterred in his work.

In the course of the 1990s, two areas began to emerge as long-term research concerns for the post-Cold War ONA. The first was the revolution in conventional weapons systems stemming from advanced electronics, precision munitions and ly guided long-range systems. The second was the replacement of Europe by Asia as America’s future arena of long-term strategic consideration. In particular, Marshall became concerned at the rapid rise of China and its potential to become a peer competitor of the United States.

During the 1980s, the ONA carefully tracked writings on what Soviet strategists called a “military technical revolution” (MTR) arising from new conventional weapons systems. Russian military theorists postulated that, over time, electronics and precision munitions would combine to create autonomous “reconnaissance-and-strike complexes” (battle networks created by the integration of command, communications and firepower). Taking his cue from Soviet thinking, Marshall commissioned a body of research to analyse the processes of military innovation in terms of technology, doctrine and organisation and how these might be translated into strategy. For example, he commissioned two leading American military historians, Williamson Murray and Allan Millett, to produce historical case studies on military effectiveness in the period from 1914 to 1945—when carrier warfare, air power, submarines and armoured mobility were all developed. Marshall was interested in exploring how a technological monopoly could evaporate quickly in the face of rivals—as was the case with the British lead in carrier aviation in 1918 and American atomic weapons in the late 1940s. The Murray–Millett study was published in three edited volumes between 1988 and 1991 under the title Military Effectiveness and they remain today seminal texts in any understanding of military innovation.

The ONA’s work on military effectiveness assumed much greater policy importance following the end of the Cold War when swift American success in the 1991 Gulf conflict demonstrated the raw power of the precision revolution. For Marshall, the liberation of Kuwait provided strong evidence of major changes in warfare arising from the use of stealth aircraft, long-range munitions, advanced sensors and satellite technology. He came to believe that long-range strike systems would eventually blur traditional distinctions between land, air and sea in favour of multi-dimensional operations. Accordingly in the early 1990s, he told his staff, “the most important thing we [the ONA] can focus on in the next several years is the investigation of, and experimentation with, novel concepts of operation and new organisations to exploit the technologies available now and likely to be available in the next 20 years”. To this end, in July 1992 ONA produced an analysis of the phenomenon of the military revolution which, almost a decade later, was published under the title of The Military Technical Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment by the Centre for Budgetary and Strategic Assessment in Washington in 2002. The significance of this work was that it set the terms for the debate on what Marshall christened the “Revolution in Military Affairs” and which came to dominate much of Western defence thinking throughout the 1990s.

An RMA-style military became of particular interest to Republican candidate George W. Bush in his quest for the White House. In early 2001, following Bush’s presidential victory, Donald Rumsfeld returned as Secretary for Defense for a second time and began to pursue a “transformation” of the US armed forces based on information-age technology and organisational change. As part of this policy, Marshall was asked by Rumsfeld to conduct a review of US defence aimed at creating “an advantage-based defence strategy” that would prolong American superiority in key competencies such as undersea warfare, aerospace science, robotics and combat training.

In October 2001, the RMA project crystallised into an Office of Force Transformation in the Pentagon under Vice-Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, whose main task was to concentrate on network-centric warfare. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, its air power and digitised ground units conquered the country in less than three weeks with only a third of the force levels deployed during the 1991 Gulf War. It was a striking demonstration of decisive RMA-style warfare. Yet victory was soon eclipsed by the unexpected development of protracted irregular wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. By the mid-2000s, it was not Marshall’s state-on-state high technology RMA that dominated policy discussions in the Pentagon but the urgent problem of counterinsurgency with its requirements for “war among the people”.

On the significance of radical Islam and America’s experiment with counterinsurgency and nation-building from 2004 to 2014, Krepinevich and Watts tell us little about Marshall’s views. Curiously, there is no reference in the pages of The Last Warrior to whether the ONA studied, still less foresaw, the radicalisation of the Islamic world and the global significance of a non-state movement such as Al Qaeda. One can only speculate on the reasons. It is possible that Marshall may have perceived significant problems in applying net assessment and a competitive strategies approach—both of which work best against a symmetric adversary—to the asymmetric challenge presented by amorphous groups of non-state actors such as radical Islamic extremists. In addition, the ONA may have viewed the counterinsurgency concerns that came to dominate much of American defence thinking from 2004 to 2014 to have been an endeavour more about finding immediate operational solutions than one focused on future strategic analysis. To learn more we must await a fuller biography in the years to come.

Yet, if Marshall did not become personally involved in assessing the insurgency challenges that America faced, it is worth noting that one of his protégés, Eliot Cohen—described by Fred Kaplan in his 2013 book The Insurgents as “an agile practitioner of the Marshallian art”—did become a leading figure in invigorating American efforts to master irregular conflict in Iraq. Cohen, professor of strategic studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University and later Counsellor of the State Department from 2006 to 2009, convened an influential June 2005 conference of international experts at Basin Harbor in Vermont to analyse the Iraq War. A year later, in June 2006, Cohen attended a key meeting on the Iraq crisis at Camp David—where he recommended to President Bush the command appointment of counterinsurgency expert General David Petraeus. The challenge of Islamic insurgency is a reminder that, while the ONA was indefatigable in its research it was never infallible in its diagnostics—nor was it well suited to analysing every enemy America faced. As a long-range think-tank created at the height of the Cold War, the ONA was best suited to undertaking intellectual analysis of large-scale, technically capable state adversaries, such as those of the Warsaw Pact.

While much of the US defence establishment became consumed by irregular conflict after the mid-2000s, Marshall preferred to concentrate ONA efforts on the growing linkage between the precision revolution and the changing balance of military power in Asia. He came to believe that the gradual military emergence of China and the spread of conventional precision weapons systems were intimately entwined. From the outset, he warned that China’s acquisition of long-range missiles, cyber, space and undersea warfare capabilities would place limitations on America’s ability to project naval power to secure its Asia-Pacific alliance system stretching from Japan to Australia.

Marshall feared that, given America’s distraction with radical Islam, China would be unrestrained in acquiring the technological means to begin shifting the strategic balance in the Western Pacific progressively in its favour. The ONA cited weapons systems such as the Feng 21-D anti-ship ballistic missile as evidence that China was rapidly acquiring the capacity to pursue “area-denial and anti-access” (A2AD) strategies off its littoral. The US Navy’s forward presence, symbolised by its powerful aircraft carrier groups, would become vulnerable, leaving Taiwan, Japan and South Korea exposed to potential Chinese coercion.

Evidence presented in The Last Warrior suggests that Marshall—a Thucydidean realist by instinct and education—saw US-Chinese strategic competition as probable rather than possible, and he appears to have been unconvinced by the popular wisdom of Beijing’s “peaceful rise” or by claims of “responsible stakeholder” status. In the face of Chinese military modernisation, Marshall was among the first to urge a renewal of American strategic effort away from the Middle East towards Asia. In 2002, he suggested that such a shift was necessary in order “to plan for the types of military challenges a malevolent China may pose over the long-term and [to] incorporate these into service and joint war games and exercise programs”.

In 2011, another of Marshall’s ONA protégés, Aaron Friedberg, published A Contest for Supremacy: China, America and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia, a pessimistic study which attacked “a wilful, blinkered optimism that Sino-US rivalry was highly unlikely, in part because it was too dangerous to contemplate”. From the early 2000s, ONA focused much research on a better understanding of China’s strategic culture and its view of war. Marshall was particularly impressed by the French scholar François Jullien’s work on Chinese military thought with its emphasis on achieving positional and psychological advantage (xing and shih) over an adversary—concepts which resonated with his own philosophy of competitive strategies. Concepts such as the US Navy’s air-sea battle, joint operational access and, most recently, the Joint Concept for Access and Maneuver in the Global Commons all bear the imprint of ONA influence. However, despite Marshall’s strong focus on Sino-American strategic relations, it remains unclear to what extent he influenced the Obama administration’s 2011 announcement of a “pivot”, or rebalancing, of US defence resources towards the Asia-Pacific.

While The Last Warrior provides a fascinating portrait of a strategic mind, the overall effect is often curiously abstract and even enigmatic. We learn little about Marshall’s motivations and broader philosophical outlook which might have produced a more flesh-and-blood analysis. Marshall’s career raises interesting questions concerning the relationship between Mars and Minerva in intellectual life. This book might have contemplated some of the questions raised by Bruce Kuklick in his 2006 study, Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger. Such questions include: What is the role of knowledge in public policy and how do contemplative people engage with the world of action? What can expert learning offer public life? How do bureaucratic and learned cultures actually interact?

Marshall’s long career is perfect material for a meditation on Wissenschaft—a study of how ideas become knowledge. Perhaps because of a paucity of available material, the authors do not probe where Marshall stood philosophically in relation to waging the Cold War or, more recently, on post-Cold War challenges. Reading between the lines it seems clear that Marshall was in the camp of optimistic American realists such as Paul Nitze and Richard Pipes who believed the Cold War could be won, rather than that of Spenglerian pessimists such as George Kennan and Henry Kissinger who thought the struggle was best managed by détente and arms control. On post-Cold War challenges, Marshall preferred to concentrate on the future of great power rivalry and technologically-advanced militaries rather than on the non-state challenges of irregular conflict. Insofar as we can gauge his thinking, this logic seems to stem from his belief that only powerful states can present existential challenges to American power. Such convictions help explain his deep interest in the return of China as the leading power of Asia.

One of the best insights into Marshall’s strategic thinking comes from an essay, “Strategy as a Profession for Future Generations” which he wrote for a 1991 volume he also co-edited with J.J. Martin and Henry S. Rowen, On Not Confusing Ourselves: Essays in Honor of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter. In this piece, Marshall makes a strong case for the importance of rigorous strategic thinking. He highlights the necessity for original ideas noting that, at RAND in the early 1950s, when strategic studies were in their infancy, there was no intellectual hierarchy because there were no experts. As a result, “Nobel prize winners were no better than graduate students”. The RAND experience clearly contributed to Marshall’s central belief that “there is no specific set of disciplines that must be mastered to be a strategist”. Rather, what is vital is a high tolerance for uncertainty and “a cast of mind that is questioning, eclectic, able to devise the broadest kinds of issues and goals, and able to formulate appropriate ways of achieving these goals”. In terms of academic disciplines that might facilitate such flexibility, Marshall emphasises economics and business studies and recommends “[the study of] history of all kinds, military history, of course, but also economic and technological history”.

At a conference dinner in the mid-1990s, some of Marshall’s “St Andrew’s Prep” protégés presented him with a framed print of Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1873 painting of François Leclerc du Tremblay (Père Joseph) the Capuchin monk who served at the right hand of Cardinal Richelieu and who has come down to us as the original éminence grise. The implication is clear: just as du Tremblay played a key role in France’s emergence as the great power of Europe at the end of the Thirty Years War, so too was Marshall instrumental in shaping America’s global supremacy by helping to defeat the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Yet, while du Tremblay was an agent of power politics, Marshall remained a diagnostic strategic thinker, who, as Krepinevich and Watts tell us, “could lead the policy-making horses to water, but could not make them drink—or, perhaps, think”.

The picture of Marshall that emerges, then, is of a courtly and self-effacing individual comfortable with anonymity in the pursuit of improved knowledge. His private motto—“There is no end to the good a person can do if he does not care who gets the credit”—demonstrates a dedication to impersonal truth rather than personal ambition. In a real sense, then, Marshall is reminiscent not of the Capuchin, du Tremblay, but of another Frenchman, the Dominican priest and philosopher Antonin-Gilbert Sertillanges. The latter’s description of the harmonious soul in pursuit of knowledge in his 1921 book, The Intellectual Life, can be applied to Marshall:

Do you want to do intellectual work? Begin by creating within you a zone of silence, a habit of recollection, a will to renunciation and detachment which puts you entirely at the disposal of the work; acquire that state of soul unburdened by desire and self-will which is the state of grace of the intellectual worker. Without that you will do nothing, at least nothing worthwhile.

Sertillanges goes on to argue that, while the most mediocre mind may hit on an idea, like a rough diamond or a pearl, what is really difficult is what he calls “the cutting of the idea, and, above all, its setting into a jewel of truth which will be the real creation”. Marshall not only hit upon the ideas of net assessment and competitive strategy, he also cut them into jewels of knowledge to serve America’s national interest during the Cold War. He achieved this “cutting of ideas” not by seeking to build an empire inside the Pentagon—the ONA has seldom numbered more than twenty personnel—but by relying on an intellect which was attuned to longer-term trends. It is this capacity for original thought and its objective presentation to the policy world that makes Marshall such an outstanding American strategist.

What then of Andrew Marshall’s legacy in the twenty-first century? Any judgment can only be an interim one, given that so much about his work still remains secret. The continuing importance and sensitivity of Marshall’s work can be gauged by the simple fact that, of twenty-five net assessments produced by the ONA under his directorship, only two are declassified today.

This secrecy notwithstanding, it seems clear that Marshall is one of the most influential Western strategists of the past half-century. He helped the West win the Cold War and set important parameters for our understanding of strategy in the twenty-first century. During his long ONA stewardship he approached the crafting of strategy as a creative process in which preferable policies must be measured against interaction with adversaries and conditioned by resources. His interlocked strategic frameworks of net assessment and competitive advantage continue to remain relevant and have been applied to such problems as weapons proliferation and Sino-Japanese military rivalry. If we are entering what Paul Bracken has called a “second nuclear age” in an Asia marked by the rise of China and inter-state rivalry, then the twin crafts of net assessment and competitive strategy will remain important to future strategists. Indeed, in 2012, the leading American scholar Thomas G. Mahnken edited a major study titled Competitive Strategies for the 21st Century: Theory, History and Practice, focused on Asia in general and China in particular.

Strategic studies are a policy-relevant field that require regular injections of new blood and fresh ideas in order to flourish. As ONA head, Marshall did much to ensure the good heath of the American strategic studies profession by mentoring younger scholars and by supporting wide-ranging research on military power. In this realm, he bears some comparison to the British military theorist Basil Liddell Hart. While Liddell Hart, the ultimate outsider who thrived on being known, is the polar opposite of Marshall, the ultimate insider who thrived on being unknown, both men share the mantle of being fine teachers. If Liddell Hart had a “Young Rogues Gallery” of photographed protégés on the walls of his English country home in Medmenham, Marshall had his “St Andrew’s Prep” graduates spread throughout the think-tanks and universities of the United States. The military historian Michael Howard once called Liddell Hart a sage, noting, “the Sage is a monarch, not a member of a republic. Above all, the Sage, however deeply his roots may be sunk in the expertise of a single subject, billows uncontrollably outside it.” Much the same can be said of Marshall with his wide range of interdisciplinary interests ranging from economics through organisational psychology and business studies to political science and history.

Marshall’s extraordinary career from the physics laboratory in Chicago where he worked with Enrico Fermi through his membership of RAND’s glittering coterie of nuclear strategy pioneers to his long and influential directorship of the Pentagon’s ONA is a reminder of the importance of fostering intellect in strategic affairs. Thinking about strategy requires significant creativity as well as curiosity and a tolerance for uncertainty. These are virtues that are seldom found in defence bureaucracies, which tend to thrive on predictability and routine. When one combines bureaucratic orthodoxy with the impact of contemporary social media outlets and a relentless electronic news cycle, the environment for good Western defence policy-making in the future is hardly encouraging. In the years ahead, Westminster governmental systems such as those of Australia and Britain would do well to examine how Marshall’s ONA functioned and to consider the value of creating diagnostic strategic-level think-tanks as vital adjuncts to their defence organisations.

From the Spanish Habsburgs through the Germans in two world wars to America in Vietnam and Iraq, history is littered with countries that could win battles but not wars because they lacked proper organisation for high-level strategy formulation. Marshall’s long ONA tenure was distinguished by his laser-like concentration on wars, not battles; by an unwavering focus on the strategic future, not the present; and by an eternal vigilance that eschewed complacency. He remains an American original and the last survivor of the gifted Cold War strategists from the RAND Corporation who emerged to prominence in the 1950s.

In 1986, when the historian Peter Paret edited a now famous collection of essays, Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, Andrew Marshall’s name did not appear in any of the chapters on Cold War strategy. It is almost certain that any future edition of Makers of Modern Strategy will have to remedy that omission—and not just on the subject of the Cold War—but in its new chapters on the post-Cold War era and beyond.

Michael Evans is the General Sir Francis Hassett Chair of Military Studies at the Australian Defence College in Canberra and a professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University. He is a former Head of the Australian Army’s Land Warfare Studies Centre at the Royal Military College, Duntroon. He wrote on Western counterinsurgency in the January-February issue.