The Last Warrior

by Andrew F. Krepinevich

  While Marshall himself voiced no opinion on Joint Vision 2010, both Krepinevich and Watts saw it as excessively focused on technology and lacking of any sense of how other militaries would compete to offset US advantages. Watts was especially troubled by Owens’s insistence that the fog and friction of war could be largely or completely eliminated by technology.75 He went on to publish a lengthy paper that updated the arguments of the military theoretician Karl von Clausewitz that “friction” was inherent in the nature of war.76 Indeed, from NATO’s 1999 intervention in Serbia to the United States’ wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there is little, if any, evidence to support the view that technology per se can banish Clausewitzian friction.

  No matter. Marshall had lost control of the RMA “narrative.” What began with a Foreign Affairs article by William Perry stating his views on the RMA four years earlier had blossomed into a cottage industry. Although ONA’s 1992 MTR assessment had certainly started the debate and provided the lexicon in which it was conducted, alternative interpretations from all over the US security community now abounded. Such thinkers as Owens had their own version of the RMA. The services, in developing their own responses to the challenges of the RMA, often sought to use the terms and rhetoric of the debate more to protect their existing programs and budgets during the post–Cold War drawdown than to move forward along the lines Marshall was advocating. Defense consulting firms, sensing business opportunities, began passing themselves off as RMA “experts.”

  Given that Marshall sought a far broader audience for the MTR assessment than did the senior Pentagon leaders he had focused on at the outset, this posed a fundamental problem for him as the RMA’s self-proclaimed “herald.”77 His job, he insisted, was not to tell the services how to respond to the MTR—what particular operational concepts they should embrace, what systems they should buy, or what mix of forces they should field. As he later observed, “I’ve been very leery about saying, ‘And here is the answer for us.’ In fact, I think . . . that it is the officer corps that has the moral responsibility to find the best way, and only they can do it. But in addition they’re better positioned, if they really go about it. [And] . . . apart from that they have the moral responsibility to the people they are going to lead.”78

  If, as Marshall believed, the services were ultimately responsible for undertaking the innovations necessary to cope with the RMA, what could he and his small office do to get the military focused on the challenge as he saw it? Toward this end he devoted much of ONA’s efforts in the 1990s to supporting war gaming, further case studies, and professional and academic writings on the RMA. These methods yielded some progress, although far less than he would have liked.

  For instance, Marshall used some of his modest budget to establish an RMA essay contest in the military journal Joint Forces Quarterly.79 He supported additional work on the development of carrier aviation during the interwar years, having been impressed by the excellent research of Tom Hone, Norman Friedman, and Mark Mandeles on how the US Navy had succeeded in developing this new form of naval warfare. A talented member of the ONA staff, Navy Commander Jan van Tol, condensed their research into a short paper so that Marshall could hand it out to others as an example of what he had in mind.80 Van Tol and James FitzSimonds, another naval officer on ONA’s staff during this period, found themselves increasingly involved in teasing out some of the implications from various RMA workshops and war games ONA sponsored. By mid-1995 they had concluded that the data fusion problem at the heart of effective battle networks was “the long pole in the tent of achieving and exploiting” Admiral Owens’ notion of dominant battlefield awareness.81

  ONA’s RMA war-gaming efforts also owed much to Michael Vickers, a former Army Special Forces officer who later became a CIA case officer and eventually the Pentagon’s undersecretary of defense for intelligence in 2011.82 Vickers is that rare combination of the man of action who is also a first-rate strategic thinker. During the late 1980s he had been instrumental in the successful US campaign to support the Afghan mujahideen (guerrillas) in their insurgency against Soviet occupation forces, a role later made famous in the book Charlie Wilson’s War.83 Having left the CIA to pursue his master’s degree under Eliot Cohen at Johns Hopkins’s Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Vickers had signed up for a net assessment course being taught by Krepinevich. Vickers’s term paper for the course examined the issue of military revolutions. This 1993 paper so impressed Krepinevich that he shared it with Marshall, who too was taken by Vickers’s work. This led to an internship for Vickers in ONA. Through his discussions with Marshall, Vickers developed the idea for a series of war games looking out to the time when the RMA had “matured”; that is, when both the United States and its major rivals had fielded the long-range precision strike capabilities described in ONA’s MTR assessments. Vickers called the game series “20XX,” given that the warfare regime he had in mind would not likely emerge until some indefinite time in the early twenty-first century. He ran the games at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), the think tank Krepinevich had established in 1995 shortly after retiring from the Army.84

  Another avenue Marshall pursued in trying to foster innovative thinking about the RMA was to establish fellows programs that would expose promising young officers to the challenges of the MTR. Two such programs were the Secretary of Defense Strategic Studies Group (SecDef SSG) and the Secretary of Defense Fellows Program. Marshall had originally raised the issue with Robin Pirie in December 1992 and shortly thereafter with Admiral Owens. Pirie had run the Chief of Naval Operations’ Strategic Studies Group (CNO SSG) and as a young officer Owens had been selected as a member of the group. Each year the CNO SSG identified a handful of midcareer Navy officers who had shown great promise of reaching flag rank. Over the course of the year they spent in the CNO SSG, they were assigned to assess an issue of strategic importance to the Navy’s leadership. They were given access to senior Navy leaders to get their views on the issue. At the end of the year they reported their findings to the chief of naval operations. The program’s principal objective, said Owens, was not to have the officers produce an excellent assessment; rather it was to stretch their minds, to get them to think on a strategic level, rather than within their familiar world of operations and tactics. Marshall liked the idea and persuaded Secretary Perry to establish his own SSG.

  Marshall then went one step further, recommending to Perry that he establish a Secretary of Defense Fellows program. Like the SecDef SSG, the program would involve a small number of hand-picked officers from all the services. Unlike the SecDef SSG, however, each of these officers would spend a year at a civilian corporation challenged by the need to conduct strategic planning in a field characterized by rapidly emerging technologies and shifting forms of competition. In brief, such companies faced challenges similar to those that would be confronted by a military organization doing planning in an environment of dynamic change and, hence, great uncertainty.

  Both the SecDef SSG and the Fellows program were approved by Perry in September 1995.85 The SecDef SSG was eventually discontinued under Perry’s successor, William Cohen. However, the Defense Fellows program has endured, with an unusually high percentage of its officers later selected for flag rank.

  By 1996, with the RMA debate fully under way, Marshall began thinking about the long-term character of the Office of Net Assessment in the post–Cold War security environment. He felt that by the end of 1997 his office would have done what it could to jump-start DoD’s innovation efforts. By then, he thought, ONA could begin refocusing its time and energy on more traditional net assessments.86

  It says much about the durability of Marshall’s 1972 conception of net assessment, which he had originally developed for assessing the long-term competition with the Soviet Union, that it remained relevant in the post–Cold War era. Marshall felt that despite the “slightly greater level of uncertainty about potential opponents and [the] vagueness of national goals,” the long-term-comp
etition framework remained “appropriate” and with it the analytic framework he had originally developed while in charge of the Net Assessment Group on Kissinger’s National Security Council.87 Marshall also retained his belief formed in the late 1980s that Asia would “be an increasing focus of attention for us.” As for the RMA,

  The potential RMA is important, but we need to shift to address the net assessment issues and questions it raises. This could include a focus on areas that we think, based on our broader analysis, are going to be key areas of competition between military establishments. These now look like long-range precision strike and information warfare, but we should consider additional areas.

  Power projection as impacted by the proliferation of weaponry of all kinds (but in particular, nuclear, chemical, biological weaponry) is a very important issue. Indeed it seems that it interacts with the likely near term focus of some RMA efforts within the United States military. New technology and new operational approaches may allow us to deal more effectively with small or intermediate powers who possess a small number of nuclear, chemical, biological systems. It is only later that larger opponents may arise in Asia, with China a specific possibility.88

  While Marshall would continue to devote attention to RMA-related issues, by the late 1990s he was redirecting ONA’s focus to China—the other long-term challenge he had foreseen in his 1987 memo to Fred Iklé—and to the spread of advanced military capabilities, including weapons of mass destruction, and nuclear weapons in particular. Although the military revolution would not occupy a central place in US defense strategy that Marshall had hoped during the early 1990s, by 2000 he had succeeded in framing the terms of the debate regarding the character of future warfare. But he was also frustrated by the absence of a well-defined US national security strategy, one that could enable him to craft net assessments that would be of greatest benefit to senior Pentagon leaders in dealing with the long-term strategic management of the Defense Department and the military services. His frustration would continue during the next administration headed by President George W. Bush.

  9

  THE PIVOT TO THE ASIA-PACIFIC REGION 2001–2014

  I see the function of net assessment being to provide to top leadership a frank, well thought out, unbiased diagnosis of major problem areas and issues that they should pay more attention to. Because of the situation we are in, those people are going to have a lot of problems.

  —ANDREW MARSHALL

  The first decade of the twenty-first century saw major changes in Marshall’s personal life. In December 2004, after a long struggle with cancer, Mary Marshall died. Their marriage had lasted just over fifty years. The two of them had been exceptionally close due in no small part to Mary’s keen intelligence and her ability to accurately assess people at first meeting. Like her husband, Mary Marshall was able to distinguish lesser minds from those worth listening to, and she had little patience for the former

  When Mary died they were still living in the same rental apartment on Virginia Avenue near the Watergate complex that they had moved into “temporarily” in 1972—or so they thought at the time. The Marshalls had always planned to return to their house in Los Angeles. But as the years in Washington turned to decades Mary had become involved the Washington scene. Among other things she became active with the capital’s Textile Museum and had run its membership program for many years. Despite her husband’s recurring declarations that they would return to California within the next year or so, the couple never did.

  Marshall did not remain a widower for long. Mutual friends prevailed upon him to him to take Ann Smith, who was also widowed, to dinner. They met at the Foggy Bottom Metro near the State Department and walked to Marshall’s favorite French restaurant. During dinner Ann found herself doing most of the talking until she finally asked her date to tell her about himself. She soon discovered that they had much in common. They were both born and raised in the Midwest, came from English stock, claimed the same religion, and could even have passed each other on Michigan Avenue in Chicago after Ann had dropped out of college to study dance in the late 1940s. After dinner, as they walked back to the Metro, Marshall asked Ann whether she would be his companion for an occasional dinner or social event and she agreed.*

  A few weeks later he invited Ann to accompany him on a trip to France. Although the trip had to be rescheduled, soon thereafter he asked her whether she would go with him to Normandy, to the beaches where American forces had invaded the Continent on D-Day. Ann demurred, saying she’d cry all over the beach and embarrass him. But Marshall, who had been there five times before, persisted, saying that the Americans buried there were his and Ann’s generation and they owed it to them to pay their respects.

  Ann did eventually go to Normandy, but after they were married in November 2006. Soon after the wedding Marshall finally relinquished the apartment on Virginia Avenue he had shared with Mary. He moved into Ann’s apartment on Prince Street in Alexandria, a few miles south of the Pentagon, and bought an adjacent apartment to serve as a library for his large collection of books. The apartment complex was just a few blocks from the King Street Metro Station, allowing Marshall to continue commuting daily to the Pentagon by Metro as he had been doing since the Blue Line had opened in 1977.

  The new century found Marshall continuing to think about how best to make the transition back to the kinds of net assessments his office had done during the Cold War. This by no means meant ignoring the RMA, but his intention was to return to analysis that more closely resembled ONA’s Cold War balances than the 1992 MTR assessment. But what kind of assessments should be undertaken, and against which competitors? The United States suddenly no longer faced a major, long-term adversary armed with thousands of nuclear weapons. In 1972 Marshall had characterized net assessment as a careful comparison of where the United States and its allies stood militarily relative to the USSR and its allies. But now, with the Soviet Union a memory and no other large competitor in sight, what useful comparisons could be made? And what assessments would be most valuable to the Pentagon’s top decision makers?

  In the early 1970s the overarching imperative to avoid general nuclear war had led Schlesinger and Marshall to agree instinctively on the strategic nuclear, European, maritime, and military investment balances as the key Cold War assessments. In the post–Cold War security environment careful net assessments were no longer needed to realize that the US military enjoyed wide margins of advantage, especially in conventional conflicts against lesser adversaries such as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. This was one unmistakable lesson of 1991 Persian Gulf War, and it would be reiterated in Serbia in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001–2002, and Iraq in 2003.

  Nevertheless, as Marshall began thinking about ONA’s future, it seemed to him that the goal of net assessment—to highlight “for the top-level decision makers emerging or already existing problems” or, equally important, “opportunities that they might wish to focus on”—remained the same as it had been during the Cold War.1 He also thought that his long-term competition framework from the late 1960s was still appropriate. What had changed was the United States’ external security environment.

  In 1996, in preparation for considering ONA’s future direction, Marshall had offered some tentative suggestions on possible future assessment topics. Asia seemed likely to matter more to US security in the years ahead than Europe. The maturation of the RMA would continue to be of interest. The proliferation of weaponry of all kinds would certainly challenge the US military’s ability to project power overseas, and in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms China had become a rising power.2 But his initial attempt to define the future focus and direction of ONA was derailed by the office’s continued absorption with issues related to the RMA.

  Marshall returned to the issue of future net assessments in October 1999. This time he convened a two-day offsite with his staff. Again, however, little progress was made toward deciding on the right topics for future assessments or how best to pursue them. In fac
t, much of the discussion did not get beyond some of the observations Marshall had offered in his 1996 memorandum: that US attention would shift from Europe to Asia, especially to China; that maturation of the RMA would greatly alter how future wars would be fought, and that the proliferation of advanced weaponry—nuclear weapons in particular—would likely continue. Due to the lack of progress toward articulating a future focus and direction for ONA, Marshall ended the offsite early on the second day.3

  The following spring Marshall made another attempt to set down his thoughts about the character of future net assessments. He noted that for the moment the United States’ military capabilities dominated those of all other nations, especially in conventional warfare. Although US leaders had not sought military preeminence, it was understandably something that they were reluctant to give up.4 This observation suggested that future ONA assessments might center on prospective changes in the competitive environment, particularly those that could degrade or offset the United States’ military preeminence. Through their public declarations, military writings, or both, countries such as China, Russia and Iran had clearly demonstrated a strong desire to erode the US position.5

  One prospect that emerged from this line of thought was that the United States should focus on a prioritized portfolio of key military competitions and try to remain well ahead in them as long as possible. Going down this path would require OSD and the services to reach some degree of consensus on a manageably short list of the strategically important military competitions. At the same time Pentagon leaders would need to identify capabilities of declining value and reduce funding in these areas. Finally, in those military competitions that appeared to be gaining in importance, the United States would want to establish (or maintain) an early lead through appropriate investments.