Pentagon decision makers would do well to take Marshall’s views to heart. His observations on such matters over three score years reveal a brilliant strategic mind with an uncanny ability to peer into the long-term future and see the situation “plain”—for what is—more clearly than most around him despite the enormous uncertainties involved. His influence on US strategy over time has been closely associated with his development and practice of net assessment. That influence, though real, has mostly been indirect, but then net assessment was always intended to be diagnostic rather than prescriptive. Marshall’s goal has not been to tell secretaries of defense how to respond to emerging strategic problems or opportunities, but to identify them far enough ahead that Pentagon leaders would still have time to act on the problems and opportunities net assessment revealed.
Much has changed since Marshall arrived at the Pentagon in October 1973. Yet the value of a net assessment organization able and willing to ask the hard questions about the national security environment, the future of warfare, and the state of various military competitions has not diminished despite the profound geopolitical and military-technical changes that have occurred since President Truman established the Special Evaluation Subcommittee in January 1953. Indeed, given the complexities of the security environment the United States faces today, well-crafted net assessments may be more valuable than ever before.
* The Atlantic Council is a nonpartisan think tank founded in 1961 to encourage cooperation between North American and European experts in the fields of political science, economics, and security studies.
* Ann Smith Marshall and Andrew May, “Happy Birthday, Andy!” 45-47.
CONCLUSION
I think my major achievement is the training or impact I’ve had on the people who have come through the office.
—ANDREW MARSHALL
Andrew Marshall’s thinking about—and assessments of—long-term military competitions involving the United States have exerted a subtle but indelible influence on American defense strategy for over half a century. Although his development of net assessment initially focused on the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union during the early 1970s, the conceptual framework he developed on the NSC has also proven useful in assessing subjects as diverse as the ongoing military revolution, the rise of China, and the proliferation of advanced weaponry. In all these areas, the Office of Net Assessment sought to provide the secretary of defense and other senior defense officials with early warning of emerging strategic problems or opportunities to gain comparative advantage over rivals.
Those who have been close to Marshall over the years—the authors included—have been as impressed with his unique personal qualities as with his penetrating intellect. Gifted with an extraordinary memory for people, places, events, and substantive issues involving strategy and the future security environment, his recollections have rarely been contradicted by archival material or other documentary sources. The accuracy of Marshall’s memory is nothing short of astonishing. Time and again his exceptional recall has enabled him to make connections between national security issues that would elude many of today’s best defense analysts.
Another of Marshall’s unique qualities is that he has never been inclined to tell senior defense officials what decisions they should make in response to strategic problems or opportunities. His willingness to serve as an influential behind-the-scenes adviser, or éminence grise, reflects a modest, self-effacing personality. Egos as big as Texas are hardly uncommon in national security affairs, but they all too often get in the way of dispassionate consideration of the empirical facts or a willingness to challenge institutional shibboleths and assumptions. Despite his remarkable prescience in anticipating, far earlier than most everyone else, major strategic issues likely to affect US national security, an overinflated ego has never been part of Marshall’s makeup.
In keeping with his low-key, unassuming personality, both at RAND and in the Pentagon, Marshall has resisted empire building. The Office of Net Assessment has never been a large organization. Even including secretaries and other support personnel, its staff never exceeded twenty and often was significantly less. Yet over the years scores of individuals have benefited from working in ONA. Over the four decades of the office’s existence roughly ninety people have served on Marshall’s staff in various capacities. Many went on to hold senior positions in the Defense Department or elsewhere. Jim Roche, who was the twenty-first Air Force secretary, is an obvious example, but so are Eliot Cohen, Aaron Friedberg, General Lance Lord, Steve Rosen, Dennis Ross, and Mike Vickers, among many others.
Rather than providing detailed guidance to members of his staff, Marshall has always been reluctant to tell them how to craft their assessments. His 1972 NSC memo “The Nature and Scope of Net Assessment” articulated a clear conception of what he envisioned net assessment to be: namely an analytic framework that would complement and, hopefully, transcend the limits of earlier, more quantitative forms of analysis. Yet, although he brought a copy the memo with him when he moved from the National Security Council to the Pentagon in 1973, he did not show it to members of his Pentagon staff. Instead of using it to explain net assessment to new members of his office, he rarely went beyond emphasizing the need for research and data, and asking for outlines. During the 1970s and 1980s Marshall was content to describe net assessment vaguely as being similar to the notion of “scanning the environment,” which provided little real illumination, especially to military members of his staff who had come to ONA from operational assignments and were accustomed to following specific orders.1
When “The Nature and Scope of Net Assessment” was finally discovered in a binder in Marshall’s office in 2002, Barry Watts’s first question was why it had not been shown to him when he first joined ONA in 1978. Marshall replied—with his usual wry smile—that he would have gladly shown it to anyone in his office who had asked to see it. But not knowing that the memo existed, no one had asked. Beyond modesty about his own ideas Marshall had a deeper, more pedagogical reason for not pushing his 1972 memo on members of his staff as they came aboard. He far preferred for them to work out for themselves what net assessment was, much as he himself had done over the years through relentless self-education and intellectual introspection.
This is not to suggest that Marshall would assign balance areas to new members of his office and then simply leave them twisting in the wind with respect to how to proceed. He invariably pressed his net assessors to start with outlines of their balances before attempting any drafting, and he was rarely satisfied with the first, second, or even third iteration. It was not uncommon for members of his staff to iterate through a dozen or more outlines before Marshall was persuaded that the assessment was headed in the right direction. And even after an outline had garnered his approval, it was not unknown for him to read the resulting draft and direct that it be abandoned in favor of starting over again with a fresh outline.
Yet there were also times when Marshall did not hesitate to offer fairly pithy and pointed guidance to those on his staff. In the early 1980s he brought Steve Rosen to ONA and asked him to work on an East Asian assessment. After taking an initial cut at an outline, Rosen approached Marshall expecting the same kind of praise he had invariably received throughout his career. Never using two words when one would do, Marshall responded, “Why don’t you go out and do some research for a change?” adding, “You keep giving me solutions. Stop giving me solutions. Why don’t you tell me what the problem is?”2
Marshall’s emphasis on solid research and ascertaining the nature of a problem goes to the heart of his conception of net assessment. It also points to another proclivity: the importance he has always attached to asking the right questions. In this he had a rather different perspective than a number of the other leading thinkers of his day. Recall, for example, how acidly the head of RAND’s mathematics division, John Williams, criticized Brodie, Hitch, and Marshall for preferring questions to concrete answers in their in
their 1954 paper “The Next Ten Years,” which sought to plot a course for RAND’s research on strategic nuclear forces. Marshall probably never agreed with Williams’s strong preference for answers versus questions. In Marshall’s view higher-level issues of strategic choice were inevitably riddled with uncertainties that had to be faced, rather than avoided by jumping ahead to possible solutions. Efforts to go beyond diagnosis and produce prescriptions, he came to feel after becoming Schlesinger’s director of net assessment, was likely to corrupt balanced, objective analysis. He thought it far better to concentrate on asking the right questions and leave the prescriptions to others. Returning to our medical analogy, Marshall has been the preeminent strategic “diagnostician” of his generation, identifying “security maladies” earlier than most for senior policy makers, thus enabling them to write the proper “prescriptions” in establishing the proper defense priorities.
Good questions, then, were—and remain—the core of Marshall’s approach to net assessment. It is a priority that he shared with some of the most brilliant men of his time. When the Nobel laureate in economics Ronald Coase died in 2013, The Economist magazine began its obituary by recalling Coase’s capacity to ask the right questions: “The job of clever people is to ask difficult questions. The job of very clever people is to ask deceptively simple ones. Eighty years ago a young British economist wondered: why do companies exist? The answer that he gave remains as fascinating as it was back then.” Firms exist because they can reduce or eliminate the “transaction cost” of going to the market by doing things in-house.3
Marshall’s long intellectual journey from the Great Depression and the Second World War to the University of Chicago, RAND, Kissinger’s National Security Council under Nixon, and finally the Office of Net Assessment has been entwined with a series of deceptively simple but difficult and illuminating questions, among them:
•What measures, exchange calculations, war games, scenarios, and analytic methodologies can be used to assess where the United States stands relative to a given opponent in various areas of military competition?
•Did the Soviets make different assumptions about objectives, emphasize different scenarios, use different measures of effectiveness, and focus on different variables than did their US counterparts?
•Why did Soviet choices about strategic nuclear forces diverge so much from the predictions of the rational-actor model of human and organizational behavior?
•Did Herbert Simon’s notion of bounded rationality and the behavior of large organizations, such as private business firms, provide a better framework for understanding actual Soviet strategic choices than the rational-actor model?
•Do anthropology, ethology, and evolutionary biology support the belief that conflict and war are part of the human condition, in which case war is unlikely to be banished from international relations?
•Should US force posture decisions during the long-term competition with USSR have focused less on arms race stability and, instead, more on how the United States might be a better, more effective competitor by exploiting areas of US advantage and Soviet weakness?
•How did USSR’s gross national product compare with that of the United States and what was the burden of Soviet military programs on the USSR’s economy?
•Were the Soviets right in their belief that advances in precision munitions, wide-area sensors, and computerized command and control would give rise to a late-twentieth-century revolution in military affairs?
•What would a mature precision-strike regime be like and would it constrain traditional US approaches to overseas power projection?
•If even medium-size countries will eventually be able to field anti-access/area-denial capabilities sufficient to make intervention in their regions too difficult and costly for the United States to bear, would US leaders be forced to reassess the country’s role in the world, or would it be possible, through a combination of new capabilities, operational concepts, and innovation to restore the American military’s freedom of maneuver?
•How has the role of nuclear weapons changed since the Cold War ended? How does the second nuclear age differ from the first? Is the “firebreak” between nuclear use and conventional precision strike narrowing?
•What are the implications—for the US military and the West as a whole—of China’s rise?
•Are Chinese assessments of the military balance even more different from US assessments than were those of the Soviet General Staff during the Cold War, or as Russian assessments are today?
•Are Chinese military theorists right in thinking that being “richer” in information than the adversary will increasingly be the most critical source of advantage in future crises and conflicts?
•During the Cold War the global political-military competition was dominated by two “players,” the United States and the Soviet Union. Is the world moving toward an era of a three-or four-player multipolar competition and, if so, what might that imply for strategic stability?
These are all profound questions. And, characteristically, Marshall has not asked them once or twice but again and again in the belief that they were of enduring relevance for the Pentagon’s most senior leaders. He has been indefatigable in seeking better and better answers to such “simple” questions.
Marshall’s development of net assessment rests on a number of intellectual themes or lines of research that he has pursued since he left the University of Chicago in 1949. In discussing these themes over the years, the one he has most often mentioned first is the importance of resource constraints in national security decisions—a fact that has increasingly eluded both civilian and military leaders in recent years due to the growing tendency to conflate the stating of desired objectives with the wherewithal to accomplish them. As Hitch and McKean famously put it in 1960, resources are always limited compared to our wants and therefore constrain our choices.
Marshall’s appreciation for the ways that economics can constrain defense strategy dates back to his early days at RAND. The think tank’s original mission focused on assessing the military worth of alternative force postures for the Air Force’s intercontinental nuclear forces. RAND’s economists recognized early on that such judgments had to take into account not merely the costs and effectiveness of various alternatives but the share of the Air Force’s overall resources that each option consumed. A choice that left the Air Force unable to meet its other missions and responsibilities was not viable no matter how much bang it delivered for the buck. Such macroeconomic constraints meant, for example, that there were real limits to how many bombers and aerial refueling tanker aircraft the Strategic Air Command could buy and operate in the 1950s. Later, resource limits imposed similar tradeoffs between heavy bombers, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, and sea-based submarine-launched ballistic missiles.
These sorts of tradeoffs, in turn, required choices to be made about decision criteria or metrics, which RAND economists termed the “criterion problem.” The engineers who dominated the think tank during its early years were inclined to specify decision criteria for judging alternative Air Force nuclear postures in ways that ignored the fact that total resources were always limited in relation to the service’s wants. The work on the criterion problem by Hitch and his economists sought to infuse RAND’s analyses with a healthy appreciation of the reality of resource constraints. Yet even today, sixty years later, one finds defense analysts who argue that US defense strategy should not be “resource constrained.”
Because the USSR’s strategic nuclear programs were similarly constrained by available resources, this issue was also relevant to US forecasts of Soviet strategic nuclear forces, which was Marshall and Loftus’ main concern in the 1950s. To be realistic, projections of the USSR’s nuclear forces needed to take into account the resource tradeoffs that the Soviets themselves faced. Doing so proved easier said than done. At least part of the reason that in 1953 the CIA established a five-person branch to begin estimating the costs of the U
SSR’s military establishment was to address this issue.4 Nevertheless, disagreement over the magnitude of the USSR’s military burden would persist to the Cold War’s end.
In their early thinking about the burden issue in late 1950s Marshall and Loftus expected that excessive military spending would lead to penalties in either current consumption or investment in the USSR’s economic infrastructure. But they did not yet anticipate how burdensome Soviet military programs would prove to be. In hindsight the USSR’s military burden probably approached 40 percent of GNP in the 1980s and was one of the major factors that led to the collapse of the Soviet economy and the USSR itself. Interestingly, though, Marshall’s experience was that even late in the Cold War some very senior US military leaders believed that Soviet military efforts did not face resource constraints. General Lew Allen, a nuclear physicist who was the Air Force’s chief of staff from 1978 to 1982, doubted the viability of US strategies that sought to impose costs on the Soviets. The USSR, he believed, would always be able to find the extra resources to counter any strategic challenges that the United States might pose.5 Through sustained intellectual effort informed by experience, Marshall knew better.
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