Perhaps the most obvious accomplishment to point to is Marshall’s work on estimating the burden that Soviet military programs imposed on the USSR’s economy during the 1970s and 1980s. This was one of the first issues Schlesinger asked Marshall to pursue. Schlesinger told Marshall to push the CIA to reconsider its estimate that only 6 to 7 percent of the USSR’s economic output was going to military programs. If the CIA’s economists were correct and Soviet central planners were “miracle workers,” then time was on the Soviet Union’s side in their long-term competition with the United States. If Schlesinger and Marshall were right, then the situation over the long-term was more favorable to the United States, with important implications for the development of strategy.
Right to the end of the Cold War the economists at the CIA resisted Marshall’s arguments on the need for a fundamental rethinking of their burden estimates. To be sure, there was the May 1976 “bombshell” when, virtually overnight the agency abruptly doubled its estimate of the USSR’s military burden to 11 to 13 percent.23 But as late as 1987, both the CIA and the DIA insisted that the burden had risen to only 15 to 17 percent of the USSR’s GNP in the early 1980s.24
Marshall never gave up on this issue, never stopped questioning the official estimates. In 1975, Marshall estimated the USSR’s military burden to be roughly double the CIA’s estimate.25 By 1988 he and David Epstein thought it was in the vicinity of 32 to 34 percent of Soviet GNP when indirect military costs and spending on the USSR’s external empire were included.26 These estimates proved closer to the truth than the intelligence community’s by at least a factor of two. In the end, Marshall’s small office, aided by its ability to fund outside research on Soviet military spending and the size of the USSR’s economy, produced more accurate estimates of the USSR’s military burden for senior Pentagon leaders than did the US intelligence agencies.
ONA’s long-term research on the USSR’s military burden had other consequences. In the mid-1970s the Office of Net Assessment’s military investment assessments persuaded Rumsfeld that the Soviet military was outspending the Defense Department, that the trends were adverse, and that the US defense budget needed to be increased.27 Later, under Ronald Reagan, Marshall’s work on the USSR’s defense burden inspired Weinberger’s decision in the mid-1980s to embrace competitive strategies as a way of imposing disproportionate costs on the Soviets.
A second area in which Marshall has unquestionably had a profound and enduring influence on US strategic thought was his instigation of debate over the revolution in military affairs. ONA did not merely start the debate over whether, as the Soviets believed, advances in precision munitions, wide-area sensors, and computerized command and control were giving rise to changes in war’s future conduct comparable to the emergence during 1918–1939 of blitzkrieg, carrier aviation, and strategic bombing. Marshall and his staff also managed to set the terms of the debate. They provided the debate’s lexicon as well as operational concepts such as reconnaissance strike, anti-access/area-denial and AirSea Battle—terms that have become central to debates about national security both in the United States and abroad.
In assessing the RMA, as in many other phases of his career, Marshall proved himself willing to push ONA in an entirely new direction from its original focus on the key Cold War balances. Those balances had all tried to assess where the United States stood relative to the USSR in various areas of military competition. The MTR assessment, by contrast, was not a balance per se but an attempt to alert Defense Department officials to the possibility that a military revolution was under way. ONA’s 1992 and 1993 assessments of the military-technical revolution differed from the Cold War assessments in other ways because they were neither classified nor written privately behind the closed doors of ONA, which was a sensitive compartmented information facility. Even the most cursory comparison of the MTR assessment with the Cold War assessments that preceded it reveal a rare flexibility of mind and openness to new possibilities on Marshall’s part that very few individuals or organizations manage to achieve.
The issue of defense transformation that emerged from the MTR debate is still with us. When Rumsfeld returned to the Pentagon in 2001 for his second term as defense secretary, he argued in his first annual report to Congress that, despite al Qaeda’s attacks on 9/11, he viewed transformation of the US armed forces as necessary because the challenges confronting the United States in the twenty-first century were “vastly different” from those of the twentieth century.28 To be sure, the United States needed to win the war against al Qaeda and like-minded terrorists, but Rumsfeld also insisted that the military’s transformation had to proceed at the same time. Thus he ostensibly committed himself to transformation, just as his predecessor, William Cohen, had, at least rhetorically, during the second Clinton administration.
One can, of course, question how serious the commitments of Cohen and Rumsfeld to transformation were. As Marshall foresaw in 1987, the issue was the pace at which the United States might pursue transformational technologies and capabilities at the expense of fully funding and fielding existing programs.29 In Cohen’s case the bulk of the Pentagon’s programmatic emphasis remained on existing systems and capabilities. As for Rumsfeld, in the wake of 9/11 his paradigm for transformation was the combination of air-delivered precision-guided munitions being called in against the Taliban in Afghanistan by Special Forces operators on horseback.30 This paradigm hardly called for the transformation of even a small portion of the US military’s capital stock. At the end of the day, Marshall’s influence has always been limited by the willingness of senior defense officials not only to take his advice to heart but to act upon it.
His influence has been more evident with respect to the United States’ emerging competition with China. Drawing from Marshall’s 2001 strategy review, Rumsfeld was on solid ground in arguing that the security challenges of the twenty-first century were dramatically different from those of the previous century. In the mid-1990s China’s leaders began a military modernization program that included developing A2/AD capabilities in the western Pacific, which its strategists refer to as enabling “counter-intervention operations.”31 Sustained investments aimed at denying US forces access to China’s periphery have ranged from deploying over a thousand advanced short-range conventional ballistic missiles opposite Taiwan to developing medium-range antiship ballistic missiles (notably the DengFeng-21D), land-attack and antiship cruise missiles, long-range SAMs such as the HQ-9, counterspace (antisatellite) weapons, and military cyberspace capabilities.
As far back as the late 1980s Marshall had begun thinking about how the rise of China and the proliferation of precision weaponry might affect the United States’ position in the Asia-Pacific region. Toward this end he began funding research aimed at better understanding the Chinese as a military competitor. A good example of such ONA-directed research is Michael Pillsbury’s China Debates the Future Security Environment, which explored divergent schools of thought on the RMA within the PLA.32 Despite the research into the PLA that Marshall sponsored, however, it took a decade before the US defense establishment began to respond openly to the PLA’s growing A2/AD capabilities for counterintervention operations—capabilities that ONA had been exploring in war games and through other research for more than a decade.
As the US military began recognizing China as a military competitor, however, Marshall’s fingerprints were evident, especially in the responses of the Navy and the Air Force. One explicit manifestation of his concerns about China occurred when Air Force chief of staff General Norton Schwartz and chief of naval operations Admiral Gary Roughead signed a memorandum of understanding to develop Air-Sea Battle, which sought to find ways of countering China’s A2/AD capabilities in the western Pacific by having the two services work together rather than separately. There is now an Air-Sea Battle Office in the Pentagon.33 And in 2012 President Barack Obama went a step further by calling for a rebalancing the US military toward the Asia-Pacific region.34 In short, US security pol
icy and defense strategy is finally beginning to catch up with Marshall long-standing view that the rise of China presents a security challenge that the United States will not be able to ignore in the long run. In this respect, Marshall’s contributions to US strategic thought and national security may outlast his actual career—a career that is unlikely to be surpassed in its duration and influence anytime soon.
After a long and productive career at RAND, Marshall has served every defense secretary since Schlesinger and every president since Nixon. Insofar as ONA’s core mission since 1973 has been to identify emerging problems and opportunities in time for the Pentagon’s top leaders to address them, he has been extraordinarily successful and influential, even if most of his success and influence has occurred behind the scenes. Characteristically Marshall has never sought credit or public acknowledgment for all that he and his office have achieved. But time and again he has managed to ask the right strategic questions and see further and more clearly into the uncertain future than those around him.
GLOSSARY OF ACRONYMS
A2/AD
anti-access/area-denial
AAF
Army Air Forces
ABM Treaty
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty
ACDA
Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
ADE
armored division equivalent
ALCM
air-launched cruise missile
ASW
antisubmarine warfare
ATGM
antitank guided missile
C2
command and control
C3I
command, control, communications, and intelligence
C4I
command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence
C4ISR
command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance
CAA
Concepts Analysis Agency
CBO
Combined Bomber Offensive
CENTAG
Central Army Group
CIA
Central Intelligence Agency, a.k.a. the Agency
CILTS
Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy
CNO SSG
Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group
COMINT
communications intelligence
CONUS
continental United States
CSBA
Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments
DARPA
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
DBA
dominant battlespace awareness
DBP
Defense Budget Project
DCI
director of central intelligence
DCS
deputy chief of staff
DCS/R&D
deputy chief of staff/research and development
DDR&E
Office of Defense Research and Engineering
DIA
Defense Intelligence Agency
DPG
Defense Planning Guidance
DSB
Defense Science Board
FEAT
Force Evaluation Analysis Team
FY
Fiscal Year
GPS
global positioning system
HEW
Department of Health, Education and Welfare
ICBM
intercontinental ballistic missile
IEDs
improvised explosive devices
ISA
International Security Affairs
ISR
intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance
JSTARS
joint surveillance and target attack radar system
LGB
laser-guided bomb
LNO
limited nuclear option
LRA
Long Range Aviation
MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MOE
measure of effectiveness
MTR
military-technical revolution
NATO
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NESC
Net Evaluation Subcommittee
New START
New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty
NIC
National Intelligence Council
NIE
National Intelligence Estimate
NORTHAG
Northern Army Group
NPS
Naval Postgraduate School
NSA
National Security Agency
NSC
National Security Council
NSCIC
National Security Council Intelligence Committee
NSDD 32
National Security Decision Directive 32
OER
Office of Economic Research
OMB
Office of Management and Budget
ONA
Office of Net Assessment
ONE
Office of National Estimates
OPEC
Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries
OR
operations research
OSA
Office of Systems Analysis
OSD
Office of the Secretary of Defense
OSD/NA
Office of Net Assessment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense
OSR
Office of Strategic Research
OSRD
Office of Scientific Research and Development
OSS
Office of Strategic Services
OTH
over-the-horizon [radar]
PA&E
Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation
PFIAB
President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
PGM
precision-guided munition
PLA
People’s Liberation Army
PPBS
Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System
PRM/NSC-10
Presidential Review Memorandum/NSC-10
QDR
Quadrennial Defense Review
R&D
research and development
RAND
Research ANd Development Corporation
RMA
revolution in military affairs
ROTC
Reserve Office Training Corps
RSAS
RAND Strategy Assessment System
RUK
reconnaissance-strike complex
SAC
Strategic Air Command
SACEUR
supreme allied commander in Europe
SAFE
Strategy and Force Evaluation
SAI
Science Applications International
SAIC
Science Applications International Corporation
SALT
Strategic Arms Limitation Talks
SAM
surface-to-air missile
SAP
special-access programs
SAS
Strategic Analysis Simulation
SCDC
Strategic Concepts Development Center
SCIF
sensitive compartmented information facility
SDI
Strategic Defense Initiative
SDIO
Strategic Defense Initiative Office
SecDef SSG
Secretary of Defense Strategic Studies Group
SecDef/DCI
secretary of defense/director of central intelligence
SESC
Special Evaluation Subcommittee
SHAPE
Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe
SIOP
Single Integrated Operational Plan
SLBM
submarine-launched ballistic missile
SOC
Strategic Objectives Committee
SOSUS
Sound Surveillance System
SOVA
Office of Soviet Affairs
SSG
strategic studies group
TASC
(the) Analytic Sciences Corporation
TASCFORM
TASC Force Modernization
TFWE
tactical fighter wing equivalent
TVD
geographic theater of military action
The Last Warrior Page 36