March 14, 2023
The Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI)
“Foreign policy strategist Andrew Marshall had a career that spanned seven decades from the late 1940s. He was hailed by a former KGB officer as ‘the grey cardinal, the éminence grise’ of the U.S. revolution of military affairs, and as ‘the great hero’ of Chinese officers tracking developments in U.S. military technology, claiming they had translated every word he wrote. Dr. Thomas G. Mahnken joins ‘Talking Strategy’ to discuss his work and life.”
January 16, 2023
Center for International Maritime Security (CIMSEC)
“Known throughout parts of the American national security establishment as “Yoda,” referred to by The Atlantic as the “Brain of the Pentagon,” and respected worldwide for his decades of strategic work at RAND, the National Security Council, and finally in founding and running the Office of Net Assessment, Andrew Marshall was a critical figure in the Cold War and post-Cold War history of American security and strategy. He was also an intellectual figure who left a limited imprint on the literature of American national security, having written the vast majority of his work for classified audiences and publishing very little in the open.”
December 19, 2022
Book Review
“U.S. national security is recovering from over twenty years of Instant Gratification Warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan. The threat posed by the People’s Republic of China requires the U.S. to think in decades instead of in deployment cycles, and develop strategies and plans in an integrated manner. “Reflection on Net Assessment” is the perfect book for someone who needs to shake off organizationally-incentivized impatience and focus on long-term threats.”
March 2020
Cambria Press
In Thomas G. Mahnken’s Net Assessment and Military Strategy, former members of Marshall’s staff and those who benefited from his mentorship present essays on the history, tenets, applications, and influence of net assessment and Marshall’s work. Featuring an introduction by Andrew Marshall, this volume is essential reading that traces net assessment’s impact on U.S. national security and defense strategy from the Cold War to today.
January 6, 2015
Basic Books
In The Last Warrior, Andrew Krepinevich and Barry Watts—both former members of Marshall’s staff—trace Marshall’s intellectual development from his upbringing in Detroit during the Great Depression to his decades in Washington as an influential behind-the-scenes advisor on American defense strategy. The result is a unique insider’s perspective on the changes in U.S. strategy from the dawn of the Cold War to the present day.
2020
Journal of Strategic Studies
“Andrew W. Marshall, who shaped the way in which contemporary international security experts think about strategy, has been mostly associated with the invention of net assessment. The intellectual sources of this analytical technique, and of the related competitive strategies concept, could be traced to Marshall’s efforts to uncover Soviet post-World War II defense transformations. This article outlines the essence of these Soviet innovations – the empirical frame of reference that inspired Marshall. It provides a new perspective on the history of the net-assessment methodology, advances the debate within strategic studies over the nature of military innovations, and offers insights for experts examining defense transformations worldwide.”
May 2020
The Andrew W. Marshall Foundation
This publication features reflections, remarks, and essays by:
Graham Allison
Mie Augier
Jesse Ausubel
Gordon Barrass
Rebecca Bash
Keith Bickel
Jacqueline Deal
Nicholas Eberstadt
David Epstein
David Fahrenkrug
Aaron Friedberg
Melissa Hathaway
Andrew Krepinevich
Scooter Libby
Andrew May
Jeffrey S. McKitrick
John Milam
Chip Pickett
Dmitry Ponomareff
Jim Powell
James Roche
Stephen P. Rosen
Paul Selva
Abram Shulsky
Anna Simons
Lionel Tiger
Barry Watts
March 29, 2019
This is a special edition of the Defense & Aerospace Report Podcast that remembers the life and legacy of Andy Marshall, former director of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment.
Moderated by: Vago Muradian
Speakers:
- Former Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work
- Gen. Paul Selva, USAF, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and one of Marshall’s former military fellows
- Col. Tom Ehrhard, PhD, USAF Ret., vice president for defense strategy at the Long Term Strategy Group, and one of Marshall’s former military fellows
- Jaymie Durnan, deputy assistant to the director of strategic initiatives at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Marshall’s executor and former military fellow
May 17, 2015
Nixon Presidential Library & Museum
Andrew Krepinevich and Barry Watts talk about their biography of Andrew Marshall, head of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment – the Pentagon’s think tank – from 1973-2015. The co-authors are former members of Marshall’s staff.
April 16, 2015
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Presentation of the George P. Shultz Award for Distinguished Service to Andrew Marshall
April 2015
Organization Science
“Much of intellectual history is punctuated by the flaring of intellectual outliers, small groups of thinkers who briefly, but decisively, influence the development of ideas, technologies, policies, or worldviews. To understand the flaring of intellectual outliers, we use archival and interview data from the RAND Corporation after the Second World War. We focus on five factors important to the RAND experience: (1) a belief in fundamental research as a source of practical ideas, (2) a culture of optimistic urgency, (3) the solicitation of renegade ambition, (4) the recruitment of intellectual cronies, and (5) the facilitation of the combinatorics of variety. To understand the subsequent decline of intellectual outliers at RAND, we note that success yields a sense of competence, endurance in a competitive world, and the opportunity and inclination to grow. Self-confidence, endurance, and growth produce numerous positive consequences for an organization; but for the most part, they undermine variety. Outliers and the conditions that produce them are not favored by their environments. Engineering solutions to this problem involve extending time and space horizons, providing false information about the likelihoods of positive returns from exploration, buffering exploratory activities from the pressures of efficiency, and protecting exploration from analysis by connecting it to dictates of identities.”
February 2015
Air University Press
“By the time he entered civil service, most of Marshall’s formative ideas about the practice of net assessment and his unique understanding of organizational behavior had emerged. Instinctively multidisciplinary, Marshall accrued a multitude of ostensibly different analytic lenses.”