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.
July 22, 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:
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 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.”
January 23, 2015
The Wall Street Journal
“In the annals of strategic thought from Sun Tzu through Carl Von Clausewitz, and the chronicles of long public service from Queen Victoria through Adm. Hyman Rickover, Andrew Marshall has an honorable place.”
January 8, 2015
The Economist
“He rarely speaks in public and almost never to the press. Most of his reports are secret. A historian once asked if even his brain was classified. But for over four decades Andrew Marshall’s judgments, emanating from a small office in the Pentagon, have guided American defence policy.”
January 2, 2015
CNBC
“Since Andrew Marshall founded the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment in the early ’70s, he’s been the only person to head the think tank. But at the age of 93, Marshall—nicknamed “Yoda” after the sage extraterrestrial character from “Star Wars”—is retiring, according to the Washington Post.”