The Last Warrior

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.

The Flaring of Intellectual Outliers: An Organizational Interpretation of the Generation of Novelty in the RAND Corporation

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.”

The Hidden Hand Behind America’s Foreign Policy

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.”

The Quiet American

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.”

In Search of a Successor for the Pentagon’s “Yoda”

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.”

“Yoda” Still Standing: Office of Pentagon Futurist, Andrew Marshall, 92, Survives Budget Ax

December 4, 2013

The Washington Post

“Yoda is the nom de guerre for Andrew W. Marshall, the 92-year-old futurist who directs the Pentagon’s obliquely named internal think tank, the Office of Net Assessment. A fixture in national-security circles since the dawn of the Cold War, Marshall contemplates military strategy and apocalyptic scenarios that could emerge in the decades to come.”