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Andrew Marshall: Net Assessment as a Tool of Strategy

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.”

American Defense Reform: Lessons from Failure and Success in Navy History

December 1, 2022

Georgetown University Press

Featuring a discussion on Andy Marshall, American Defense Reform is “a roadmap for U.S. military innovation based on the Navy’s history of success through civilian-military collaborations.”

“The U.S. military must continually adapt to evolving technologies, shifting adversaries, and a changing social environment for its personnel. In American Defense Reform, Dave Oliver and Anand Toprani use U.S. naval history as a guide for leading successful change in the Pentagon.

American Defense Reform provides a historical analysis of the Navy during four key periods of disruptive transformation: the 1940s Revolt of the Admirals, the McNamara Revolution in systems analysis, the fallout from the Vietnam War, and the end of the Cold War. The authors draw insights from historical documents, previously unpublished interviews from four-star admirals, and Oliver’s own experiences as a senior naval officer and defense industry executive. They show that Congress alone cannot effectively create change and reveal barriers to applying the experience of the private sector to the public sector.”

The Art of Net Assessment and Uncovering Foreign Military Innovations: Learning from Andrew W. Marshall’s Legacy

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.”

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.

Quantitative Dynamics of Human Empires

2013

Rockefeller University

“Quantitative modeling of social systems shows a large component of automatic drives in the behavior of individual humans and human society. Studies of the formation and breakdown of 20 diverse empires operating over almost 3,000 years describe these processes with utmost clarity and paradigmatic simplicity. Taking territorial expansion as the basic parameter, we show that it can be represented in time by a single logistic equation in spite of the complicated sequences of events usually reported by historians. The driving forces of empire, leading to expansion and saturation at 14 days of travel from the capital, can be reduced to testosterone and progesterone.”

Thoughts for the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review

April 2001

  • If you had been a security policy-maker in the world’s greatest power in 1900, you would have been a Brit, looking warily at your age-old enemy, France.

 

  • By 1910, you would be allied with France and your enemy would be Germany.

 

  • By 1920, World War I would have been fought and won, and you’d be engaged in a naval arms race with your erstwhile allies, the U.S. and Japan.

 

  • By 1930, naval arms limitation treaties were in effect, the Great Depression was underway, and the defense planning standard said “no war for ten years.”

 

  • Nine years later World War II had begun.

 

  • By 1950, Britain no longer was the world’s greatest power, the Atomic Age had dawned, and a “police action” was underway in Korea.

 

  • Ten years later the political focus was on the “missile gap,” the strategic paradigm was shifting from massive retaliation to flexible response, and few people had heard of Vietnam.

 

  • By 1970, the peak of our involvement in Vietnam had come and gone, we were beginning détente with the Soviets, and we were anointing the Shah as our protégé in the Gulf region.

 

  • By 1980, the Soviets were in Afghanistan, Iran was in the throes of revolution, there was talk of our “hollow forces” and a “window of vulnerability,” and the U.S. was the greatest creditor nation the world had ever seen.

 

  • By 1990, the Soviet Union was within a year of dissolution, American forces in the Desert were on the verge of showing they were anything but hollow, the U.S. had become the greatest debtor nation the world had ever known, and almost no one had heard of the Internet.

 

  • Ten years later, Warsaw was the capital of a NATO nation, asymmetric threats transcended geography, and the parallel revolutions of information, biotechnology, robotics, nanotechnology, and high density energy sources foreshadowed changes almost beyond forecasting.

 

  • All of which is to say that I’m not sure what 2010 will look like, but I’m sure that it will be very little like we expect, so we should plan accordingly.

 

 

The Military Use of Space: A Diagnostic Net Assessment

February 1, 2001

Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments

“The principal aim of this report is to assess the evolving capabilities of nations and other actors to exploit near-earth space for military purposes over the next 20-25 years.”

Optimal Ways to Confuse Ourselves

Autumn 1975

Foreign Policy
No. 20, pp. 170-198

“We have all been waiting for the Great Debate on strategic arms so widely heralded a year ago. But it is hard to conduct any debate, much less a great debate, when language is used with almost no relation to the world it is supposed to describe. Contrast what has been happening to strategic forces and what we say has been happening.”