Early next month, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's Adviser on Net Assessment will produce a report that will be the working blueprint for the Pentagon's future. Given that the Adviser -- Andrew Marshall -- is a futurist fascinated with the most advanced technologies, observers expect the report to be chock full of recommendations emphasizing an expansive embrace of "information age" technologies, and a shift away from more conventional procurements.
Indeed, if you read last Friday's Washington Post, you'd be inclined to think that Andrew Marshall is an island of ingenuity, intellect, and integrity floating amidst the vast archipelago of corrupt and conniving Defense bureaucracies. He is, wrote the Post's Thomas Ricks, "one of the Pentagon's most unconventional thinkers," a man who's "controversial" in part due to his prescient, visionary views that are "hardly conservative." Because he's scrapped with the military brass over a handful of doctrinal and procurement issues, he's a "radical reformer." Not that the average person would know any of this, of course, as Marshall is "all but unknown outside national security circles" and is legendary for being "publicity-shy."
Indeed, for a guy who's been ensconced at the Pentagon since 1973,the 79-year old Marshall has done a remarkable job of flying below theradar. Put his name and office into the news database Nexis and you'llfind less than 50 hits. Among them is a reprinted piece in The PalmBeach Post Ricks did for his former employer, the Wall StreetJournal, which could hardly have been more effusive in depicting Marshall as the quiet, Oz-like genius of the Pentagon. Far from being probing, this article puts Ricks in the company of a bevy of defense contracting executives and their cut-out advocacy groups, like Frank Gaffney's Center for Security Policy, who adore Marshall for his dire prognostications about an inevitably bellicose and hegemonic China and his advocacy of "Revolution in Military Affairs" -- something critics charge is an intellectual cover for spending largess on "precision" Buck Rogers-type weaponry that has been less than 100 percent effective. But it's his subtle role as a national missile defense booster that has many concerned about his new tasking as uber-Pentagon program reviewer.
"Putting Andy Marshall in charge of this is a ploy to make surenational missile defense gets funded," holds Mel Goodman, a veteranCentral Intelligence Agency analyst now at the National DefenseUniversity. "If he can justify making cuts in conventional procurement, they can then justify taking $60 billion to throw at [missile defense]. [Rumsfeld] is the first secretary of defense to turn over a key problem to his Net Assessment Adviser, which is a strange way to do business. If they were serious about this, they would not be looking for answers in several weeks."
According to those who have worked with Marshall or kept an eye onhim, Marshall's forward vision of defense revolves around the notionthat in the near future, the U.S. will not have access it currentlyenjoys to forward bases around the world, so force projection mustnecessarily become an action that revolves not around aircraft carriersorties and armor and infantry deployment, but long-range arsenal shipsand planes, networked sensor arrays and precision-weapons. As such,Marshall's been particularly critical of the Air Force's F-22 fighter program -- the plane, he says, has too short a range to be useful to the American military of the future.
Some have touted Marshall's opposition to the F-22 as an example ofhis "iconoclastic" thinking. But according to investigative author KenSilverstein -- perhaps the only journalist who's written critically ofMarshall -- this is bunk. "So he's been a critic of the F-22. Fine anddandy, " says Silverstein. "But you can find case after case where he'scome out in support of other systems that are just as worthy ofskewering. Saying he's a tough critic is like saying Jack Valenti is atough critic of the movie industry."
While Marshall gave rare interviews to Ricks in 1994 and right-winghistorian Jay Winik for an admiring April 1999 Washingtonian piece, Marshall declined to answer any of Silverstein's queries when Silverstein was working on a series of defense-related investigations for The Nation that he later expanded for his book, last year's Private Warriors.
Noting that only a handful of sycophantic articles were responsiblefor Marshall's public image, Silverstein expressed great skepticismabout some of Marshall's claims, including one that Office of NetAssessment had been the first to sound the national security alarm aboutAIDS in the 1980s, going so far as to alert the Centers for DiseaseControl (CDC) to take the problem seriously. (The Centers did notrespond to queries from The American Prospect about any contact between the Office of Net Assessment and the CDC, but according to interviews with Pentagon sources who remember early 1980's briefings on AIDS from the Armed Forces Medical Intelligence Center, no one can recall any involvement -- or advocacy role -- from Marshall's office.)
Another claim Silverstein found a bit difficult to swallow was a rifffrom Ricks' Wall Street Journal piece, in which he asserted, "Well ahead of most Sovietologists, Mr. Marshall noticed the weakness of Soviet society in 1977, he focused on the environmental and demographic crisis that were undermining the Soviet system." In fact, Silverstein wrote, Marshall's "associates have no recollection of Marshall ever having expressed such views," quoting a former staffer as saying, "until the very end he was a major promoter of the line that 'The Russians are coming and they're 10 feet tall.'"
Indeed, in 1977, Marshall was one of the quietly forceful handsbehind the infamous Team B episode, the Central Intelligence Agency gave members of the far-right Committee on the Present Danger access to CIA data and allowed to histrionically rewrite the National Intelligence Estimate on Soviet Military Intentions. Though Winik wrote that he later rebuked the intelligence community for overestimating Soviet strengths in the '80s, Silverstein noted in his book that Marshall's aid in authoring a secret Reagan Administration-era study on winning a nuclear war with the Soviets (the U.S. should "be able to force the Soviet Union to seek earliest termination of hostilities on terms favorable to the United States," it held) didn't exactly smack of prognostic optimism about the USSR's military capabilities.
National Defense University's Goodman -- one of the Agency's topSovietologists who testified against Robert Gates for the latter'sexaggerating the Soviet threat -- adds the assertions about Marshall'sSovieticus prescience strains credulity. "I don't recall where he wasout in front of the whole Soviet issue -- if anything, he may have saidit was time to throw more money into taking out the Soviets at a timewhen we were spending too much already," Goodman says, adding that thisagain brings us back to the current issue of missile defense. "We werespending in peacetime what we would normally do in wartime budgetallocations. Now, instead of spending 6 percent of the GNP on defense,we're spending three. National Missile Defense puts that at risk, and ifyou're talking about a radical tax cut at the same time, that likelyputs us back in the deficit spending arena."
Though Silverstein holds that Marshall, "has been an enthusiasticsupporter of Star Wars schemes," Marshall's boosterism is more oblique;unlike the hawks on the Hill and elsewhere, he's not visibly jumping upand down, shaking his pom-poms in support of National Missile Defense. Indeed, few of his associates, from the past or present, are willing toascribe any particular view to him, and not just because of hislegendary bent towards the taciturn. ("He's as Delphic as they come --days may go by before he utters a word," says a former Office of NetAssessment staffer, adding that this proclivity for reticence has earnedhim the nickname "Yoda.") "He's hard to draw a bead on," says oneanalyst who worked with him, "because he spends his time coming up withevery conceivable future scenario that could threaten the U.S."
"He is not very interested in the here and now, but is primarilyinterested in hypothesizing futures that cut against the grain, and youcan argue that we really do need someone like that," says JonathanPollack, a professor at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, and one of the leading analysts of the Chinese military. "His interest is to take events as they are understood and find a way to turn them on their head, to conflate understanding, and look for patterns or possibilities that could be studied. And he often comes up with quirk results. It's like he thinks of the world as a bell curve and is only interested in the tails of distribution." Or to put it more succinctly, he is, Pollack affectionately says, "a worrywart."
And this makes him worth having around, at the very least as anunconventional sounding board for a Secretary of Defense, or as a grandvision canary-in-the-coal-mine. But according to a longtime analyst, theproduct from Marshall's office often seems to be, "thinking outside ofthe box for the sake of thinking outside the box," fused with a touch ofthe paranoid. "His views are very much animated by the belief that mostof those at the Pentagon are asleep at the switch, too wedded to thestatus quo and weapons systems he believes will be vulnerable in thefuture," says the analyst, who concedes, "the fact that he doesn't sharethe conceit about an unchallenged United States may have a utility at acertain level.
"But how much serious policy judgments and spending and procurementdecisions should be based on this approach is another question," headds. "Because the reality is a lot of the things he's postulatingaren't provable. His escape clause is that what he's talking about isnot reality today, but is using the equation of, 'based on thisvariable, let's extrapolate and postulate that x could happen whichcould lead to y which could lead to z, and how do we prepare for that?'There are times it's great to know you have someone around who runsthose scenarios, especially if they do come to pass. But Andy is not thePentagon's indispensable man, nor is he an omniscient seer."
Indeed, according to Silverstein, if there's a good description ofMarshall it's that he's, "one of the most effective pork-seekingmissiles ever deployed by the military brass." While this may beoverstating matters a bit, given Marshall's desire to gut a slew ofconventional weapons programs, it seems to ring true if you'reinterested in national missile defense. As a key witness before DonaldRumsfeld's Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to theUnited States, Marshall played no small role in convincing the commission -- whose findings have been cogently criticized by numerous analysts -- that a real threat is imminent.
"Though Rumsfeld's commission made no recommendation whatsoever onNational Missile Defense, it dealt with the issue very artfully," saysPollack. "In fact, if that commission had a methodology, it was a veryMarshallian methodology -- you can posit these circumstances, and if youposit the following it's feasible this next thing could happen."National Missile Defense deployment should, Pollack adds, be looked atunder the larger rubric on the -- currently in vogue -- doctrine of"homeland defense," which focuses on protection from ballistic missilesand terrorism, and offers a lot of moneymaking potential to defensecontractors. "This is going to be a gravy train," he says.
