It is a truth universally acknowledged that power in Washington is not necessarily measured by an impressive job title, or even appearances on CNN. Case in point: Andrew Marshall, who died last week at the age of 97.
Marshall, who ran something called the Office of Net Assessment at the Department of Defense from 1973 until his retirement four years ago, probably had more influence on American military thinking and planning — and by extension, foreign policy — over a longer period of time than any other government official, including officials who were nominally his superior. Yet he was almost wholly unknown to the public, even to many in government and political journalism.
The story begins in 1947, when Secretary of State George C. Marshall concluded that the State Department needed some sort of compact, independent, long-range planning bureau, an internal “think tank” before the phrase was invented, to analyze trends and anticipate problems, and report directly to the secretary. The Policy Planning Staff was a good idea, but Marshall’s mistake was to appoint the neurotic, self-dramatizing scholar-diplomat George Kennan as its first director. Kennan swiftly ran afoul of Marshall’s successor, Dean Acheson, and after he left in 1950, Policy Planning was absorbed into the State Department’s carnivorous bureaucracy, where it remains.
Andrew Marshall was, among other things, the temperamental opposite of George Kennan. Homely (his affectionate nickname of “Yoda” was not entirely inaccurate), self-effacing, and largely devoid of political ambition, Marshall had been an autodidact student of diplomatic and military affairs, a graduate of the University of Chicago, and by 1972, battle-tested veteran of the RAND Corporation’s Cold War research and planning apparatus. When Henry Kissinger, from his perch at the National Security Council, was looking to establish something like a policy planning staff at the Pentagon, Marshall was the obvious recruit.
His initial assignment was to assess the military strength of the Soviet Union. Marshall’s conclusions were counterintuitive and prophetic. The Soviet economy was considerably weaker than was universally believed, especially by the CIA, and Moscow’s military budgets took a disproportionate bite out of the Soviet gross national product. Of course, the 1970s were the high tide of detente between Russia and the United States, and the Nixon-Ford administrations had plenty of things to worry about, including winding down the Vietnam War and disrupting the global order with the People’s Republic of China. But in the following decade, Marshall’s insights prompted the Reagan administration to wager that challenging Moscow economically and politically would strain the Soviet Union’s resources to the breaking point, as it did.
In that sense, Marshall not only correctly diagnosed the Cold War, but helped end it as well.
In time, Marshall’s periodic “net assessments” of military strategy, probably the most rigidly classified documents in Washington, came to be seen by successive defense secretaries as reliably prescient. But not always. As The New York Times has pointed out, Marshall “missed big trends like cyberwarfare and had wrongly ignored the kind of terrorism threats that the United States faced in the early 21st century.” Nevertheless, the reform and modernization programs that Marshall promoted were critical to the success of military operations in the Bush and Obama administrations. And in the 1990s, Marshall was very nearly a lone voice, in Washington or anywhere, predicting the impending challenge and peril of Chinese strategic power.
It may well be, of course, that Marshall’s very obscurity was the key to his success and service to his country. Largely insulated from political or ideological pressures, and free to conclude and assert what he thought, for four decades he surrounded himself with a small, distinguished coterie of assistants and associates who, after graduation, have gone on to widen their mentor’s strategic influence.
Yet while Marshall himself was as vital as ever into his early 90s, the weight of bureaucracy eventually prevailed. At the beginning of President Obama’s second term, the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment was, in the words of The Washington Post, “realigned on the bureaucratic flow chart,” no longer reporting directly to the secretary but to the under secretary of defense for policy. One year later, Marshall was gone.
Philip Terzian, a former writer and editor at The Weekly Standard, is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
