The last warrior : Andrew Marshall and the shaping of modern American defense strategy

327 Pages·2014·3.34 MB·English

by  Krepinevich

THE LAST WARRIOR

Copyright © 2015 by Andrew F. Krepinevich and Barry D. Watts Foreword copyright © 2015 by Robert
M. Gates Published by Basic Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group All rights reserved. Printed in
the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without
written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For
information, address Basic Books 250 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10107.
Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States
by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special
Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103,
or call [phone], ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected].
Set in 10.75 point Adobe Caslon Pro Krepinevich, Andrew F.
The last warrior : Andrew Marshall and the shaping of modern American defense strategy / Andrew
Krepinevich and Barry Watts. — First edition.
pages cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-465-08071-7 (e-book) 1. Marshall, Andrew W., 1921– 2. United States—Military
policy. 3. United States. Department of Defense. Director of Net Assessment—Biography. 4. United
States. Department of Defense—Officials and employees—Biography. 5. Rand Corporation—
Biography. 6. Military planning—United States—History—20th century. 7. Military planning—United
States—History—21st century. 8. United States—Foreign relations. 9. Strategy. 10. Cold
War. I. Watts, Barry. II. Title. III. Title: Andrew Marshall and the shaping of modern American defense
strategy.
UA23.K77622 2014
355'.033573—dc23
2014024139
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To
Andrew W. Marshall
and in Memory of
James R. Schlesinger
The Fathers of Net Assessment
CONTENTS
Figures
Foreword by Robert M. Gates
Authors’ Note
Introduction
1 A SELF-EDUCATED MAN, 1921–1949
2 EARLY RAND YEARS, 1949–1960
3 THE QUEST FOR BETTER ANALYTIC METHODS, 1961–1969
4 THE BIRTH OF NET ASSESSMENT, 1969–1973
5 MOVING TO THE PENTAGON, 1973–1975
6 THE MATURATION OF NET ASSESSMENT, 1976–1980
7 COLD WAR END GAME, 1981–1991
8 THE MILITARY REVOLUTION, 1991–2000
9 THE PIVOT TO THE ASIA-PACIFIC REGION, 2001–2014
CONCLUSION
Glossary of Acronyms
Notes
Index
Photos between pages 138 and 139
FIGURES
FIGURE 4.1A. US–USSR Strategic-Nuclear Force Ratios.
FIGURE 4.1B. US and USSR Military Spending.
FIGURE 6.1 Trends in the US-Soviet Strategic-Nuclear Balance 1966–1976.
FIGURE 6.2 United States versus Soviet Bomber Defenses.
FIGURE 6.3 NATO/Warsaw Pact Central Region Ground Forces and
Ratios, 1978.
FIGURE 6.4 WUV Calculation for a Notional US Combat Division.
FIGURE 6.5 NATO/Warsaw Pact Central Region WUV Trends.
FIGURE 6.6 The German Campaign in the West, May–June 1940.
FIGURE 6.7 Allied/German Theater “Bean Count” and WUV Comparisons,
May 10, 1940.
FIGURE 6.8 By-Sector Division and WUV Comparisons, May 10, 1940.
FOREWORD
T
his book chronicles the life of a remarkable, but little-known
nonagenarian: Andrew Marshall, who has served every defense secretary
extending back to James Schlesinger’s tenure during the Nixon administration.
The book’s authors, Andrew Krepinevich and Barry Watts, are well qualified to
tell Marshall’s story. Both have known and worked for Marshall for some three
decades; Krepinevich also served on the Defense Policy Board during my tenure
as secretary of defense.
The authors describe the book as Marshall’s intellectual biography. It is that,
and more. It offers a unique perspective on the history of the Cold War, as well
as the quarter century that has passed since the Berlin Wall’s fall.
In the course of their book, Krepinevich and Watts introduce us to
Marshall’s groundbreaking work on organizational theory, which came to have a
profound influence on our understanding of the Soviet leadership’s decision-
making process. His influence was revealed in Roberta Wohlstetter’s Pearl
Harbor: Warning and Decision, and Graham Allison’s Essence of Decision.
Both of these works greatly changed the way in which we viewed the role of
intelligence, our ability to achieve early warning of an attack, and our capacity
for effective deterrence. Both authors cited Marshall as the inspiration for their
work.
In the late 1960s, during his second decade on the staff at the RAND
Corporation, Marshall began his effort to address the limitations of systems
analysis, while also looking for ways to improve the United States’ ability to
craft better strategies in what had become a long-term competition with the
Soviet Union. The result was his analytic methodology known as “net
assessment.” It only took a few years before an Office of Net Assessment was
established at the Pentagon, with Marshall as its head.
Thanks to its charter to think innovatively on matters of strategic importance,
during its forty-one years existence the Office of Net Assessment (which is to
say, Marshall himself) has consistently identified emerging challenges and
opportunities that required the attention of the Defense Department’s senior
leadership. For example, in the early 1970s the CIA estimated the burden Soviet
defense spending placed on the USSR’s economy to be 6 or 7 percent.
Marshall’s independent assessment of the Soviet defense burden led the CIA to
double its estimate. This led to a fundamental rethinking of our long-term
competitive position in the Cold War. It convinced a number of key senior
leaders that it would be difficult for the Soviets to sustain this level of effort over
the long term. Put another way, it suggested that time was on our side. A decade
later, Marshall was proved right.
Later, Marshall’s development of “competitive” or cost-imposing strategies
as a way of imposing disproportionate costs on America’s enemies helped offset
declining defense budgets toward the latter half of the 1980s. The concept was
simple, yet profound. Instead of constantly looking for ways to respond to Soviet
threats, Marshall argued, we should also look for opportunities to undermine the
value of their military investments. Beginning in the late 1970s, in looking at the
Soviet military’s heavy investment in submarines, Marshall suggested we exploit
our advantages in quieting technology and in undersea sensors to enable our
submarines to avoid detection while also enhancing our ability to detect Soviet
subs. In the wake of the Carter administration’s cancelling of the B-1 bomber,
Marshall strongly urged then defense secretary Harold Brown to “stay in the
bomber business” even though the Soviets had no effective defense against our
nuclear missile forces. Marshall pointed out that, while this was true, we needed
to look at the bigger picture. The USSR, he noted, had the world’s longest
border. As the Berlin Wall and the shooting down of a Korean airliner that
wandered into its airspace showed, its regime was determined to control access
to its territory. To this end they had deployed a massive air defense system,
primarily to defend against the U.S. bomber force. By maintaining that force,
Marshall noted, we would incentivize the Soviets to maintain and modernize
their advanced air defense system, which cost far more than our B-2 stealth
bomber program. By the mid-1980s defense secretary Caspar Weinberger was
making competitive strategies like these a centerpiece of his defense strategy.
As the Cold War approached its end, Marshall was already exploring the
strategic horizon a decade or two out. As we were negotiating the INF Treaty
with the Soviets in 1987, Marshall was informing senior Pentagon officials that
the biggest challenge the United States would face in the coming decades was
the rise of China to great power status, eclipsing the Soviet Union. The greatest
potential opportunity would come, he declared, from the onset of precision
warfare, what became known in the 1990s as the “Revolution in Military
Affairs.” He thereby identified the emerging revolution in precision-strike
warfare that has reshaped major components of our military.
More recently, during my tenure as defense secretary, Marshall’s Office of
Net Assessment brought to the fore the emerging challenge to U.S. power-
projection from rivals developing what is now commonly referred to as anti-
access/area-denial capabilities. He also demonstrated the need for our military to
adopt new concepts of operation, such as Air-Sea Battle, to meet the challenge.
Marshall’s story, as presented in these pages, shows that while so much
effort in the Pentagon is understandably consumed by the press of day-to-day
operations, there is an enduring need for what Marshall has created in this small
office, modestly funded, charged to engage in innovative thinking, and reporting
directly to the secretary of defense. Those of us who have served with Marshall
have been the fortunate beneficiaries of his wisdom and insight, which have
repeatedly paid enormous dividends during some of the most challenging
periods in our recent history. We are now entering another such period, one in
which the contributions of the Office of Net Assessment will be needed by
senior defense officials every bit as much as they have been in the past.
Robert M. Gates