The Last Warrior Read online

  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 (800) 810-4145, 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

  1A SELF-EDUCATED MAN, 1921–1949

  2EARLY RAND YEARS, 1949–1960

  3THE QUEST FOR BETTER ANALYTIC METHODS, 1961–1969

  4THE BIRTH OF NET ASSESSMENT, 1969–1973

  5MOVING TO THE PENTAGON, 1973–1975

  6THE MATURATION OF NET ASSESSMENT, 1976–1980

  7COLD WAR END GAME, 1981–1991

  8THE MILITARY REVOLUTION, 1991–2000

  9THE PIVOT TO THE ASIA-PACIFIC REGION, 2001–2014

  CONCLUSION

  Glossary of Acronyms

  Notes

  Index

  Photos between pages 138 and 139

  FIGURES

  FIGURE4.1A.US–USSR Strategic-Nuclear Force Ratios.

  FIGURE4.1B.US and USSR Military Spending.

  FIGURE6.1Trends in the US-Soviet Strategic-Nuclear Balance 1966–1976.

  FIGURE6.2United States versus Soviet Bomber Defenses.

  FIGURE6.3NATO/Warsaw Pact Central Region Ground Forces and Ratios, 1978.

  FIGURE6.4WUV Calculation for a Notional US Combat Division.

  FIGURE6.5NATO/Warsaw Pact Central Region WUV Trends.

  FIGURE6.6The German Campaign in the West, May–June 1940.

  FIGURE6.7Allied/German Theater “Bean Count” and WUV Comparisons, May 10, 1940.

  FIGURE6.8By-Sector Division and WUV Comparisons, May 10, 1940.

  FOREWORD

  This 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 exp
loring 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

  AUTHORS’ NOTE

  Our fundamental aim in writing this book was not to produce a biography of Andrew Marshall, but rather his intellectual history. We hoped to provide a window into how Marshall came to think about and assess long-term military competitions involving the United States. While his development of net assessment initially focused on the Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, the conceptual framework he developed in the early 1970s has also proved to be a useful way of thinking about areas as diverse as the revolution in warfare that arrived with the advent of precision-guided munitions and battle networks, the rise of China, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. In all these cases, Marshall’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA) sought to provide the Secretary of Defense and other senior US national security decision makers with early warning of emerging strategic problems, as well as opportunities to pursue strategic advantages over the nation’s competitors.

  We have endeavored to be as unbiased and objective as we could in describing Marshall’s long intellectual journey from Detroit during the Great Depression and the Second World War to over four decades as the Pentagon’s director of net assessment. Yet neither of us can claim to be disinterested observers. We both have a long history with Marshall. Watts served on his Office of Net Assessment (ONA) staff during 1978–1981 and 1985–1996, and Krepinevich during 1989–1993. Both of us retired from active military service when we left Marshall’s staff and went on to have long careers in the security studies field. Yet neither of us fully left Marshall’s orbit. Over the years we have both participated in a range of activities sponsored by Marshall covering a multitude of issues. As employees of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, which provides consulting support to ONA, both of us have been involved in diverse projects funded by that office. Once a member of Marshall’s coterie of trusted former net assessors and outside defense experts—“St. Andrew’s Prep”—always a member.

  As with all authors, our ability to share our story with the reader is limited by our analytic and literary shortcomings. In this instance we were also constrained by the fact that many of the products of Marshall’s intellectual efforts remain classified. Thus Marshall’s full intellectual history will not likely be known for decades to come, until the time when these documents have been declassified. That being said, we believe that even with these limitations, Marshall’s story is one worth the telling. We leave it to the reader to judge how well we have succeeded.

  This book could not have been written without considerable help from a great many people. Principal among them is Marshall himself, who kindly submitted to a series of interviews by the authors, and who promptly and graciously responded to specific questions that emerged when the manuscript was in its final stages. A debt of thanks is also owed to Kurt Guthe, who some twenty years ago conducted a series of taped interviews with Marshall about his life and the practice of net assessment. These interviews provided an invaluable window into Marshall’s personal life experiences as well as his intellectual development over seventy years. The interviews themselves were sponsored through the generosity of the Smith Richardson Foundation, with the help of Devon Cross and Marin Strmecki. Our appreciation also extends to the many members of St. Andrew’s Prep who kindly shared their experiences of being mentored by Marshall.

  Our gratitude extends to our literary agent, Eric Lupfer, who was instrumental in helping us develop the major themes that form the foundation of this book, as well as guiding us through the publication process. Our editors, Alex Littlefield and Tim Bartlett, provided a helpful mix of encouragement and prodding, along with a keen editorial eye for how we might enhance the value of our story. We were also ably supported by Elizabeth Dana, editorial assistant, and Rachael King, our project editor. Their copyediting and fact-checking substantially improved the manuscript. Of course, any remaining errors of fact or grammar are our responsibility, and ours alone.

  Since October 1973, when Marshall assumed the directorship of the Office of Net Assessment, over 90 military officers and civilian analysis have served on Marshall’s staff. Outside ONA an even larger number of analysts and scholars in the intelligence community, academia, the military services, and various think tanks, have also contributed directly and indirectly to the development and practice of net assessment. In writing this book we realized early on that due to limits on its length it would necessarily constrain who as well as what we could include.

  A brief word is in order about our title choice. As the reader will discern, Marshall was never a warrior in the military sense, although he was a “soldier” in America’s “Arsenal of Democracy,” and a “Cold Warrior” as well. But he is very close to being the last of Tom Brokaw’s “greatest generation”: men and women who grew up during the Great Depression and experienced the Second World War when they were still young, and who met the challenge of the “long, twilight struggle” with the Soviet Union. A defining characteristic of this generation, in our view, is its determination to meet these challenges, not because they are easy but, as President Kennedy, declared, “because they are hard.” As Marshall is likely the last of his generation to serve in a senior government position, our title, The Last Warrior, seems appropriate.

  Lastly, the greatest sacrifices made in writing this book were not borne by the authors, who accomplished most of their writing and editing on weekends and during evenings, but by their wives. They have shown remarkable understanding as the two of us engaged in what has been first and foremost a labor of love. To our far better halves, Julia Krepinevich and Hope Watts, we owe a large measure of gratitude, along with our love.

  INTRODUCTION

  On the third floor of the innermost, or “A” ring, of the Pentagon, near where the ninth and tenth corridors come together, sits the sole entrance to the Office of Net Assessment. Labeled “3A932,” the nondescript door faces the Pentagon’s central courtyard. During the Cold War the courtyard was nicknamed “ground zero,” because it was assumed that Soviet nuclear missiles were aimed at the snack bar at its center.

  The A ring is one of the five concentric rings of offices in the five-storied, five-sided building. Most senior defense officials’ offices, including that of the secretary of defense, are situated on the structure’s outermost, or E ring, which is considered prime Pentagon real estate. But despite the separatio
n between the A and E rings, it takes only a few minutes to walk from the defense secretary’s E-ring suite down the ninth corridor to 3A932. The proximity is important, for 3A932 houses the defense secretary’s own private think tank.

  To enter 3A932 visitors must announce their presence by pressing a button next to the office’s entry door. Following a buzzing sound indicating that the locks have been disengaged, the heavy door can be opened and the office entered. This security is necessary, even inside the Pentagon, as the office stores highly classified material. In Pentagon parlance, it is a sensitive compartmented information facility—or “SCIF” (pronounced “skiff”).

  Once inside, any visitor expecting a scene out of a Hollywood movie will be disappointed. There are no electronic displays. People are not scurrying about. Rather, to the left are cramped cubicles for junior staff, along with a few small offices. To the far right sits a conference room. The furnishings are what one might find at a discount warehouse.

  Located slightly to the right of the entrance is a larger office, roughly 20 by 30 feet, assigned to the director. Inside is a fully stocked bank of bookshelves to the right, and a rectangular conference table off to the left large enough to seat four or five people comfortably but equipped with only a few chairs. The reason is that the table and most of the other horizontal surfaces in the office serve a different purpose. They are stacked high with scholarly papers and books on subjects as diverse as anthropology, nuclear weapons, demographics, and cognitive science, many of them sent by their authors in the hope the director of net assessment will read and perhaps even comment on them.

  There is a desk in the director’s office; like the conference table, it sags under the weight of books and papers. Nearby are two worn leather armchairs. One accommodates short stacks of papers on its arms, with the seat hosting a slightly larger pile. On the floor in front of this chair, where a person sitting in it might place his or her feet, rests yet another stack of books and papers.