U.S. Defense Strategy Was Largely Shaped By A Single Man For 40 Years

[MikeWB]

U.S. Defense Strategy Was Largely Shaped By A Single Man For 40 Years



The Pentagon is, by all accounts, a very large building, so it may come as a surprise to learn that all of its top-secret decisions about which foreign threats to monitor have essentially been made by a single guy since 1973. His name is Andrew Marshall and, while we'd love to quote him in this article, we can't. He doesn't speak to anyone publicly. Virtually every report he writes is more secretive than the recipe for Coca-Cola. But there's a reason everybody in Washington calls him "Yoda," and it's not because he's a tiny old man who speaks like a stroke victim. No, it's because Andrew Marshall might well be clairvoyant.


From 1973 until his retirement in January 2015, Marshall headed the Pentagon's Office Of Net Assessment, a tiny think tank responsible for studying information from around the globe to determine potential threats. This includes monitoring foreign trends, predicting the future moves of various nations (sometimes decades in advance), and recommending where in the world we should probably start dropping bombs. Marshall was so precise in his work that he relied on psychological studies of world leaders, essentially acting like an FBI profiler to try to figure out whether Vladimir Putin is going to nuke half the globe anytime soon.

Some of Marshall's notable predictions were the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of China as America's most powerful frenemy. He also guessed that drone strikes and computer espionage would become the new landscape of international conflict. He was so good at what he did that every single president, regardless of intelligence or political affiliation, retained Marshall as ONA director without question. When both Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush agree that you're the best person to run the country's defense center, odds are you're pretty good at your job.


Hell, even China thought Marshall was the tops. Chinese General Chen Zhou was once quoted as saying, "Our great hero was Andy Marshall in the Pentagon. We translated every word he wrote." Granted, most of those words were probably "we need to watch out for those damned Chinese," but the fact that they wanted to keep reading means there was something to his method that warranted study.
https://archive.is/J6c74