THE LAST WARRIOR

A well-organized biography of Andrew Marshall (b. 1921), the architect of the Defense Department’s “net assessment” strategy since the early days of the Cold War.

Two leading members of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, Krepinevich (7 Deadly Scenarios: A Military Futurist Explores War in the 21st Century, 2009, etc.) and Watts have both served in Marshall’s Office of Net Assessment at the Pentagon during the last few decades. Marshall took the ONA helm in 1973. During the Cold War, the task of the agency was to create careful comparisons of U.S.-Soviet weapons systems and costs so that the U.S. could implement a workable framework aimed at gaining advantage. Following the end of the Cold War, the ONA has shifted its focus to China and elsewhere. Since Marshall’s first 1972 memo, “The Nature and Scope of Net Assessments”—issued when he had only recently left RAND after 20-plus years at the request of then–National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger—Marshall’s assessments have remained classified, yet the framework he set out has stood the test of time. Part of the puzzling information Marshall then signaled was the huge discrepancy between what the U.S. spent on weaponry versus what the Soviets did. At the time, the Pentagon regularly overestimated the size of the Soviet economy and underestimated the amount of military spending from that economy; Marshall’s assessments hinted at the severe structural problems caused by the Soviet defense burden. Nonetheless, the hysterical competition with the Soviets prompted President Ronald Reagan to ramp up military spending to unprecedented levels. In clear prose (despite the plethora of acronyms, eased by the glossary at the end), the authors trace the career of this brilliant strategic thinker, from his working-class Detroit upbringing to becoming a largely self-taught statistician to working with the big-name government wonks over numerous administrations.

An elucidating intellectual history of an influential strategic sage that few outsiders have ever heard of.