the future of war - a 1994 perspective

8/14/2019 The Future of War - a 1994 perspective

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Document 1 of 1Warning Shot: How Wars Are Fought Will Change Radically, Pentagon Planner Says --- AndrewMarshall Sees Risk Of the Military Slighting Cheap, High-Tech Arms --- Operating Behind the ScenesAuthor: By Thomas E. RicksPublication info: Wall Street Journal , Eastern edition [New York, N.Y] 15 July 1994: A1.ProQuest document linkAbstract Abstract): The driving force behind that debate is Andrew Marshall, a virtual unknown outside thePentagon but a legend within it. In a building preoccupied with short-range budget questions, Mr. Marshall, who

heads the Office of Net Assessment, keeps an eye on the long view. Probably the only current government

official who participated in the entire Cold War -- he began as a nuclear strategist in 1949 and has been kept on

in his current job by every president since Richard Nixon -- the 72-year-old thinker is struggling to save the U.S.

armed forces from becoming paralyzed by their own successes in the Cold War and Desert Storm.

Mr. Marshall is "truly an original thinker," Mr. Perry says. "No one would ever agree with everything Andy says,

but I always find him worth listening to."

Meanwhile, Mr. Marshall is warning Defense Secretary Perry, who contends the world is "midway" into a military

revolution, that an early lead is no guarantee of remaining on top. "Countries that have very good positions can

lose them very rapidly," Mr. Marshall says. "The British are an example."

Links: LSE Article FinderFull text: WASHINGTON -- A classified war game at the U.S. Naval War College recently pitted a militarilyresurgent China in the year 2020 against the U.S.

The key difference between the hypothetical adversaries was that China had a 21st-century military, bought off

the shelf, while the U.S. fielded an updated version of its Gulf War force. Satellite-guided antiship missiles

showered the U.S. fleet, which was naked to Chinese surveillance sensors high in space. As fast as the U.S.

could blind the small, inexpensive satellites, the Chinese launched more. American aircraft carriers were forced

to stay too far off China's coast to do much.

The game, which Navy officials won't discuss, captured the main argument now roiling the Pentagon. It isn'tabout Bosnia or Haiti or North Korea but about whether the way wars are fought will change fundamentally in

coming decades.

The driving force behind that debate is Andrew Marshall, a virtual unknown outside the Pentagon but a legend

within it. In a building preoccupied with short-range budget questions, Mr. Marshall, who heads the Office of Net

Assessment, keeps an eye on the long view. Probably the only current government official who participated in

the entire Cold War -- he began as a nuclear strategist in 1949 and has been kept on in his current job by every

president since Richard Nixon -- the 72-year-old thinker is struggling to save the U.S. armed forces from

becoming paralyzed by their own successes in the Cold War and Desert Storm.

His message is less a prescription than a warning -- to avoid the fate of other nations whose overconfident

militaries slid from triumph to obsolescence. And his thinking is commanding top-level attention in Washington

as the end of the Cold War and mind-boggling leaps in technology have spurred a willingness to re-examine

long-held military assumptions. His cause isn't being hurt by the ascension early this year of two old friends to

The U.S. was badly bloodied -- despite the best efforts of the 80

participating military officers, intelligence analysts and Defense

Department strategists.
http://search.proquest.com/docview/398410759?accountid=9630http://zw4gk5cr3l.search.serialssolutions.com/?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_enc=info:ofi/enc:UTF-8&rfr_id=info:sid/ProQ:abiglobal&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:journal&rft.genre=unknown&rft.jtitle=Wall%20Street%20Journal&rft.atitle=Warning%20Shot:%20How%20Wars%20Are%20Fought%20Will%20Change%20Radically,%20Pentagon%20Planner%20Says%20---%20Andrew%20Marshall%20Sees%20Risk%20Of%20the%20Military%20Slighting%20Cheap,%20High-Tech%20Arms%20---%20Operating%20Behind%20the%20Scenes&rft.au=By%20Thomas%20E.%20Ricks&rft.aulast=By%20Thomas%20E.%20Ricks&rft.aufirst=&rft.date=1994-07-15&rft.volume=&rft.issue=&rft.spage=A.1&rft.isbn=&rft.btitle=&rft.title=Wall%20Street%20Journal&rft.issn=00999660http://zw4gk5cr3l.search.serialssolutions.com/?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_enc=info:ofi/enc:UTF-8&rfr_id=info:sid/ProQ:abiglobal&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:journal&rft.genre=unknown&rft.jtitle=Wall%20Street%20Journal&rft.atitle=Warning%20Shot:%20How%20Wars%20Are%20Fought%20Will%20Change%20Radically,%20Pentagon%20Planner%20Says%20---%20Andrew%20Marshall%20Sees%20Risk%20Of%20the%20Military%20Slighting%20Cheap,%20High-Tech%20Arms%20---%20Operating%20Behind%20the%20Scenes&rft.au=By%20Thomas%20E.%20Ricks&rft.aulast=By%20Thomas%20E.%20Ricks&rft.aufirst=&rft.date=1994-07-15&rft.volume=&rft.issue=&rft.spage=A.1&rft.isbn=&rft.btitle=&rft.title=Wall%20Street%20Journal&rft.issn=00999660http://search.proquest.com/docview/398410759?accountid=9630


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key positions -- of William Perry as defense secretary and of Adm. William Owens as vice chairman of the Joint

Chiefs of Staff.

Mr. Marshall is "truly an original thinker," Mr. Perry says. "No one would ever agree with everything Andy says,

but I always find him worth listening to."

According to Mr. Marshall, the Information Age will spark a "military revolution," just as artillery did in the 15th

century and Industrial Age machinery did over the past 150 years. The next 30 years, he suggests, may see the

beginning of the end of the industrial era of attrition warfare. Among his other expectations:

-- Mass armies may be replaced by smaller, more professional forces packing more firepower and fighting from

a distance rather than closing with and destroying the enemy. The main mission of forward ground forces may

shift from laying direct fire on the enemy toward spotting targets for "standoff" weapons and assessing the

damage they do.

-- The ascension of such standoff weaponry may blur distinctions among air, land and sea warfare. For

example, the best way to halt an Iraqi tank attack may be not with U.S. tanks but with a submarine launching

from 100 miles away "brilliant" missiles that zero in on the sound of Russian-built tank engines.

-- On a battlefield where data move around like e-mail and long-range "smart" weapons home in on targets with

extraordinary accuracy, military mainstays such as tanks could become anachronistic deathtraps.

-- Aircraft carriers also could lose their central role. Because of the proliferation of cruise missiles, ships may be

smaller and stealthier, yet able to strike farther with ballistic missiles or drone delivery systems. Manned aircraft

in the Navy and the Air Force may increasingly be supplanted by such pilotless drones.

-- The new forces probably would require less logistical support -- fewer transport ships and planes -- but far

more targeting intelligence. Such information no longer would trickle through a military bureaucracy but would

be beamed from "sensor to shooter" -- directly from a satellite to a tiny screen inside a pilot's headset or into the

warhead of a missile flung from 1,000 miles away.

-- Military formations may become less hierarchical, with middle-management staff eliminated and front-line

commanders plucking intelligence from the U.S. or from space. Soldiers may use a continually updatedelectronic display of the whereabouts of friend and foe.

What Mr. Marshall envisions is a far cry from Desert Storm, which he considers a late Industrial Age conflict with

only hints of the high-tech future -- that is, using new equipment in old ways. Gen. Walter Boomer, the just-

retired commander of the Marines in the Gulf War, agrees, saying, "General Patton could have walked into my

command post and he would have understood everything."

Meanwhile, Mr. Marshall is warning Defense Secretary Perry, who contends the world is "midway" into a military

revolution, that an early lead is no guarantee of remaining on top. "Countries that have very good positions can

lose them very rapidly," Mr. Marshall says. "The British are an example."

Rather than imitate Britain's military decline after its victory in World War I, Mr. Marshall contends, the U.S.military should look to Germany in 1935, when the lean Wehrmacht, restricted in size by the Treaty of

Versailles, combined the tank, radio, machine gun and airplane to create the blitzkrieg. The upshot: The

Germans overwhelmed the British and French in 1940 despite fielding 1,000 fewer tanks.

One way to grasp what warfare could be like in 30 years is to look at Mr. Marshall's methods of spreading his

ideas. Operating from a windowless, submarine-like office in the Pentagon's lowly A ring, he commands a staff

of only 13. And, avoiding direct confrontation with the huge U.S. military establishment, he employs stealth,

distance and precision.

"It's intellectual warfare within the system, and he's been brilliant at that," says Daniel Goure, a former Pentagon

strategist. The low-profile Mr. Marshall battles by proxy, recruiting allies to take the fight public. Within the

Pentagon, says Andrew Krepinevich, a former aide, "Everybody knows who he is, but very few people actually

know him."

Mr. Marshall also practices a kind of "information dominance," knowing more about more than other players. On


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returning to the Pentagon after a tour at sea, Adm. Owens says, "I always stopped by to see what Andy is

thinking. In a transitory environment, he provides continuity."

And Mr. Marshall attacks simultaneously on many fronts. He relies heavily on a cabal of former aides dubbed

"St. Andrew's Prep" and an informal network extending from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the Central Intelligence

Agency to Harvard and across the defense industry.

At a recent conference on the military revolution at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., he sat in the audience

for two days without uttering a word. "We prefer to do things internally," he explains. When he does speak, it is

in private, with his conversation punctuated by long pauses. Associates used to fantasize that he and another

famously taciturn Pentagon official, Fred Ikle, could wordlessly devise entire military strategies through arched

eyebrows and flexed fingers.

Mr. Marshall is a prolific writer whose opus is influential but almost entirely classified. As with the Wizard of Oz,

his aura is enhanced by the fact that he operates behind a curtain. Most of his "assessments" -- projects

sometimes spanning years of meticulous research often based on super-secret intelligence -- are allowed out of

his office only one copy at a time.

For example, he worked on the idea of the military revolution for several years before unveiling it. A lot of top

officers, especially those stationed in the field, are still only vaguely aware of it. So his adversaries frequently

don't even know they are under attack. By the time they realize it, the battle may be over.

Mr. Marshall employs such tactics because his revolution calls into question some of the services' crown jewels

and some of the defense industry's biggest programs: the Navy's aircraft carriers, the Army's tanks, the Air

Force's fighters and bombers. If those platforms are indeed "sunset systems," as Mr. Marshall believes, the

armed services and defense contractors alike face a big shake-up.

Over the years, Mr. Marshall's studies amount to a secret history of much of the Cold War. In the mid-1970s, in

response to startling intelligence about Soviet war plans to sabotage European ports and cut U.S. supply lines

across the Atlantic, Mr. Marshall and James Roche, a former aide and now chief strategist for Northrop

Grumman Corp., wrote a paper laying the foundation for the Navy's plan to bottle up the Soviet navy in theArctic Sea. "Jim and I had an impact," Mr. Marshall concedes.

A few years later, Mr. Marshall's office produced a study that helped Defense Secretary Harold Brown dissuade

President Carter from withdrawing U.S. troops from South Korea. It predicted that South Korea, Japan and

Taiwan would respond to a U.S. pullout by acquiring nuclear weapons. The Marshall paper "played a significant

role," Mr. Brown recalls.

Well ahead of most Sovietologists, Mr. Marshall noticed weaknesses of Soviet society. Trained as an

economist, he began in the late 1960s to believe that the CIA was seriously underestimating the burden that

Soviet defense spending was imposing. That contention sparked a fight he pursued against the agency for 20

years. In 1977, when many Sovietologists were still predicting that the Soviet Union would become more like theU.S., he focused on the environmental and demographic crises that were undermining the Soviet system. A few

years later, he commissioned a formal project on "The Vulnerabilities of the Soviet Empire."

Fearing that a weakening Soviet leadership might be tempted into a desperate pre-emptive nuclear strike

against the U.S., Mr. Marshall recommended in the early 1980s a "doomsday project" to update Eisenhower-era

defenses. The goal was to convince the Soviets that a nuclear attack on the U.S. leadership wasn't an option.

The resulting $9 billion project led to construction of new secret bunkers for U.S. leaders and provided them

with mobile vans with nuclear-hardened communications systems.

In 1986, Mr. Marshall's analysis of President Mikhail Gorbachev's view of the war in Afghanistan helped

overcome the opposition of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to shipping Stinger antiaircraft missiles to the Afghan

resistance. The chiefs worried that the downing of Soviet pilots by U.S. weaponry would provoke a Soviet

offensive against Pakistan. But Mr. Marshall argued, says one participant in the discussions, that sending

Stingers would convey a message to Mr. Gorbachev that "this wasn't his war yet, and that his military was


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bungling it and couldn't win it."

Mr. Marshall again weighed in on Korea in 1991, with a still-secret study warning that the North Koreans could

sweep through South Korean defenses and win a war within 10 days, before the U.S. could do much. Always

careful to pick his timing, Mr. Marshall never showed the alarming report to Defense Secretary Dick Cheney.

Earlier this year, the White House requested a copy. "As far as I'm concerned, it's only rumor that Clinton read it

recently," Mr. Marshall demurs.

But Mr. Marshall's most significant contribution may well be his work on wars of the next century. He first began

noting Soviet worries in the mid-1970s that U.S. technological advances would revolutionize warfare. He began

his own project in 1989, at quarterly meetings of "St. Andrew's Prep." Mr. Marshall laid before his former

assistants two questions: With the waning of the Cold War, would a multipolar world produce new military

competitions? And could one of those powers -- probably China, maybe Japan or India, or even Russia --

leapfrog the U.S. by acquiring 21st-century technology?

In 1991, Mr. Marshall circulated a draft of a study of the emerging military revolution written by Mr. Krepinevich,

then an Army lieutenant colonel, to his "college of cardinals," an informal group that included Mr. Perry and

Adm. Owens. A year later, Mr. Marshall let the cat out of the bag; he distributed a report panning the U.S.

inventory of tanks, aircraft and ships as a "millstone" that could drain resources and thus impede innovation.

"The Air Force was apopleptic," recalls Mr. Krepinevich, now retired from the Army. Basically, the report called

for halting the acquisition of such "sunset systems" and slashing the defense budget. Mr. Marshall lost that

round.

A year later, a "Bottom-Up Review" by Defense Secretary Les Aspin on how to reshape the military ignored the

questions Mr. Marshall was raising. Then in February, Mr. Perry, whose car once sported the license plate "HI

TECH," became defense secretary. A month later, Adm. Owens became vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

Suddenly, the military began to pay attention to Mr. Marshall's ideas.

Today, five task forces and dozens of attendant study groups are beavering away at the Pentagon, exploring

the implications of a military revolution. "With the task forces, and in a lot of other ways, Andy is spreading theidea," says Eliot Cohen, an old friend who teaches strategy at Johns Hopkins University. "That's the way Andy

always works; he seeks as many venues as possible. And he doesn't care about getting the credit."

A combined report to the defense secretary is due at summer's end, and there is talk in the Pentagon that

billions of dollars may be allocated in line with its recommendations. Already, the Army has shifted its budget

over the past year from trying to improve current infantry weapons to trying to develop new ones. Indeed,

equipment purchases have generally been put on hold as the military pauses to consider the new world: In

fiscal 1995, the Army will buy no tanks, the Air Force no fighters, and the Navy only six ships.

"Periods of great innovation almost always come in resource-poor periods," observes Paul Kaminski, an old

friend of Mr. Marshall's who is expected to become the Defense Department's next acquisition chief. The postnow is vacant.

But not everyone is persuaded. Earl Rubright, the science adviser to the U.S. Central Command, which

oversees operations in the Mideast, visited the Pentagon in May to tell a group of senior Navy officers how six

destroyers and cruisers could fire enough missiles to destroy a division of 750 enemy tanks and still have

enough left to ward off an enemy aircraft or missile response.

"What about the carriers?" asked one admiral, worried about the role of the Navy's favorite ships.

"There are no carriers" in the scenario, Mr. Rubright responded. An appalled silence followed, he says.

One way the military brass might thwart Mr. Marshall's ideas is by adopting the rhetoric but resisting the

content. "The revolution has begun," proclaims a new video produced by the Army's Training and Doctrine

Command. The Army, says Brig. Gen. Edward Anderson of the Combined Arms Command at Fort

Leavenworth, is moving from being "people organized around weapons systems" to "people organized around

information." But others, such as Mr. Goure, the former Pentagon strategist, worry that the Army is simply


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"chrome-plating" its tank force.

Nonetheless, the services are studying Information Age warfare and conducting innovative war games. In a

recent Army exercise in California, battlefield commanders pulled information directly from satellites. The Navy

and Army are studying "deep-strike" tactics that now are the province of the Air Force. The Navy is

contemplating building stealthy "arsenal ships" specifically designed to strike deep inland with ballistic missiles

that reach 120 miles in a few minutes. The Army is beginning to look at marrying space surveillance systems,

the digitized battlefield, instant communications and long-range precision-strike ability.

"Together," says Bob Gaskin, another former Marshall aide, "they give the Army the ability to target and strike

enemy concentrations at great distance -- and they can do it before the Air Force has the time to tell the pilot to

suit up."

The Navy, especially, is thinking about cheaper logistics and support functions. Adm. Owens is pushing for a

"floating island" that could be built by linking up a handful of oil platforms and could receive cargo aircraft as

large as the C-130.

"It wouldn't be a Navy carrier," he says. "The Navy doesn't like it too much because it doesn't have a pointy

bow."

The Navy also is looking at slashing its logistical requirements by having a tender deployed to, say, the Persian

Gulf and using preprogrammed instructions to produce machine-tooled parts aboard ship rather than buying

them in the U.S. and shipping them around the world.

The main reason for reducing the logistics base is the expectation that future Saddam Husseins won't be so

stupid as to allow the U.S. six months to build up huge mountains of supplies. And any aggressors will almost

certainly have more accurate missiles than Saddam's Scuds. In the future, "we can't create large, juicy targets,"

Mr. Marshall warns.

Despite such stirrings of change in the military, Mr. Marshall and his allies still aren't sure that the U.S. can stay

on top in the coming era. "What's different from the '20s and '30s is that there isn't quite this leap of vision yet,"

he worries.Credit: Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

Publication title: Wall Street Journal, Eastern editionPages:A1Number of pages: 0Publication year: 1994Publication date: Jul 15, 1994Year: 1994Publisher: Dow Jones & Company IncPlace of publication: New York, N.Y.Country of publication: United StatesPublication subject: Business And Economics--Banking And FinanceISSN: 00999660Source type: NewspapersLanguage of publication: EnglishDocument type: NEWSPAPER


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ProQuest document ID: 398410759Document URL: http://search.proquest.com/docview/398410759?accountid=9630Copyright: Copyright Dow Jones & Company Inc Jul 15, 1994Last updated: 2010-06-26Database: ProQuest Business Collection_______________________________________________________________

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the future of war - a 1994 perspective

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