There are a handful of short articles out there now, though most do not go into the level of how the New York Times covered the story last week. The short version is that the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA), which has existed for more than half a century, is being shut down under the orders of the new SecDef Pete Hegseth.
The Office of Net Assessment Gets the Axe: Why It Matters
On the one hand, closing down this office looks like another chapter in the “big broom” that is being taken to the entirety of the United States Government by the new Trump (47) Administration. However, for those who do not know the history of the Office of Net Assessment and/or did not know Andrew Marshall, the office’s founder and long-time director, this decision is a tremendous loss for the national security community. It is not just another bunch of mediocre bureaucrats being shown the door.
Marshall ran the office from its founding in 1973 until his retirement in 2015 at age 93. During that time, he became, as more than one profile of him over the years described, “the most influential policy maker you never heard of.”
His policy analysis covered more areas and disciplines than one can imagine, but it was all centered on one objective: determining what future wars would look like and how the US should fight and win them.
However, Washington, D.C., is a strange place in many ways. Former SecDef Dr. Robert Gates once described it as “the city where everyone mutinies, but no one deserts.” Some say they despise the manner in which the town operates, but those same people all want to be close to the centers of power and the budgets that go with them. Marshall was more than successful at both—securing budgets for security studies and defense analyses of up to US $10 million per year.
Attempts At Removal
Someone who stays on top in the budget wars for as long as Marshall did would eventually become a target. Marshall was a target of those coveting such a conglomeration of dollar signs and the notoriety that goes with such a long tenure within the national security community. Most people in that community play the zero-sum game, so many looked upon the millions Marshall’s office received every year as rightfully theirs.
Unsurprisingly, over the years, there were numerous attempts to remove Andy Marshall, sideline him bureaucratically, marginalize him, or—as he became older—force him to retire. One of the most vigorous—and also one of the last—efforts to do so came in the second term of the Obama Administration, which illustrates just how much egos are at play today to the detriment of our national security interests.
One of the prerequisites for being successful in the national security business in Washington, as I always like to say, is to make sure you have a degree in Child Psychology. It is about the only way to avoid the pitfalls of those who will try to push you in front of a bureaucratic train or have you suffer some other calamity. (Not surprisingly, one of the few books Marshall ever wrote was one he co-authored in 2012 entitled “Psychosis and Civilization: Two Studies in the Frequency of Mental Disease.”)
In the eyes of Obama, Marshall was guilty of two unforgivable sins. One was that he was far more competent and ingenious on defense policy issues than the 44th president could ever hope to be, and everyone knew it. In 2012, the journal Foreign Policy named Marshall one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers “for thinking way, way outside the Pentagon box.”
The other was that for years, Marshall had been one of the few voices—voices now heard everywhere today—that the most serious threat to America’s future would be the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
The former fact made Obama less than the smartest person in the room—a situation the former President could not tolerate given his immeasurable arrogance. (Even at the beginning of his first term, commentators wrote that he was “a president for whom the word ‘hubris’ might have been invented.”)
President Barack Obama convenes a National Security Council meeting in the Situation Room of the White House, July 28, 2014. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza).
However, Marshall’s support of a stronger line against Beijing also endangered President Obama’s pet project of a nuclear deal with Iran, otherwise known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action (JCPOA). Obama was counting on Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping to convince the Iranians to sign this agreement.
In the process, many important US principles and national security interests were binned for the sake of this one accord. Among other Congressional initiatives, the White House blocked were that no arms were sent to Ukraine after the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea, and no severe punishments were leveled against the PRC in retaliation for cyberattacks that stole reams of US classified data and intellectual property.
What Happened to Net Assessment
When Marshall finally retired at age 93, he left behind a legacy and a history of work to be passed to a new generation of defense policymakers. It is believed one reason Hegseth has now ordered the Office of Net Assessment to be shuttered is that there are those who charge the office with having “lost its way in the past decade or more.”
Capt. James Fanell (USN ret’d) was once the head intelligence officer and specialist on the Chinese military for the Pacific Fleet Command in Hawaii. He was another of those whose message about China being the future threat to the US was not welcome in the Obama White House, which forced him to retire in 2014—just one year before Andy Marshall.
Fanell, who now works with several European think tanks, including the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, spoke with me from Switzerland and pointed out the “fine work that Andy and his people did. They created the system of national security priorities that won us the Cold War.
“More importantly, they were responsible for making sure that the US was going to be ready for any potential contingency dreamed up from our enemies – to make sure we were not blindsided,” he continued. “What the people who encouraged Hegseth to take this decision now are saying is that the core concepts on which Net Assessment was based were being somewhat upended. We were getting away from the ‘don’t be blindsided’ as the top priority.”
A Major Mistake
However, just unceremoniously closing down the Office of Net Assessment is not the answer because our enemies are still out there, as he and others have said.
It is not by coincidence that every senior foreign defense ministry official I ever met was either trying to determine how they could duplicate the Net Assessment function inside of their own national security community or how to inculcate the disciplines Marshall devised over the years into their threat assessment process. Senior intelligence officials as far away as Australia relished the chance to meet with Marshall and have him comment on what he saw that they were doing right—as well as what they were doing wrong.
More significantly, national security thinkers in the one nation that is the center of today’s military strategists—namely, the PRC—followed Marshall’s writings and position papers most of all. In an interview in 2012, Major General Chen Zhou from the Academy of Military Science, the principal author of four Chinese defense white papers, stated that Marshall was pivotal in changing Chinese defense policy development in the 1990s and 2000s.
DF-15B missile from China
“An office created by a man with this kind of influence on the thinking of our greatest adversary – you would think that someone in the Pentagon would find a way to maintain it in one form or another,” said a senior retired US military officer who spoke to 19FortyFive.
Even in the US, there have been calls to keep this activity alive and even expand it into other disciplines. One such suggestion was to develop a “parallel universe” of ONA dedicated to studying how the US can maintain its edge in the rapidly advancing technological innovation revolution.
There have been some indications that DoD will now re-formulate ONA in some other form or as part of some other function within the Pentagon. One hopes that they do so—and that it retains the concept of “don’t be blindsided” as the organization’s overriding objective.
About the Author: Reuben F. Johnson
Reuben F. Johnson is a survivor of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and is now an Expert on Foreign Military Affairs with the Fundacja im. Kazimierza Pułaskiego in Warsaw. He has been a consultant to the Pentagon, several NATO governments and the Australian government in the fields of defense technology and weapon systems design. Over the past 30 years he has resided in and reported from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Brazil, the People’s Republic of China and Australia.
