A Sense of the Enemy

by Shore, Zachary

  Superior force, by standard measures, did not win. The number that truly counted was the one that revealed a tank’s likely longevity. Counting tanks before the war was a necessary but insufficient exercise. It didn’t tell observers what they needed to know in order to assess the net strength of each side in the conflict. “What impressed me about the ’73 War,” Marshall explains, “was how asymmetric it was. Israel was not only much better prepared to recover and repair its tanks, it also dominated the battlefield, making recovery possible.”

  When Marshall and his analysts next looked at the Soviet Union’s capacity for repairs, they found that the United States had a distinct and meaningful advantage. The bulk of the Soviet forces were comprised of conscripts, young men compelled to serve for two years in the army or three in the navy. Most were poorly trained and lacking technical know-how. American soldiers, conversely, were given better, longer, and more specialized training. Each unit working on ships or aircraft contained men able to perform some repairs when necessary. The Soviet military didn’t work that way. Most of the time, when an engine or other critical part of an aircraft, tank, or ship malfunctioned, the Soviets had to send that part back to a depot or factory for repair. The Soviet Air Force, for example, purchased six engines for each engine position on its aircraft. The United States bought only one and a quarter—a dramatic cost-saving measure when multiplied by thousands of planes. Those costs, of course, counted not just in rubles but in time. The Soviet delays in servicing aircraft parts meant that American planes would be available more of the time when needed most.

  Likewise, American ships had on-board crews that could make repairs on the spot, but Soviet naval crews did not possess the same level of maintenance training. The longer their ships were at sea, the less effectively they would function. The numbers of ships in each side’s fleet was not important. Marshall recognized that less obvious asymmetries mattered far more. The simple and seemingly insignificant difference in repair capabilities meant that Soviet forces would come under extreme pressure during a protracted conflict.

  Ensuring that America could continue to strike and engage the Soviets in a prolonged military conflict meant that the United States would ultimately have the advantage. It was this type of thinking that contributed to America’s Cold War strategy. In Marshall’s case, the insight derived not from sophisticated algorithms but from unorthodox thinking about how best to compare competing military forces.

  The Office of Net Assessment (ONA) director, Andrew Marshall, once a mathematical whiz kid, has one overriding mission: to assess the balance between competing militaries. At age ninety-two (that is not a typographical error), Marshall is not merely sharp but deeply engaged in running ONA’s affairs. The office churns out countless reports analyzing military and strategic issues ranging across the globe, examining everything from advances in neuro-pharmacology to Swedish innovations in submarine design to the future of microrobot warriors, always with an eye to their impact on American national security. The fact that Marshall has remained ONA’s sole director since its inception, serving eight Presidents and more than a dozen secretaries of defense over the past forty years, suggests that he either is exceedingly astute at political survival, provides a product of substantial value, or both.6

  During the Cold War, Marshall and ONA paid careful attention to the numbers and patterns that mattered most—the ones that constrained enemy behavior. Many credit Marshall with contributing to the policy of spending the Soviet Union into bankruptcy. He allegedly encouraged keeping long-range bombers in service while developing a new generation, both of which forced the Soviets to invest in costly air defense systems, though Marshall would not confirm this. Perhaps it was this seeming inscrutability, maybe his political longevity, or simply his age that earned him the affectionate nickname “Yoda.”

  Trained as an econometrician (essentially, an economic quant), Marshall later switched fields to mathematical statistics because he objected to the then-dominant view in economics of rational decision-making. The notion that Homo economicus always sought and was informed enough to maximize benefits did not accord with Marshall’s view of human behavior. It has taken economics decades to come around, grudgingly, to a more flexible view embodied in the emerging subfield of behavioral economics.

  Early in his career, Marshall himself performed some number crunching to useful effect. After a brief teaching stint at the University of Chicago, Marshall married his facility with numbers to a study of national security. In 1949, he joined a project at RAND to study mental illness. Many at the time believed that modern societies were prone to higher rates of psychosis. During World War II, it appeared that a large number of soldiers were rejected from service for psychological reasons—a larger proportion than in World War I. If this reflected a general trend, then a still larger proportion would be rejected for service if the United States had to mobilize again. The implications were troubling. Analyzing a century’s worth of data, Herbert Goldhamer with Marshall’s assistance concluded that no significant rise in serious mental illness in the United States had occurred.7

  The mental illness study was precisely the kind of nontraditional investigation at which RAND excelled. Its scholars moved beyond missile counting to explore the many other societal dimensions on which wars were fought and won. They asked the questions that others never dared. RAND in those days differed from the typical defense establishment think tanks. Although it focused predominantly on the Soviet Union and strategic issues surrounding nuclear war, it cultivated a free-flowing intellectual environment. The average age of its analysts was twenty-seven. These were energetic, inquisitive men, tackling the big questions of strategy in a nuclear age. And at that moment in history, the field was wide open. Too many military men and policy pundits were obsessed with missile counting—constantly weighing the balance of American and NATO forces against those of the Warsaw Pact states. RAND was different. It brought together many of the top young intellects working on strategy, and it offered them considerable latitude to explore fresh avenues of inquiry. It was within this intellectual incubator that Marshall developed some of the methods he would later apply to analyzing the Soviet military throughout the Cold War.

  Part of ONA’s mission is to recognize and gauge the impact of long-term trends. Marshall’s background at RAND clearly contributed to this type of focus. In the 1950s, one of Marshall’s RAND colleagues, Charlie Hitch, made a curious but seemingly innocuous observation. Hitch, a Harvard-trained Rhodes scholar who worked for the Office of Strategic Services during the Second World War, had been teaching at Oxford before RAND lured him away to its headquarters in Santa Monica. Studying 200 years of data, Hitch saw that America’s economy had grown at a rate of roughly 1 percent more than Britain’s annually. In any single year, or even within a span of a decade or more, the impact of this variation in growth rates would not be significant. But Hitch’s point was that over a century or longer, the impact would be profound. Financial dominance would mean military dominance. It would result in the supplanting of Britain by America as a global superpower. It was not a foregone certainty that America would overtake Britain as it did. Many populous, resource-rich nations do not achieve great power status for countless reasons. Hitch believed that modest, sustained economic growth was one key cause of American ascendance. Though initially inconsequential, the net effect over time of a mere 1 percent difference would prove a monumental advantage.8 That 1 percent was a number that counted. It was, at least for Hitch’s purposes, the information that mattered most, for it graphically underscored the link between economic and military might. This type of analysis—the search for underlying drivers and constraints—shaped the training grounds on which Marshall flourished.

  In 1972, Andrew Marshall was serving on the National Security Council under Henry Kissinger when President Nixon ordered the creation of a new group within the Council, one that Marshall would later lead. This group would be charged with an entirely different mission: it would lo
ok ahead to the strategic environment that the military would likely face in a decade’s time. It would assess the trends affecting America’s position vis-à-vis its peer competitor. It would scrutinize the relative strengths and weaknesses of the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as that of their allies. Understanding the net balance in these competitions enabled strategists to ask what opportunities were being missed, which strengths needed to be bolstered, and which weaknesses could be exploited. It also helped strategic planners to envision how adversaries might assess and attack America’s vulnerabilities.

  In November 1973, the group moved into the Pentagon to become the Office of Net Assessment. Marshall has remained its director ever since. ONA’s reports, most of them highly classified, would be written for the highest-level decision-makers: the Secretary of Defense and his deputies.

  From 1976 to 1978, ONA’s attention turned to Soviet strategy in northern Europe. In contemplating the Soviets’ likely moves in a European war, U.S. experts assumed that part of Soviet strategy would involve an attack down through Norway. The Barents Sea port at Murmansk represented Russia’s western-most border of northern Europe in the divided Cold War world. If Soviet forces moved aggressively at any point along the borders between NATO and Warsaw Pact states, the United States was committed to a rapid deployment of ten American divisions to reinforce the central front of NATO—a massive and costly undertaking.

  Most strategists assumed that the Soviets would send their attack submarines into the Atlantic in order to disrupt American deployments, but some military observers had noticed a surprising anomaly in Soviet naval operations. Although American attack submarines were positioned to intercept Soviet subs if they moved out from the Barents Sea, the Soviets were holding their subs back. They were not conducting operations as expected. Something didn’t add up. This curious break in the pattern of Soviet behavior quickly drew the Pentagon’s attention.

  “One of the things that happens from time to time,” Marshall told me in a windowless Pentagon meeting room, “is that you have to revise your entire notion of how your opponent sees things.” After reviewing fresh analysis of Soviet doctrine and intentions, Marshall concluded that the Soviets actually saw this whole region in largely defensive terms.

  “I remembered something that Norwegian military officials had said to me a decade earlier in 1964,” he continued. “They realized that the Soviets must have viewed that sea region as essential to their air defense perimeter, and they would want to push their air defenses out.” The Soviets, Marshall concluded, wanted to create and protect a bastion for their strategic missile submarines as well.

  The surprising Soviet behavior could easily have been misinterpreted as aggressive. Any deviation from the norm in Soviet military operations raised grave concerns about what the Russians were up to. A spiral of action and reaction could then easily have led to heightened Cold War tensions, or worse. Focusing on pattern breaks can never guarantee that the correct analysis of that behavior will result. Instead, pattern-break moments provide an opportunity to reassess our beliefs about what the enemy really wants.

  “Your view of what the enemy is up to and what he is thinking can shift very rapidly,” Marshall says. “New data can surprise you and cause you to revise both your assessment of the enemy and the appropriateness of your strategy.”

  No high-tech computer algorithms were needed to change the U.S. perceptions of Soviet behavior. Years of studying Soviet strategy were necessary but not sufficient. The insight that Soviet strategy in the North Sea was defensive, not offensive, came instead by observing a meaningful pattern break in Soviet behavior. When the analysts encountered surprising new information, they took it seriously, rather than dismissing it because it did not conform to expectations. And after reassessing what they knew, they had to change what they believed.

  Yet even the most ardent true believers in predictive prowess, quantitative or not, have had to admit that foreseeing massive changes, such as societal transformations, is still a distant dream. ONA’s own foresights have not always been correct.

  The Russian Riddle

  In 1988, America’s foremost strategic thinkers met at Harvard to cast their eyes just twenty years ahead. Marshall presided over the gathering, and many of his protégés contributed their expertise. In a studious final report summarizing their discussions, the experts soberly concluded that by 2008 the Soviet economy will have probably declined.9

  They were right.

  If in-depth analysis of a society’s underlying trends truly aids prediction, many people have asked why those who were most invested in predicting international affairs—experts in government like Marshall or scholars of international relations theory—failed so stunningly to foresee the Soviet Union’s demise. Marshall maintains that his office came closer than others in seeing the decline of the Soviet Union, though it did not predict the collapse.

  According to Marshall, in 1988 the Central Intelligence Agency estimated that the Soviet economy stood at approximately 60 percent of the U.S. economy. ONA, in contrast, recognized it as not more than a third or a quarter the size of the U.S. economy. Experts at the time underestimated the percentage of the Soviet gross domestic product (GDP) devoted to military spending. Most thought it was only around 12 percent. ONA believed correctly, Marshall says, that it was actually about 30 to 35 percent. Nonetheless, he admits that he was surprised by the events just one year after the Harvard conference. He told Wired magazine: “I thought they were in trouble, but the rapidity and completeness of the withdrawal were really striking.”10

  Marshall and ONA have fared better when focused on the nearer-term future and specifically when assessing an enemy’s underlying constraints. Foreseeing the Soviet Union’s collapse was not possible, but neither was it necessary. Understanding Soviet behavior and influencing its decisions proved more useful. Whether it was in recognizing the implications of Soviet maintenance and repair capabilities, or its approach to its air defenses, ONA’s ability to think like the enemy, to step out of the American mindset and into another’s, represented true value. This is the skill set that America clearly needs more of in waging its current conflicts.

  The Future of Futuring

  One of President Barack Obama’s rude awakenings came just two years into his first term, when the revolutions that spread from Tunisia and sparked the Arab Spring caught the American intelligence community mostly unawares. Despite an annual budget of roughly $80 billion—about the current GDP of Iraq—the analysts provided virtually no advanced warning of the upheavals. As administration insiders told The New York Times, the President let them know he was not happy about it. But this frustration was born of unreasonable expectations.11 Just as ONA and all the experts failed to foresee the Soviet Union’s demise, today’s American intelligence community could no better anticipate the revolutions that shook the Arab world. Quantitative analysis is unlikely to assist because such dramatic episodes are not iterative, and no large data sets are likely to reveal a pattern for pinpointing the timing, scope, or nature of a revolution. Revolutions are launched by people, and people are notoriously diverse in the degree of oppression they are willing to endure. What we can do, instead, is to focus our attention on predicting the behavior of individuals and small groups, not with probability but with heuristics based on their underlying drivers and constraints.

  The ability to get out of our own minds and into the heads of others is one of the oldest challenges we all face. It’s tough enough to do with people we know well. Attempting it with those from foreign cultures is immeasurably harder. It should be obvious that even small-scale, individual actions can never be perfectly anticipated since so much of human behavior rests on contingencies and chance. That said, we can still enhance our strategic empathy by retraining ourselves to approach prediction differently. We may never find an algorithmic oracle that can reliably predict societal upheavals. But we can improve our strategic empathy for individuals and governments, beginning by focu
sing on meaningful pattern breaks. Even a modest refinement in our ability to think like others could have substantial payoffs both in winning wars and, more crucially, in sustaining peace.

  Conclusion

  Moon Over Miami

  Kadeesha had a tip. It arrived by anonymous e-mail. “Watch the 9:20 race at Wolverhampton. The winner will be a horse called Boz.”

  Kadeesha was instructed not to place a bet; she was merely to watch. She had never put money on the races before. In fact, she had no history of gambling. Why would she, of all people, be receiving this tip? A single mom in Kew, England, working two jobs to support her son, Kadeesha barely had enough income to cover the monthly bills. “I never had a large sum of money,” she explained, “’cause it always goes out ’cause of all the responsibilities I’ve got in life.” But the sender insisted that he possessed a foolproof system for consistently predicting the winners at the race track. “I was gutted that I couldn’t put a bet on, but I checked it out and it won.”

  Kadeesha was intrigued. The next e-mail came a few days later. Again it predicted the result of a race just twenty-four hours in advance, this one at Suffolk Downs in Boston. How could this “system” know anything about a race in America? Kadeesha figured, “I’m up for a laugh,” and this time, as instructed, she put a small amount of money on Laced Up. Though not the favorite, her horse won again.

  Now Kadeesha was hooked. When the third e-mail came, she zoomed out from her desk at work to the nearest betting shop. She put down 20 quid, which for her was not a small sum, on a horse named Naughton Brook, an eighteen to one outsider. Nervous and excited, she repeated to herself, “This had betta’ win. Oh, God, this had betta’ win.” As the announcer declared the winner, Kadeesha shrieked, “Thank you, The System!” She had just won 360 pounds.