The Last Warrior

by Andrew F. Krepinevich

  Moreover, despite his landslide victory in November 1972, Nixon was rapidly losing political power as the growing Watergate scandal began to command the headlines. The precipitating event was the arrest in July 1972 of five men, later linked by the FBI to Nixon’s reelection campaign, for breaking into the Democratic National Committee Headquarters in the Watergate complex, which was just a short walk down Virginia Avenue from the Marshalls’ apartment. The subsequent cover-up of the Watergate break-in that would culminate in the president’s resignation was not the only domestic political scandal during his truncated second term. On October 10, 1973, Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned after pleading no contest to having failed to report $29,500 of income received in 1967 while governor of Maryland.

  The US economy, addicted to cheap oil, also sputtered following the so-called Yom Kippur War* that began with Egypt and Syria attacking Israel in October 1973. Washington’s support of Israel triggered a boycott by the Arab oil-producing nations that caused oil prices to skyrocket from roughly $3 to $12 a barrel.† The resulting energy crisis, along with the collapse of the UN’s Bretton Woods monetary management system two years earlier,‡ threw the US economy into recession, further eroding the president’s popular support.

  Under the threat of impeachment, Nixon resigned in August 1974. He was succeeded by Gerald Ford, who had been appointed vice president following Agnew’s resignation. When Ford pardoned Nixon for any crimes committed while in office, it triggered a surge of outrage among many Americans. These events combined to produce a rousing victory for the Democratic Party in the November 1974 congressional elections, reflecting not only the American public’s anger over the Watergate scandal but also its growing desire to scale back US security commitments. Thus when North Vietnam initiated a major offensive against South Vietnam in March 1975, Congress denied military assistance funding to the Saigon government. Bereft of the kind of US support that had enabled its successful defense against North Vietnam’s 1972 Easter Offensive, South Vietnam collapsed within two months. This combination of war-weariness, a sluggish economy, political scandal, and the promise of détente continued to propel the United States toward a period of retrenchment. Viewed from this perspective, Kissinger felt he was playing a weak hand as best he could.

  Was America’s hand that weak? To Schlesinger and Marshall, Kissinger’s pessimism was unwarranted. In Schlesinger’s view there was still cause for optimism about the United States’ prospects. He went so far as to call himself a “revivalist.” He believed that the United States could recover its footing and compete effectively against the Soviet Union in the battle for geostrategic advantage.7 This difference of opinion manifested itself in a growing competition between Kissinger and Schlesinger for the ear of President Ford in formulating national security policy.

  As a close observer of both men, Marshall concluded that the conflict between Kissinger and Schlesinger had much to do with their very different views of the relative long-term strengths and weaknesses of the two rival superpowers, an issue to which he would accord great importance in his office’s net assessments. Marshall suspected that Kissinger might have been swayed, in a way that he and Schlesinger were not, by the CIA’s somber estimates of how small a burden the Soviet military buildup was placing on its economy. As DCI Schlesinger had questioned the CIA’s estimate of Soviet military spending as a percentage of the USSR’s economic output. He could not understand how an economy half the size of the United States could be fielding and modernizing a much larger military than the United States and still have roughly the same burden, about 6 percent of gross national product. Once in the Pentagon, one of Schlesinger’s first tasks for Marshall was to push the CIA to reconsider this estimate.

  While Marshall officially oversaw the NSSM 186 assessment of US and Soviet ground forces, the analysis was done by neither him nor his two-man staff. Instead it was conducted by an interagency working group in the Pentagon. Patrick Parker, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence assessment, was assigned by the Defense Department to head a steering group to guide the analysis. The group included the Army and Navy secretaries,* the directors of the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, the director of the Office of Defense Research and Engineering, the assistant secretary of defense for the Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation (PA&E), the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Marshall. Robert Stone from PA&E directed the interagency working group, with the CIA providing most of the data on Soviet ground forces.8

  This arrangement did not produce the kind of net assessment Marshall had envisioned in 1972. The steering group was populated with senior officials who lacked the time to devote serious intellectual effort to the assessment, and who also needed to satisfy the views of a wide range of bureaucratic players and organizations. As anyone familiar with the workings of large government bureaucracies knows, the interagency process generally produces results that reflect compromises on substantive areas of disagreement among the group’s participants. This leads to findings that are the least objectionable to everyone involved rather than those that are the most insightful and, not surprisingly, often the most controversial.9 Such was the case with this first national net assessment.

  The NSSM 186 comparison of the US and Soviet ground forces was not completed until April 1974 and was, at best, bland. It argued that no important insights or conclusions could be drawn from the major differences, or asymmetries, between the two sides’ ground forces. In particular, it offered no meaningful observations regarding the question that was increasingly in the forefront of Marshall and Schlesinger’s thinking: whether the United States or the Soviet Union was more efficient or successful in converting resources into military capabilities. Instead, the assessment stressed the obvious: that judgments regarding the overall balance between US and Soviet ground forces would have to take into account such things as the US advantages in mobility and tactical air forces, and the forces of both sides’ allies. And since the entire US Army and Marine Corps would not fight the entire Soviet Army in any plausible scenario, the study also offered no operational context—such as a conflict between NATO and the Warsaw Pact in Central Europe—for thinking about possible combat outcomes in realistic contingencies. To make matters worse, the CIA promptly distanced itself from the assessment’s innocuous findings even though the Agency had provided most of the intelligence data and participated in the interagency working group.

  Marshall forwarded results of what became known as the NSSM 186 Phase I assessment to Schlesinger on April 16, 1974. However, his forwarding memorandum did not voice the depth of his disappointment with its substance. Marshall’s foremost objection centered on the assessment’s implication that Soviet ground forces did not have any exploitable weaknesses. Privately, however, he was angry over the assessment. He thought the analysis was so broad and general as to produce findings that were, in his eyes, little more than “bullshit.” Marshall felt the assessment effectively concluded that the “Soviets don’t have any weaknesses,” which he knew was “nonsense.”10 He also believed that some of the positions taken by participants flew in the face of common sense, particularly DIA’s insistence that the semiannual influx of raw conscripts into the Soviet Army to replace soldiers who had been serving for several years did not affect its readiness.11 Making matters worse, when he met with the head of DIA, Lieutenant General Daniel Graham, to discuss the assessment he found that Graham personally agreed with him, contradicting the official position of his organization.12 This only served to reinforce Marshall’s view that net assessments, if they were to be of any value to the defense secretary or other senior officials, would have to avoid the interagency process and its tendency to reduce findings to only those that could be agreed upon by all.

  Marshall asked Phillip Karber, who was then working for the BDM Corporation,* to review the assessment. Although his views were not as negative as Marshall’s, Karber was by no means enamored of the assessment’s findings. He was especially struck b
y the decision to exclude the US Reserve and National Guard ground forces from US force levels while including the Soviet Army’s Category 2 and 3 reserve divisions. This only reinforced Marshall’s judgment that the assessment was seriously flawed. Karber was also stunned that the assessment failed to take into account the surprising effectiveness demonstrated by state-of-the-art Soviet equipment used by the Egyptians and Syrians during the recent Yom Kippur War.13

  It was not until the end of July that Marshall composed a memo to Schlesinger containing a summary of his main misgivings about the NSSM 186 assessment. Marshall called it at best “only a partial success.” He also admitted that while he had expected that acquiring the necessary intelligence data from the CIA would be difficult, he had had “little appreciation of how bad the problem was.” The assessment revealed that there were serious gaps in the intelligence community’s understanding of the qualitative aspects of Soviet forces, and a strong tendency to fill in the gaps with worst-case estimates. He told Schlesinger that he needed good data on such matters as training and logistics, yet he could get little in these areas.

  Marshall also noted that the assessment raised a number of issues that were left unresolved. One was the fact that the US Army and Marine Corps had roughly twice as many men per major weapon system as one found in the Soviet ground forces. This suggested that American equipment might be more technically advanced and also better supported and maintained, and thus more capable and reliable than Soviet equipment. But even in this case, when faced with major divergences between how the Soviet and the US military chose to operate their respective forces, the intelligence and military participants in the assessment could not decide whether these differences worked to the United States’ advantage. Marshall also noted that while the interagency group found that the Soviets could mobilize and commit their reserves to combat much more quickly than could the US Army and Marine Corps—another major asymmetry between US and Soviet ground forces—it could not agree on the significance of this finding. Marshall’s bottom line to Schlesinger: “We cannot leave this subject in this state.”14

  After reading the memo, Schlesinger called Marshall in to discuss the situation. He concurred with Marshall that the ground forces assessment was woefully inadequate. Both men found particularly egregious its overall failure to identify weaknesses in Soviet Union’s ground forces that could be exploited to NATO’s advantage.15 The implication that the Soviets had no weaknesses flew in the face of everything Marshall had learned about organizational behavior in general and Soviet organizational behavior in particular during his collaborations with Loftus, Goldhamer, Schlesinger, and others. A “more balanced assessment of Soviet strengths and weaknesses,” Marshall later observed, would avoid such mistakes as overestimating the opponent, making wrong choices such as “unnecessary abandonment of defensible positions,” and failing to make “more effective use of our own resources.”16 He also felt it was critical to understand the other side’s way of “doing business”: the psychological-political effects or uses of military forces, both in peace and in war. The assessment generally ignored these qualitative factors, which while important could not be reduced to numerical comparisons. When they finished reviewing the report Marshall recalled Schlesinger exclaiming, “Enough of this shit. Let’s get on and do something serious.”17

  The two men quickly concluded that adequate net assessments—that is, frank and objective analyses of where the United States stood relative to the Soviet Union in various military competitions—could not be left to the interagency process, or to the efforts of individual intelligence agencies, the military services, or even established analytic organizations in the Office of the Secretary of Defense such as PA&E. Instead, Marshall was going to have to develop net assessment as a new analytic discipline, and his small staff in the Office of Net Assessment was going to have to do the bulk of the hard intellectual work needed to produce adequate assessments.

  Marshall believed that “most of the things the defense secretary could decide or affect were issues that had to do with future forces” and capabilities.18 If so, net assessments would have to go beyond the tendency to focus on the problems of evaluating likely outcomes of battles that might occur in the immediate future. There was little a defense secretary could do to influence these battles or campaigns in the sense that the forces, equipment, and the commanders who would fight them were already in place. Nor could they be changed either quickly or easily. What a defense secretary could influence to a far greater degree were the US military’s characteristics in the mid- to long-term future. A defense secretary was in a position to affect the selection of military officers and leaders who would rise to key command and staff positions in the years ahead. He could also determine the priority that would be given to research into new or more advanced military capabilities, which developmental systems would move forward into production, and in what quantities they would be fielded. As it might well be a decade or longer before these decisions would be realized in the military’s force posture, the defense secretary would need to have some sense of what the security environment would look like during that timeframe—in particular, how the future security environment might differ from today’s.

  To Marshall, therefore, it seemed natural to focus net assessments on providing the Defense Department’s most senior leaders with early warning of emerging problems or currently neglected problems that would likely get worse, and of opportunities and advantages the United States already had (or could develop) that it might exploit. He felt that “the kind of perspective you had, the kind of issues you wanted to illuminate, were strategic management issues [emphasis added]. We weren’t doing this assessment for the theater commander and his immediate problems.”19

  This did not mean that assessments focusing on the longer term would be useless to today’s senior military and civilian leaders. But they were not Marshall’s principal audience. The assessments would be done specifically for the defense secretary, to help him with strategic management issues facing the Defense Department in the most important existing—and emerging—military competitions. Marshall and his staff would endeavor to highlight one or two of the most pressing problems or attractive opportunities in a given competition, and do so early enough for the defense secretary to make decisions about them that would influence their outcome.

  To undertake this kind of work ONA would have a research budget to enable its director to draw on the most talented individuals and organizations anywhere in the United States, including those outside the US government. This reflected Marshall’s RAND experience. Especially in the 1950s RAND’s top management had sought out the “best and brightest” talent throughout the country, including outside consultants, to assist in its work. Among other things, he believed this approach could benefit from harvesting some of the thinking done in the area of business strategy, in particular the notion of exploiting one’s strengths in order to capture markets as a means of driving rivals out of specific business areas.

  Marshall and Schlesinger agreed that ONA’s net assessments would be diagnostic, rather than prescriptive. They would strive to diagnose where the United States currently stood relative to the USSR in the key military competitions and where it would likely stand in the next five to eight years. But Marshall’s office would not write the prescriptions for which military capabilities might be needed to “treat” a security problem or exploit an opportunity. Those decisions would be left to the defense secretary and other senior DoD officials.

  To avoid the risk that assessments would be watered down by having ONA coordinate its products with other parts of the Pentagon bureaucracy, Schlesinger directed that the assessments would go directly to him without being coordinated either within the Pentagon or elsewhere in the government. They would represent the best judgments of the Office of Net Assessment.20 In addition there would be no set schedule for producing net assessments; the emphasis would be on getting them done well rather than fast. Marshall would be able to d
evote as much time as necessary to producing full-blown assessments. Nor would he be under any pressure to update major assessments on any regular schedule, although he would always be ready to respond to requests for summaries of existing military balances and those that were under way, as well as to support special projects directed by the secretary of defense.

  Recasting net assessments as private documents written for the defense secretary by ONA alone effectively reversed the original process for conducting national net assessments through a coordinated interagency effort. In this way Schlesinger and Marshall set the framework and the conditions under which net assessment would evolve and mature. While originally laid down by Schlesinger, this approach was later accepted and to a great extent institutionalized by his immediate successors, Donald Rumsfeld and Harold Brown.21

  Marshall was skeptical that he would be able to provide Schlesinger with much in the way of useful assessments in the near term.22 He and his small staff would have to work their way up a steep learning curve to develop this new form of analysis. The NSSM 186 assessment had shown that the intelligence community could not necessarily be relied upon to provide the kinds of data they would need. Other sources might have to be found. This, too, would take time. Marshall also concluded, after reviewing the state of simulation and modeling, that he could not rely on these analytic tools to estimate or predict likely combat outcomes with any degree of reliability. Success here would require a different approach. Analysis of likely war outcomes would need to rely less on exquisite (and highly expensive) simulations and more on war gaming involving experienced military practitioners.