Reviewing Epistemic Communities and Andrew Marshall
I finally got around to reviewing the Andrew Marshall paper I linked to a while back. It was fascinating and does make a sound case that Marshall is responsible for much of intellectual architecture of the Cold War and was also shaped by a Zelig-like variety of influences. However, it is, much like the Net Assessment literature in general, hagiography and often highly naive. I winced when reading this paragraph:
Marshall is reticent to help even members of his own staff understand what net assessment is. This unwillingness to foist his opinion on others reflects his own transformative experiences at RAND — the long journey from scientific certitude to acceptance of the vagaries of human competition. Pedagogically, Marshall believes that allowing others to work out how to do a net assessment is preferable to him trying to explain it to them. His mentorship is not pedantic but that of a shepherd guiding others’ intellectual growth to help them arrive at their own conclusions through an intensive process.
Perhaps because national security community members are so used to overt power grabs, saying “you can’t do this!”, checklists, and bureaucratic “standard operating procedures,” Marshall’s relaxed nature and indirect mechanisms of guidance seem revolutionary. And, to his credit, it was! However, to suggest that Marshall had an “unwillingness to foist his opinion on others” is both dishonest and also highly underrates Marshall’s own skills as a bureacuratic operator. To explain how, it is important to emphasize that the conclusions and interests of the Office of Net Assessment need not follow from the theory of net assessment as an analytical method.It is safe to say that the Office of Net Assessment, as many have documented, has emphasized a core set of themes of its own — such as high-technology conflict with other great powers. Moreover, while ONA lacked much formal influence beyond its direct line to the Secretary of Defense, it exercised far more influence in its legions of supportive alumni and other stakeholders that Marshall cultivated.
The author acknowledges both below:
Marshall’s office, with a small staff and relatively miniscule budget, went on to conceive and bureaucratically midwife strategic frameworks such as the Competitive Strategies Initiative, the revolution in military affairs, and, most recently, antiaccess/area denial. …..Marshall’s longevity is partially attributable to this network of alumni — loyal graduates of St. Andrew’s Prep. In recent years, several of these acolytes have attempted to spread the gospel of St. Andrew by teaching graduate-level courses on net assessment in Washington-area universities’ strategic studies programs. …..
Marshall and John Boyd are both very similar in that their methods are opaque and tacit in nature. One had to really be there at one of Boyd’s lectures to understand his theory, and even then you might not get it unless you were immersed in his intellectual influences and communicated with him for clarification after the lecture. Similarly, the author goes on to note that one cannot teach net assessment, it must be learned through an apprenticeship process over time and immersion in the net assessment community and context.
This makes it difficult to functionally separate the Marshallian and Boydian methods from the preferences, opinions, and conclusions of the communities that view them as strategic saints. And that’s why Boydians often come off as unhinged or unserious to defense analysts that might otherwise find value in Boyd’s theories — if William S. Lind, Pierre Sprey, and others invoke Saint Boyd’s name to justify outlandish opinions about defense policy, strategy, and technology, most unfamiliar with the nuances of the Boydian corpus are going to take their word for it and associate Boyd’s ideas with their opinions. The inability to separate Boyd’s method and philosophy from his person and his followers is a large part of what retards Boydian strategic theory from being more well-accepted in the US defense and national security establishment.
Marshall and his followers are far more in the mainstream of US defense thought and practice, but that’s also because they established an outpost within the US defense community rather than standing outside yelling at it while waving clenched fists (as many Boydians do). And its also absolutely true that most of the Office of Net Assessment’s most prominent post-Cold War successes that its boosters often cite — such as the revolution in military affairs (RMA) — tilt towards a certain discrete set of opinions about the nature and direction of US defense policy.
And there’s no problem with that — the tendency of the US defense establishment to jump from fad to fad makes the idea of an office that will work on high-technology, great power war problems even if all the cool kids aren’t having it at the moment very attractive. As someone that does take Marshall and his followers as inspirations, I will say this: it’s OK to celebrate Marshall and Net Assessment for its achievements while nonetheless being realistic about the real role that Marshall and others played in US defense policy. Marshall has achieved enough of value without the need to further inflate him or his followers through hagiography.
