Andrew Marshall

Longtime director of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, the secretive shop whose mission was to assess how the US measured up against its competitors and how it could improve its strategic position over time. Per The Kill Chain, Marshall reported directly to the secretary of defense across a forty-two-year career, working for fourteen of them, which earned him near-mythic status — reverentially called “Mr. Marshall” and, in Washington defense circles, “Yoda.” His 1992 report on the Gulf War broke with the consensus: rather than declaring a new way of warfare already arrived, he argued the US “did not come close to its potential to move the most useful information rapidly to those who needed it most,” and that its battle network had barely changed since Vietnam.

Marshall is the intellectual origin point of the “revolution in military affairs” thesis that animates The Kill Chain — the idea that new sensors, surveillance, and precision weapons would transform war, but only if militaries also reformed their institutions and operational concepts to exploit them. His analysts coined “anti-access and area denial” (A2/AD) in 1992 to describe how a peer adversary might counter America’s platform-centric approach; he correctly foresaw, that early, that China would build exactly those weapons, and commissioned the “Future Warfare 20XX” wargames that pitted the US against an unnamed “large peer competitor” everyone understood to be China. In Chip War, Marshall appears as the Office of Net Assessment strategist who argued as early as 1972 that the US should exploit its “substantial and durable lead” in computers to “shift concepts of warfare” — the intellectual root of the precision-strike revolution, alongside Bill Perry and Harold Brown. His acolyte Bob Work later tried to rehabilitate the RMA as deputy secretary of defense.

Context: Andrew Marshall (1921–2019) ran the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment from its founding in 1973 until 2015, advising defense secretaries from Schlesinger to Carter and shaping decades of American strategic thinking on competition with the Soviet Union and later China.

Where this appears

• The Kill Chain — the “Yoda” of the Office of Net Assessment who foresaw the revolution in military affairs and China’s anti-access weapons in 1992; the book’s intellectual anchor.
• Chip War — the Net Assessment strategist who argued the US should capitalize on its computing lead to reshape warfare, the root of the precision-strike revolution.