Net Assessment

The Office of Net Assessment is the small, secretive Department of Defense shop whose analytic work forms the spine of The Kill Chain. Per the book, its mission was “to determine how the United States measured up against its competitors, primarily the Soviet Union, and how it could improve its strategic position over time.” For four decades its director was Andrew Marshall — the man Pentagon insiders reverentially called “Mr. Marshall” and, in defense circles, “Yoda” — who reported directly to the secretary of defense and whose writings few beyond the secretary ever saw.

The discipline is best understood through Marshall’s 1992 report, which dissented from the prevailing read of the Gulf War: rather than treating it as proof of a new American way of war, Marshall concluded the U.S. “did not come close to its potential to move the most useful information rapidly to those who needed it most,” and that the U.S. battle network “had not changed appreciably from the Vietnam era.” From that assessment came the framing of a coming “revolution in military affairs,” the coining of “anti-access and area denial” (A2/AD) to describe exactly the capabilities China was beginning to build, and the “Future Warfare 20XX” wargame series that pitted the U.S. against an unnamed “large peer competitor.” The book uses this lineage — carried forward by Marshall acolyte Bob Work — to argue that the defense establishment thinks in terms of platforms (“things”) when the revolution was really about networks and the connections between them.

Context: The Office of Net Assessment (ONA) is a real DoD office founded in 1973; Andrew Marshall directed it from then until his 2015 retirement. “Net assessment” as a discipline compares a nation’s military capabilities against rivals’ over long time horizons, accounting for both sides’ strengths, weaknesses, and likely trajectories.

Where this appears

• The Kill Chain — the Office of Net Assessment and Andrew Marshall’s revolution-in-military-affairs thesis are the book’s analytic engine; Kyle’s notes flag Marshall and Work as figures to understand and the wargames as a source of “future warfare” surface areas (energy-directed weapons, quantum, BCIs).