cover image The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy

The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy

Andrew Krepinevich and Barry Watts. Basic, $29.98 (368 p) ISBN 978-0-465-03000-2

For four decades Andrew Marshall has been a central figure of the U.S. security establishment, particularly in his role as director of the Office of Net Assessment where he has mentored the intellectual dimension of a historically-pragmatic military system. Krepinevich and Watts, major contributors to contemporary security studies, have produced an objective and perceptive intellectual history of Marshall and his work. Marshall joined the embryonic Rand Corporation in 1949, formulating the concept of %E2%80%9Cnet assessment%E2%80%9D in a Cold War context. This process systematically compares the U.S. military position to its rivals and friends with the aim of enabling long-range planning as opposed to immediate problem-solving. Now standard procedure, its controversial introduction challenged and cultivated both Marshall%E2%80%99s political skill and his analytic power. Marshall made crucial contributions to the Reagan administration%E2%80%99s policies and later applied the methods of net assessment to the wider issue of responding to fundamental changes in the nature of war%E2%80%94the resultant controversies of which continue to inform the thinking of armed forces and defense intellectuals. The authors demonstrate how Marshall%E2%80%99s ability to ask the right questions and see clearly into uncertain futures has been vital to America%E2%80%99s ability to keep pace with war%E2%80%99s fundamentally protean nature. Agent: Eric Lupfer, William Morris Endeavor. (Jan.)