Who is Andrew Marshall?
Every person should be asking that question.
Most people have never heard of Andrew Marshall. I didn't know the name before I heard author Alex Abella mention him on Alex Jones's show on Tuesday. After doing some digging I learned that he has been the director of the Office of Net Assessment, which is part of the Department of Defense, since 1973 when he was appointed by Richard Nixon. He has stayed in that position for almost four decades, every single President has re-appointed him. Prior to being director of ONA, he was a nuclear expert working for the infamous RAND corporation, and was later invited to the National Security Council by Henry Kissinger.
Click here to read Christopher Hitchens's 2001 article "The Case Against Henry Kissinger."
Marshall is considered by many national security insiders and warmongers as the Pentagon's megamind, a real life Yoda. But he's not a foreign policy guru (he didn't predict the collapse of the Soviet Union, and was surprised at the rate of its fall, although he is wrongly credited with that prediction), instead, he's a prophet of doom. And thankfully for him doom is big business, especially when it is false.
His main expertise is in thinking up scary scenarios and new threats to America's defenses, and then advising his colleagues on the types of weapon systems best suited to address those dangers. He is not so much a national asset as an asset for the national security industry that feeds on new threats, and new conflicts, whether real, or manufactured.
Most of his deranged theories about the future pose a danger to America, and humanity. The threats that Marshall speaks about are all in his head. If Lennon imagined peace, Marshall imagines war. And there are lots of people in the war industry who like to imagine with him. But the only reason he is called a visionary is because he thinks of new ways for the American government to kill people. I think of him as the conductor on the military-industrial-congressional complex's money train. He sets the course to the destination where the most money can be made by defense contractors, and war corporations.
Marshall likes to think of himself as a brilliant data-mining seer, a true and unfettered guardian of America's defenses who is not tied down by the bureaucracy, but when he's finished with his wacky theorizing he knows whose whistle to blow: the war-minded American plutocracy. Less of a visionary, he's more like a loony nutcase with a cult-like following in the most dangerous of places: the government.
Marshall's reach is in high, and very secret places. Dick Cheney's heart is among those places. If Dick Cheney is the Darth Vader of America's political galaxy then Marshall is the dark matter that produced the galaxy. Marshall's other die-hard followers include neocon Paul Wolfowitz, and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
In Marshall's future there are new wars, and universal chaos, and because of his immense stature as a grand, all-seeing prophet numerous pentagon officials over the years have listened religiously to his deranged and paranoid opinions about the future, particularly Rumsfeld, who pushed Marshall's schemes to transform the American military in 2001/2002. Peter J. Boyer wrote a very good article about Rumsfeld's retooling of the military for the New Yorker in November 2006 called "Downfall: How Donald Rumsfeld reformed the Army and lost Iraq."
In some respects, the permanent war establishment is built on Marshall's ideas. Any intellectual that gives corrupt power brokers the feeling of respect, and destiny is called a "guru" and a "genius." And that's what Marshall does. He gives defense contractors, and pentagon officials the excuse to continue their terrorist ways, and provides a lease on life for the U.S. empire. In 2002, Marshall told Wired magazine that "All the world is getting less safe." He didn't say this as a hard-nosed realist, but as an intellectual schemer calling for more warfare. Ordinary people have no place in Marshall's conception of the world. What worries him is not poverty, or looming environmental disasters, but, god forbid, world peace, because peace would make him irrelevant. He is not trying to save the world from dangers with his predictions about the future, but to fill up the pockets of his friends with more money, and keep the powers that be locked in for another hundred years.
And in Marshall's world, America is the father-protector-policeman, making the planet more safe. Jonathan Pollack, a professor at Rhode Island's Naval War College says that Marshall "is not very interested in the here and now, but is primarily interested in hypothesizing futures that cut against the grain," (From The American Prospect's February 2001 article 'The Dubious Genius of Andrew Marshall' by Jason Vest).
Click here to read a collection of articles about Marshall that have been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wired Magazine, and other publications. And click here to read Marshall's Wikipedia entry.
