The Pentagon's resident visionary, Andrew Marshall, talks to Peter Schwartz about why everything you know about war is wrong.
Andrew Marshall, one of the United States's foremost military analysts, began his work in national security in 1949, at the Rand research institution, a think tank established in Santa Monica, California, to foster the connection between scientists and the military that had developed during World War II. Marshall, 73, has worked at the Pentagon for 22 years, serving under six presidents. (A secretary of defense would be lucky to serve through the administration of one.) Military experts credit him and his protégés with influencing the informational dimension of warfare - illustrated during the Persian Gulf War by the shutting down of internal Iraqi communications and the worldwide coordination of allies. This shift toward information has just begun, claims Marshall, and will revolutionize our understanding of war. Peter Schwartz met with Marshall in his Pentagon office.
Wired: You've been talking for some time about a coming revolution in military affairs. What do you mean by revolution?
Marshall:
Information and communications technologies will change how conventional battles are conducted. Instead of bombing factories, the aim may now be to penetrate information networks. As more and more of the economy of any given country is embodied in its information systems, that country will be more vulnerable to disruption.
In the industrial era, if I bombed a factory, it was gone. But now, if I wipe out a database, there could easily be a copy or two of the database over there. This has to influence how you think about confrontations and the nature of war. For instance, can you imagine information warfare reaching the point where one side tries to manipulate foreign media?
There's a guy walking around Washington trying to sell the idea of special equipment in an airplane that could take over the other side's networks. So you can put your news on.
Until now, all the wars we have fought essentially have been nation against nation. But the opponents in this new kind of conflict are probably less likely to be nation states.
Probably. There may well be an increase in guerrilla warfare because new technologies may increase our vulnerability to it. We are living in the equivalent of the early 1920s, when tanks, airplanes, and later radar and radio were new, and people weren't sure what they were or how to use them. We have only preliminary ideas about how today's technology is going to change warfare. But it will. In the old world, if I wanted to attack something physical, there was one way to get there. You could put guards and guns around it, you could protect it. But a database - or a control system - usually has multiple pathways, unpredictable routes to it, and seems intrinsically impossible to protect. That's why most efforts at computer security have been defeated.
In business today, the real challenge is how to reorganize whatever it is you do to take advantage of technology. It isn't just applying the same technology to do the same thing more efficiently.
Right! For the last nine months, I've run a task force that's trying to look at ways to foster innovation in the military. We consulted a lot of people who are trying to help commercial enterprises become more innovative. I found, however, that very few of them are dealing with innovation on the scale we are. The military establishment can't go out of business. Yet, we have rarely created new services. One of the things we'll undoubtedly recommend is that there be a war-gaming and concepts-development center formed at the joint level. The range of the weapon systems are such now that the geographical separation - the navy owning the sea area, and the army and air force owning the land areas - may make less sense than it used to.
The words Pentagon and innovation don't go in the same sentence very easily. Despite advances in technology, one thinks of a relatively slow-moving bureaucracy. What can be done about that?
Changing big organizations is hard. And the military has the extra difficulty in that it's preparing to do something it doesn't have a lot of good feedback on, because it doesn't do its major task frequently. There's not a bottom line every day.
How would you characterize the way you approach problems, the way you work, as opposed to other military thinkers? They've kept you around for a long time. Obviously, there's something you're doing that's different.
Well, we are not in the business of supplying answers. We say, These are the major things you ought to pay attention to. It's important that the people in this office not be offering solutions, because if people get to be supporters of particular solutions, it tends to corrupt the diagnosis. This is very different from the business model, in which it's commonly held that if you come up with a problem, you better come up with the answer at the same time. Advocating a problem and a solution simultaneously inhibits the ability to solve problems.
What could happen in the next 20 years that most of us aren't even thinking about today, something that could be a big surprise?
People generally assume that nation states will continue to exist in their current form. But Russia might go through a period of further breakup, and it might come back together again. And China may fragment. At the same time, a period like this offers the opportunity for some smaller states, if they are really vigorous and enterprising, to move up dramatically in the ranking of powers in the world. I keep reminding people that Japan's GNP in 1938 was probably about 10 percent of the US's.
Are nuclear weapons history?
I'm skeptical about that. The Gulf War may have convinced Third World countries to obtain nuclear weapons so the US doesn't become engaged. One of the things I am personally concerned about is that so few people now in power have ever seen one of these things go off.
Did you ever see one?
Yes, at a Nevada test site. It had this tremendous brightness. You weren't supposed to look until you had counted to 10 after the blast. But we knew a lot about nuclear weapons; we knew that you could look at the blast one second afterward. And because we wanted to see the fireball, we sat facing the thing. We just bowed our heads and put the heels of our hands in our eye sockets. The light came through our hands as though we were looking at the sun with our eyelids closed. And you could feel the heat almost immediately, from seven or eight miles away.
