The Pentagon’s Endangered Brain Trust

In the 1990s, following the Soviet Union’s collapse, few in Washington were thinking about China as a potential future threat. During this “unipolar moment,” the conventional wisdom held that China would become a responsible stakeholder of the global community once it had become a fully integrated member. Inside the Pentagon, however, a group of analysts charged with assessing the strategic environment saw things differently. Focusing increasing attention on the Chinese leadership, they concluded that China was intent on creating the capabilities needed to overturn the U.S.-led international order. Their findings proved prescient, anticipating by several decades the return of active great-power competition and China’s growing military challenge to the United States.

These insights came from the Office of Net Assessment (ONA), a small arm of the Department of Defense that has, through its independent analyses, for decades played a vital role in informing senior Pentagon leaders’ strategic planning and policy priorities. Although it comprises only a dozen or so staff and commands a research budget of roughly $20 million—“budget dust” in Pentagon-speak—ONA has again and again provided crucial and often contrarian analysis that has reshaped U.S. strategic thinking.

Yet on March 13, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the “disestablishment” of ONA and directed Pentagon managers to reassign the office’s employees elsewhere. He also canceled all existing ONA research contracts. In announcing the closure, Hegseth also requested that the deputy secretary of defense devise a plan for “rebuilding” the office in a different form, to be structured “consistent with” the secretary’s priorities. But the message seems clear: ONA will cease to exist as an autonomous center for strategic thinking that has so often contributed crucial and sometimes paradigm-shifting insights by challenging conventional wisdom. As a review of the office’s extraordinary history makes plain, this decision needs to be urgently revisited.

THE MARSHALL PROJECT

ONA was established in 1973, the result of an agreement between Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger. The office was charged with providing the secretary of defense with independent assessments of the military competition between the United States and Soviet Union, to include the current status as well as trends in the competition, areas of comparative U.S. advantage and disadvantage, and sources of prospective problems and opportunities. “Net assessment,” a form of strategic planning unique to the office, was formulated and refined by its founding director, Andrew Marshall, known by defense cognoscenti outside the Pentagon as “the most famous man you never heard of,” and inside it simply as “Yoda.” Marshall would lead the office for over four decades, until his retirement in 2015. He directed his staff to be “relentlessly skeptical” of the current conventional wisdom. “We’re here to inform, not to please,” was his way of saying that ONA should always speak truth to power. To prevent its findings from being blocked or watered down by the defense department’s bureaucracy, ONA was instructed to forward them directly to the Pentagon’s senior leaders.

Read the full article on Foreign Affairs.