The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy Hardcover – Illustrated, January 6, 2015

Not only a great story on how someone can not only start in a machine shop and work his way up to be THE leading strategist in his generation, but also how the international issues for our nation were addressed during his time. An excellent and very informative read.

This is a book that is well worth the effort to read, but it's hardly a "quick" or "beach" read. I think the likely "customer" for this book would be someone who has an interest in US defense policy and analytical methods. Among Marshall's many contributions to strategy were two very simple (to define; to implement very difficult) concepts:One was to understand how the adversary looks at matters; don't just look at things from a totally US perspective. If you understand what they focus on and worry about, you can better predict where they are headed.The other concept was the economic/business concept of competitive advantage: exploit what you're better at, and especially things your adversary is not very good at. This will cause your adversary to expend much time and treasure to address the gap. But, and this is where Marshall's approach puts the pieces together, this concept works best if it's an area that your adversary thinks is important, and spends time worrying about.Another interesting thing I learned from this book is that Marshall had an excellent working relationship with Harold Brown, Carter's Defense Secretary, and a very poor one with Reagan's SecDef, Caspar Weinberger. This was a bit surprising, as Carter's legacy on defense matters is pretty poor compared to Reagan's.The less-than-excellent reviews of this book often suggest that there is more than a bit of hero worship in this book, as both authors worked with Marshall for some time. It's probably a valid criticism, but it does not detract from the quality of Marshall's work.We often hear that "government should be run like a business", but the reality is that it generally doesn't seem to work too well in practice. What this book suggests is that in Marshall (who often consulted with "business people" as he developed his assessment models) understood that some marketing and economic concepts have a place in defense strategy.Stick through some of the more technical stuff. It's worth it.

The book may offer some hope that our defense strategy is doing things behind the scenes that are very effective although the public opinion about the Pentagon is low and confidence in the ability of congressional leaders to get it right is lower. There is a reason why the service chiefs behave as they do and congressmen have their personal axes to grind as well. The genius of Andrew Marshal was that he felt that we were in a "cold war" that would be a drawn out affair while a hot war would be a short disaster. So the question was - how do we win the cold war? This necessitated strategies that the public and members of Congress didn't understand. Like, if Russia had no defense against missiles why do we need the B-1 bomber. Jimmy Carter didn't understand it either. The point was that Russia has by far the longest border of any country and had to defend it. But it caused them to spend way more air defense money to defend it than we spent making them fearful. The CIA had an absurdly low estimate of Russian defense spending as a percent of GDP, which Marshall figured out. Countering our threats broke their bank. Since we seem to be in another cold war, we can only hope there are some analysts like Marshall giving advice and that the president is taking it. It may be that our "pivot to Asia" countering China's South China Sea belligerence, which costs very little - the 7th fleet is there anyway - will cost China hugely in building a real navy. Anyone interested in real defense policy should read this book.

Andrew W. Marshall retired on January 2, 2015, after serving as Director of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (“ONA”), after serving as an advisor to thirteen Secretaries of Defense from 1973 to 2015, after working on President Nixon’s and Henry Kissinger’s National Security Council from 1972 to 1973, and after rising to the position of Director of Strategic Studies at RAND Corporation from 1969 to 1972 after a lengthy tour during RAND’s “golden age.” Although Marshall was elusive and shy throughout this career, his achievements beg for a complete biography. The authors, Andrew Krepinevich and Barry Watts, are major foreign policy strategists and uniquely positioned to provide many of the answers about Marshall’s career, which spanned over eight decades, because they have worked directly with him until recently. Although The Last Warrior offers important foreign policy insights and a thorough explanation of “net assessment” as an analytical tool to assist in the formulation of long-term national strategy, the authors left the reader with many questions about Marshall and the influence of his career. In the Introduction, Krepinevich and Watts argue that Marshall’s crowning intellectual achievement from 1949 to 1972 while working at RAND was his creation of a framework for analyzing the long-term competition in intercontinental nuclear forces between the United States and the Soviet Union and his recognition that it was a series of moves and countermoves in peacetime aimed at gaining relative advantage. This framework led to Marshall’s formalization of “net assessment” as an analytical tool during his work leading the Net Assessment Group of Kissinger’s National Security Council in the Nixon administration. George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” in 1946 argued that, for the foreseeable future, the main element of American policy towards the Soviet Union must be “a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansionist tendencies.” The United States’ formal adoption of a competitive approach to deter Soviet aggression came soon thereafter in April 1950 when Paul Nitze, a member of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, drafted NSC 68, the formal implementation of Kennan’s containment policy. Marshall’s adoption of a methodology for understanding the competition between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. was an important logical step in the implementation of containment and deterrence as national policies, because it provided foreign policy decision makers with a major tool for analyzing where the United States stood in that competition and for looking at where that competition might go in the future. The Cold War’s end with the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 created a problem for net assessment, because it raised the question whether Marshall’s adherence to “competition” as the analytical coup de grace in foreign policy rendered his thinking irrelevant. While the authors tried to address that question in the later chapters of the book, The Last Warrior largely left that issue unresolved. The closest the book comes to giving the reader an understanding of Marshall as a person appears in the first two chapters, which contain some discussion of his formal education and self-education. Experience and a person’s learning and understanding from it, however, are critical aspects of self-education, especially when one becomes involved with policy planning as sensitive as intercontinental nuclear deterrence. The authors did not address Marshall’s personal experiences but focused upon the writings during his professional career as a RAND and Pentagon strategist. A person’s written output is often only a small part of his contribution to the formulation of policy. The Last Warrior’s focus upon the written output of Marshall’s career is as limiting as a biography of President Lyndon Baines Johnson would be if it only addressed the written legislation he sponsored as a Congressman and Senator and that he signed into law as President. The reader yearns to understand Marshall’s personality, his interaction with other foreign policy leaders, and the personal experiences which shaped his thinking. Marshall was married to Mary Marshall for fifty-one years before her death from cancer in 2004, yet the book failed to reveal anything about her influence on her husband. By constraining itself almost entirely to Marshall’s written output, The Last Warrior leaves out Marshall’s dealings within the RAND Corporation or within the federal government. Marshall’s direct dealings with strategic luminaries, such as Albert and Robert Wohlstetter, Daniel Ellsberg, and Herman Kahn, his relationship with President Nixon and Henry Kissinger during the height of the Watergate scandal, and his interactions with numerous Defense secretaries, under secretaries, and military leaders are significant biographical elements which shaped Marshall’s career and his legacy. Throughout the book, the authors credit Marshall for his “hidden hand” mentoring to dozens of major policy figures, including Roberta Wohlstetter, Paul Wolfowitz, Michael Vickers, Stephen Rosen, James Roche, Andrew May, and Andrew Krepinevich, to name a few. Marshall has acknowledged his mentoring as one of his primary accomplishments. Nevertheless, the reader is left wondering how this mentoring actually occurred. In the second chapter, the authors noted Marshall’s important contribution to Wohlstetter’s landmark Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, but we are left wondering what that contribution was. Wohlstetter acknowledged Marshall in the preface to her book for his “constant encouragement and advice through five years of research.” With their unique access to Marshall and their own tremendous insights into the scholarship of foreign policy formulation, it is a shame that Krepinevich and Watts did not share the details of how Marshall encouraged Wohlstetter and many of his other protégés rather than merely offering the fact that he did so. Marshall’s search for better analytic methods to understand long-term military competitions and his discomfort with systems analysis and game theory are the centerpiece of The Last Warrior and the primary focus of the fourth through seventh chapters. At RAND, Marshall studied NATO’s force posture in comparison to Warsaw Pact forces in Europe during the early 1960s and headed up RAND’s Office of Systems Analysis in the late 1960s in an effort to improve intelligence forecasts of Soviet forces. He came to realize that systems analysis and game theory (as well as realism as a theoretical principle in international relations) suffered from their assumption of decision-makers as rational actors. Marshall eventually arrived at the strange position of a director of RAND’s systems analysis who thought very little of systems of analysis as an analytical tool. Marshall and his intellectual cohort James Schlesinger (to whom the book refers as “The Father of Net Assessment”) observed that cognitive limits of rationality, conflicts within organizations, individuals’ motivational constraints, and animalistic aggressiveness are basic reasons why an observer cannot assume that the decision makers on either side of long-term military competitions will make rational, utility-maximizing decisions. Marshall first arrived in Washington, D.C., in 1969, to help Henry Kissinger’s National Security Council address the Nixon administration’s dissatisfaction with American foreign intelligence, as Chapter Four concerning “The Birth of Net Assessment” details. After Schlesinger became President Nixon’s Secretary of Defense in 1973, he asked Marshall to work with him in the Pentagon to developed net assessment as a means of probing long-term security competitions with war gaming, quantitative studies, careful development of strategic questions, and the assessor’s exercise of steady judgment. Marshall believed that his job as a net assessor was to provide a “diagnosis” of the state of long-term competitions within the security environment and to make predictions of problems likely to arise. He took great care not to provide the “prescription” for those problems and left those judgments to policymakers. As the authors detailed in Chapter 6, “The Maturation of Net Assessment, 1976-1980,” Marshall’s greatest influence on the policies of a Secretary of Defense occurred during Harold Brown’s tenure in the Carter administration. During that period from 1977 to 1980, ONA provided eleven assessments to Secretary Brown, which was more than the combined total to Secretaries Casper Weinberger, Frank Carlucci, and Richard Cheney, who followed Brown. Brown enjoyed Marshall’s frank reports that focused on long-term military competitions rather than on the internal competition within the Pentagon bureaucracies over budget shares and power centers. President Carter’s substantial reduction of the National Security Council staff within the White House afforded Marshall and ONA the opportunity to provide net assessments on issues, such as nuclear targeting studies, which might otherwise have occurred in other parts of the Executive Branch. If Marshall should receive credit in his career for a major intellectual contribution, other than his development of “net assessment” as an intellectual framework for diagnosing long-term military competitions or his mentoring dozens of international relations analysts, his work in applying organizational psychology (or psychosis) to international relations theory clearly had a profound influence on our understanding of Soviet and American Cold War strategy, of the strategy of post-Cold War countries struggling to gain superiority in a multi-polar world, of the ongoing revolution in military affairs, and of the rise of China as a global competitor.In his landmark work on the Cuban missile crisis, Essence of Decision, Graham Allison acknowledged Marshall as one of four individuals who “deserve special note for the intellectual and personal debt” he owed to them. In particular, Marshall contributed substantially to Allison’s thinking on the behavior of large organizations involved in making major policy decisions. In a 1968 RAND memorandum, Marshall observed the preeminent fact that the sheer size of large organizations precludes any single authority from having the time or the information to make all-important decisions rationally. These organizational limitations can become severe constraints on an understanding of competing policies as complex as intercontinental nuclear deterrence, the implementation of information networks, or interference with the military opponent’s information networks. Simplistic models often fail to analyze the organizational psychoses that add to nations’ foreign policies. Clearly, Marshall had a profound understanding of the manner in which large organizations operated. His survival in the same position within the Pentagon’s bureaucracy over five decades is a monument to that understanding. That the authors failed to address how Marshall survived within that large organization and in that one particular job for so long may be the greatest gap in the book. Marshall worked under Secretaries of Defense as diverse as Schlesinger, Donald Rumsfeld, Les Aspin, and William Cohen. He survived several attempts to abolish his office and his position with major efforts to abolish ONA during the Clinton administration and recently during the second Obama administration. Yet Marshall displayed a remarkable political intuition and understanding that helped him navigate the difficult bureaucratic politics of the Pentagon far longer than any person of comparable influence. The authors discussed some of the changes to placement of Marshall’s ONA within the Pentagon’s organizational chart over time, although the politics behind those changes and Marshall’s handling of and views toward them would have greatly enriched the reader’s understanding of Marshall’s intellectual development. It’s likely that those changes in where ONA fit within the Pentagon occurred under post-Cold War secretaries of defense who felt that ONA’s and Marshall’s focus upon long-term competitions did not fit within an appropriate analytic framework where the identity of potential opponents is uncertain and national goals are far more vague than they were during the U.S. and U.S.SR’s bipolar security completion. A biography of Marshall should address why he believed that ONA’s methodology has remained relevant after the Soviet Union’s collapse and how he argued that relevance within the Pentagon’s post-Cold War power structure. The Last Warrior contains one major surprise in Chapter 9: Marshall’s frustration with the George W. Bush administration’s failure to make substantial progress towards realizing Marshall’s conception of the revolution in military affairs. In February, 2001, Secretary Rumsfeld asked Marshall to conduct a review of American defense strategy which Rumsfeld and Marshall presented to President Bush the next month. During their meeting at the White House on March 21, 2001, Marshall expressed to the president the importance of experimentation and engaging young military officers in the transformation of the military to a robust force that takes the greatest advantage of the shift to long-range precision weapons and information warfare. President Bush rapidly dismissed these ideas, despite the administration’s policy commitment to force transformation in general. Marshall observed that, during the Bush administration, despite Rumsfeld’s general support for Marshall’s work, the Pentagon failed to marshal the support of the military services for force transformation and to embrace the key military competitions, which Marshall believed should form the basis of American defense policy in the post-Cold War era. The “Conclusion” of The Last Warrior undoubtedly highlights the book, because there the authors provide an outstanding summary of the “series of deceptively simple but difficult and illuminating questions” which Marshall raised as ONA’s Director over the five-decade span of his tenure. Marshall’s contributions to issues underlying America’s defense policy emanated from fields as diverse as statistics, mathematics, psychology, history, ethology, genetics, game theory, systems analysis, political science, and anthropology. The authors credit Marshall as the “preeminent strategic ‘diagnostician’ of his generation, identifying ‘security maladies’ earlier than most others, so that senior policy markers could utilize his diagnosis to write the proper ‘prescriptions.’” In their Author’s Note in the prefatory materials of the book, the authors admit, “Our fundamental aim in writing this book was not to produce a biography of Andrew Marshall, but rather his intellectual history.” This admission highlights the primary limitation of their presentation, because understanding an intellect is difficult without understanding the history of the man, his experiences, and his thoughts. The Last Warrior comprises a wonderful discussion of the history of net assessment as an analytical tool for long-term competitions within the international security environment. The book contains terrific details of the methodology of net assessment and its application to the revolution in military affairs. It also begs for a complete biography of Andrew W. Marshall, one of the most influential policy analysts in the world between 1949 and 2015, and someone whom historians and foreign policy analysts should understand.

Zu den wenigen Menschen, die über Jahrzehnte hinweg einen Einfluss auf die Formulierung der amerikanischen Sicherheitspolitik geltend machen konnten, gehört sicherlich Andrew W. Marshall, der bis 2015 Direktor des Office of Net Assessment im Pentagon gewesen war. Obwohl er nie im Rampenlicht der Öffentlichkeit stand, trug er mit seinen strategischen Analysen, seiner methodischen Vorgehensweise und der unorthodoxen Schulung seiner hochqualifizierten Mitarbeiter maßgeblich dazu bei, die Verteidigungsbereitschaft der Vereinigten Staaten und ihrer Verbündeten zu stärken.Damit seine Leistungen auch einem breiteren Publikum zugänglich gemacht werden, haben die Verteidigungsexperten Andrew F. Krepinevich und Barry D. Watts, die beide für Marshall arbeiteten und die ihm bis heute freundschaftlich verbunden sind, dieses informative Buch geschrieben. Es handelt sich um eine intellektuelle Biographie, weshalb sich die Autoren mit dem Privatleben ihres Protagonisten nur am Rande beschäftigen. Die Arbeit ist chronologisch aufgebaut. Sie widmet den geistigen Wurzeln von Marshall, dessen Erfahrungen bei der RAND Corporation und seiner langjährigen Tätigkeit im Pentagon die gebührende Aufmerksamkeit.Hierbei ist den Autoren voll bewusst, dass sie sich lediglich auf eine deutlich eingeschränkte Quellenbasis beziehen können, weil zahlreiche Dokumente noch klassifiziert sind. Dennoch wagen sie einen ersten Schritt, um Marshalls Rolle während des Kalten Krieges und in der Zeit danach zu bewerten und in einen historischen Kontext einzuordnen.Marshall wurde 1921 in Detroit geboren. Er erhielt eine fundierte Schulbildung und befasste sich aus eigenem Antrieb mit vielen Wissensgebieten. Er entschied sich schließlich für ein Studium der Wirtschaftswissenschaften an der renommierten Universität von Chicago, da er sich hiervon gute berufliche Perspektiven versprach.Nachdem er sein Studium mit einem Masterabschluss beendet hatte, begann er 1949 für RAND zu arbeiten. Hier traf er in den fünfziger und sechziger Jahren auf eine ganze Reihe von strategischen Denkern, die zu den besten des Landes gehörten. Persönlichkeiten wie Albert und Roberta Wohlstetter, James Schlesinger oder Herman Kahn, der sein Trauzeuge wurde, sorgten für ein überaus anregendes intellektuelles Klima.Marshall entwickelte in dieser Zeit einige Grundannahmen, die für sein Denken charakteristisch wurden. So stellte er das Modell des „rationalen Akteurs“ in Frage. Für ihn handeln Staaten nicht als geschlossene Einheiten, die ihre Interessen stets kühl kalkulieren. Er geht stattdessen davon aus, dass es in großen Organisationen häufig zu suboptimalen Entscheidungen kommt, weil es in ihnen immer divergierende bürokratische Präferenzen gibt, die rein vernunftorientierte Lösungsansätze verhindern.Ressourcen, die niemals unbegrenzt vorhanden sind, werden zum Spielball staatlicher Einrichtungen, die in Konkurrenz zueinander stehen und die alle darum bemüht sind, bei der Mittelvergabe nicht zu kurz zu kommen und die eigenen Partikularinteressen möglichst umfassend durchzusetzen. Dementsprechend war die Sowjetunion für Marshall kein übermächtiger Gegner, der über unbegrenzte Ressourcen verfügte, sondern ein bürokratisches Monster, welches die begrenzten Mittel mehr schlecht als recht einsetzte.Dass auch „Uncle Sam“ Schwierigkeiten mit bürokratischen Auswüchsen hatte, zeigte sich innerhalb der Nixon-Administration ganz deutlich. Der Präsident und sein Nationaler Sicherheitsberater waren mit den Leistungen der Nachrichtendienste alles andere als zufrieden. Aus diesem Grund wurde Marshall von Henry Kissinger damit beauftragt, die Ursachen für diesen unerfreulichen Umstand zu ermitteln und Verbesserungsvorschläge zu unterbreiten.Insbesondere bei der CIA reagierte man auf die von Marshall betriebenen Untersuchungen mit Unverständnis und offener Ablehnung. Bei Kissinger und Marshall verfestigte sich daraufhin der Eindruck, dass man dringend eine unabhängige Institution zur Analyse der militärischen Kräfteverhältnisse zwischen Ost und West benötigte. „Net Assessment“ sollte dazu beitragen, die angespannten Kapazitäten der USA effizienter zu nutzen und die erkannten Schwachpunkte der UdSSR besser auszunutzen.Der Nationale Sicherheitsrat (NSC) war jedoch der falsche institutionelle Rahmen, um ein derartiges Projekt voranzutreiben. Ein Wechsel ins Verteidigungsministerium erwies sich als sinnvoller, zumal dort mit James Schlesinger ein alter Freund und Kollege von Marshall als Hausherr fungierte. In einem Interview, welches 2015 in The American Interest (Volume 10, Number 5) veröffentlicht wurde, meinte er rückblickend dazu:„One of the reasons for the switch from trying to do it at the NSC to Defense was that it was designed to help decision-makers think about the decisions they had to make about future U.S. force posture. There was a real customer for it at DoD and, particularly in James Schlesinger, an appetite for this. The NSC lacked the time and staff to do this right, so over to DoD the task went.“1973 nahm Marshalls Office im Pentagon dann Fahrt auf. Er und sein kleiner Stab an Mitarbeitern untersuchten in den folgenden Jahren die militärischen Kräfteverhältnisse in verschiedenen Bereichen. Hierzu gehörten Nuklearwaffen, Seestreitkräfte oder die Kräfteverteilung zwischen NATO und Warschauer Pakt in Europa. Dabei kamen sowohl quantitative als auch qualitative Methoden zum Einsatz. Selbst Kriegsspiele fanden zunehmend Verwendung, um eine realistischere Einschätzung zu ermöglichen.Außerdem zog Marshall bei seinen Analysen externe Berater heran. Deren Begutachtung erlaubte eine von der Regierung unabhängige Betrachtung der jeweils behandelten Problematik. So stellte er sicher, dass seine Untersuchungsergebnisse nicht nur Daten und Ansichten widerspiegelten, die sich innerhalb des Verteidigungsministeriums oder der Nachrichtendienste gerade einer gewissen Beliebtheit erfreuten.Der größte Erfolg, den Marshall aus seinen Analysen herausdestillierte, war die Erkenntnis, dass die sowjetischen Rüstungsausgaben das „Vaterland der Werktätigen“ in den Ruin trieben. Damit unterschied er sich grundsätzlich von den meisten zeitgenössischen Experten, welche die Volkswirtschaft der UdSSR völlig überschätzten. Hieraus folgte die Schlussfolgerung, dass die Zeit für die USA und gegen die Sowjetunion arbeitete. Nicht „Uncle Sam“ befand sich im Prozess eines relativen Niedergangs, sondern der „Russische Bär“.Die Resultate seiner Bemühungen wurden von den Verteidigungsministern unterschiedlich verwertet. Während James Schlesinger und Harold Brown sie sehr zu schätzen wußten, war Caspar Weinberger kaum an ihnen interessiert. Im fundamentalen Gegensatz zu Marshall fehlte ihm das elementare Verständnis für eine wettbewerbsorientierte Strategie, die einen ökonomischen Umgang mit den vorhandenen Ressourcen vorsah.Nach dem Ende des Kalten Krieges kam es in den neunziger Jahren zu einer Neuausrichtung von Marshalls Office, welches sich nun verstärkt mit den Auswirkungen des technischen Fortschritts auf die moderne Kriegführung befasste. Inspiriert von sowjetischen Publikationen studierten Marshall und sein Stab die organisatorischen, operativen und strategischen Folgen des technologischen Wandels, der alte Gewissheiten zu negieren schien.In der Fachwelt lösten diese Überlegungen eine heftige Debatte aus, die unter der Bezeichnung „Revolution in Military Affairs“ (RMA) bekannt wurde. Im Pentagon der Clinton-Administration stieß Marshall damit auf wenig Begeisterung. Zum einen glaubte man dort, dass die RMA bereits umgesetzt worden sei und zum anderen hatte man mehr mit humanitären Interventionen und Nationenbildung zu tun.Dies änderte sich jedoch mit Donald Rumsfeld, welcher der Transformation der Streitkräfte im Sinne der RMA aufgeschlossen begegnete. Mit den Anschlägen vom 11.09.2001 und den sich anschließenden Kriegen in Afghanistan und im Irak richtete sich sein Fokus aber grundlegend anders aus.Gleiches galt für die machtpolitische Konfrontation mit China, die Marshall schon früh kommen sah. Weder Bill Clinton noch George W. Bush waren dazu bereit, die chinesische Herausforderung als solche zu erkennen und mit der notwendigen Entschlossenheit anzunehmen. Lediglich unter der Führung von Robert Gates begann das Pentagon damit, institutionelle Rahmenbedingungen zu schaffen, um die amerikanische Position im westlichen Pazifik operativ zu verbessern. Die massiven Einsparungen im Verteidigungshaushalt, welche die Regierung Obama im Wechselspiel mit dem Kongress veranlasste, machte die erklärte Hinwendung nach Asien allerdings mehr zu einem symbolischen Akt.Das Buch von Krepinevich und Watts wurde in vielen Besprechungen dafür kritisiert, dass es keine Distanz zu Marshall aufweisen würde. Eine solche Kritik ist nicht völlig unberechtigt; sie verkennt aber drei wichtige Punkte: Erstens machen die Autoren kein Geheimnis aus ihrer positiven Grundeinstellung gegenüber Marshall. Zweitens üben sie gelegentlich doch Kritik an ihm. Vor allem das bürokratische Beharrungsvermögen von großen Organisationen wurde von ihm zwar theoretisch klar erkannt, in der harten Praxis tat er sich jedoch immer wieder schwer damit.Drittens geht die Arbeit in gelungener Weise auf jene Schwierigkeiten ein, welche die amerikanische Verteidigungsplanung in den letzten sechzig Jahren zu bewältigen hatte. Hierauf verweist auch Douglas J. Feith in seiner hervorragenden Rezension, die am 23.01.2015 im Wall Street Journal erschienen ist. Unter dem Titel „The Hidden Hand Behind American Foreign Policy“ führt er aus: „The key theme of this thoughtful and fascinating book is the challenge of crafting defense policy without high-quality intelligence — a chronic headache for U.S. officials since America became a leading power after World War II.“Für Feith ist der Titel des Buches jedoch schlecht gewählt, da Marshall in seinem langen Leben stets Zivilist und niemals Soldat gewesen war. Davon abgesehen ist die Arbeit für alle Leser empfehlenswert, die sich ernsthaft mit der Sicherheitspolitik der „unentbehrlichen Nation“ auseinandersetzen wollen.Jürgen Rupp

cercavo da tempo The last Warriors, regalo per una persona interessata all'argomento. Il testo è interamente in inglese quindi va scelto solo se avete reale conoscenza della lingua. Consegna rapida e puntuale come sempre.

A great read for anyone interested in understanding the process of net assessment

A wonderful narrative of a personal history closely interwoven in the history of the Cold War evolvement from the American point of view till its very end and afterwards. A very well written and highly informative must-read for any student of political science and not only.