Overview

Andrew Marshall is a Pentagon legend. For more than four decades he has served as Director of the Office of Net Assessment, the Pentagon's internal think tank, under twelve defense secretaries and eight administrations. Yet Marshall has been on the cutting edge of strategic thinking even longer than that. At the RAND Corporation during its golden age in the 1950s and early 1960s, Marshall helped formulate bedrock concepts of US nuclear strategy that endure to this day; later, at the Pentagon, he pioneered the development of net assessment --a new analytic framework for understanding the long-term military competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. Following the Cold War, Marshall successfully used net assessment to anticipate emerging disruptive shifts in military affairs, including the revolution in precision warfare and the rise of China as a major strategic rival of the United States. In The Last Warrior, Andrew Krepinevich and Barry Watts--both former members of Marshall's staff--trace Marshall's intellectual development from his upbringing in Detroit during the Great Depression to his decades in Washington as an influential behind-the-scenes advisor on American defense strategy. The result is a unique insider's perspective on the changes in US strategy from the dawn of the Cold War to the present day. Covering some of the most pivotal episodes of the last half-century and peopled with some of the era's most influential figures, The Last Warrior tells Marshall's story for the first time, in the process providing an unparalleled history of the evolution of the American defense establishment.

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9781322382890

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In clear prose, the authors trace the career of this brilliant strategic thinker... An elucidating intellectual history of an influential strategic sage that few outsiders have ever heard of. -- Kirkus Reviews A fascinating account of the life and career of one of America's leading strategic thinkers, The Last Warrior outlines much of the intellectual history of American security since World War II, while also shining a light on the challenges we continue to face. --Mac Thornberry, Member of Congress Andrew Marshall mentored a series of Secretaries of Defense, beginning with James Schlesinger, in devising strategies for competing successfully with global adversaries. The Last Warrior tells that story, and shows how Marshall used the revolutionary concept of 'Net Assessment' to do it. --Harold Brown, 14th U.S. Secretary of Defense The Last Warrior is eye-opening and riveting. This story of Andrew Marshall's brilliant career vividly illuminates sixty years of the highest-level intellectual and political conflicts that shaped America's defense posture and strategy. Read it to learn about Marshall and history but also read it to discover the shape of real strategy in the larger ocean of bluster and wishful thinking. --Richard Rumelt, author of Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters

Author Information

Andrew Krepinevich is president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) and the author of several books on military history and strategy, including 7 Deadly Scenarios: A Military Futurist Explores War in the Twenty-First Century and The Army and Vietnam. He lives in Leesburg, Virginia. Barry Watts has been a senior fellow at CSBA since 2002, when he left the Pentagon as the Director of Program Analysis and Evaluation. He too has written extensively on military history and strategy, including Clausewitzian Friction and Future War. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

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