The Last Warrior

Andrew Marshall is aPentagon legend. For more than four decades he has served as Director of theOffice of Net Assessment, the Pentagon’s internal think tank, under twelvedefense secretaries and eight administrations. Yet Marshall has been on thecutting edge of strategic thinking even longer than that. At the Rand Corporation during its golden age in the 1950s and early 1960s, Marshall helpedformulate bedrock concepts of US nuclear strategy that endure to this day;later, at the Pentagon, he pioneered the development of “net assessment”—a newanalytic framework for understanding the long-term military competition betweenthe United States and the Soviet Union. Following the Cold War, Marshallsuccessfully used net assessment to anticipate emerging disruptive shifts inmilitary affairs, including the revolution in precision warfare and the rise ofChina as a major strategic rival of the United States. In The Last Warrior,Andrew Krepinevich and Barry Watts—both former members of Marshall’sstaff—trace Marshall’s intellectual development from his upbringing in Detroitduring the Great Depression to his decades in Washington as an influentialbehind-the-scenes advisor on American defense strategy. The result is a uniqueinsider’s perspective on the changes in US strategy from the dawn of the ColdWar to the present day. Covering some of the mostpivotal episodes of the last half century and peopled with some of the era’smost influential figures, The Last Warrior tells Marshall’s story forthe first time, in the process providing an unparalleled history of theevolution of the American defense establishment.