Slashdot Mirror
The Pentagon May Retire "Yoda," Its 92-Year-Old Futurist
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Of all the weapons the Pentagon relies on to defend the United States, one of the strangest and most secretive is Andrew Marshall, a 92-year-old man who's spent the last 40 years staring into the future trying to predict the next big threat to America. Known fondly as "Yoda" to his many fans in Washington, Marshall heads up the Office of Net Assessment—the Defense Department's think tank tasked with taking a long view, out-of-the-box approach to defense strategy. In his role as the Pentagon's visionary sage, Marshall is credited with predicting the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of China's global prominence, the role of autonomous weapons and robots in warfare, and even helping end the Cold War. Now, facing budget cuts, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel is considering reorganizing or possibly even shuttering the futurist think tank, Defense News recently reported."
He never saw it coming
uh the title makes it sound like they are going to uh assassinate the nice old man
wants his plot back.. "Where Will The Little Green Man Be Next?"
So, now we know who Yoda is, as well as the Jedi Knights.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
He's been trying to predict the future for the last 40 years. Unless everything he writes gets stamped 'above top secret: incinerator's eyes only' surely we have enough material to evaluate his efficacy by now?
How did it go?
Hey, I saw that guy on that Star Wars footage they just found on that eBay laserdisc. He looked pretty old.
Did he not forsee his own potential demise?
Sounds like one of the few places in the defense industry that's got things right lately.
Why not? If he's ever needed again I'm sure someone will find him slumming it in a marsh or something.
"I foresee large cuts in defense spending as the world becomes a safer place. I also foresee a way to avoid the cuts, by making up a new enemy whose threat can be neither defined nor denied, allowing huge possibilities for new agencies and monies.
Yoda's goal was to defend against coercion. The US government's goal is to maintain and expand their power and revenue, and the way they do it is by initiating coercion, not defending against it.
I'm truly interested. He either called it and they ignored him, in which case he's not useful, or he didn't call it, in which case he's not useful.
I'm sure he costs less than a redundant engine for the F-35, but everybody who says that each of the thousands of useless programs don't need to be cut because they don't cost too much is ignoring the rest of those other thousands.
If he's as smart as the ethos contends, many think tanks would be glad to hire him on. I only hope I'm fortunate enough to be in such a position when I'm 92. Also cool that he was already 60 before he picked up his nickname - most career military are outta-there at that point.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Does our government have no bounds for incompetence and intellectual laziness? They believe a single man is the best at this stuff? Do they really buy into guru-ism? Or is he just their Captain obvious, which in U.S. governmental terms roughly translates to "the one person who doesn't assume wildly imaginative scenarios that involve a fairly tale planet that assumes world leaders follow some sort of good/evil paradigm where foreign leaders are akin to evil geniuses?"
Ugh, this is so stupid. This is the only long view think tank in the Pentagon, the only one who looks at the entirety of a nation and tries to predict what will happen and more or less gets it correct. One of the big complaints about the military is they're "always fighting the last war"; this group was specifically designed to try to predict what a conflict 20 years from now will be and start preparing for it. Marshall needs to retire; he's damned old, but the group's purpose is still relevant.
40 years ago was 1973, which was 4 years before Star Wars, and 7 years before Empire Strikes Back, which is where Yoda is first mentioned and appears.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I wonder how close he was from the Aliens at Area 51.
If they get rid of what works the next thing you know the Pentagon will prioritize the capture of the rebel leader Louis Riel before the Saskatchewan Rebellion spreads to the central US.
What an amazing visionary! Envisioning the implosion of a corrupt, bankrupt police state? Brilliant! Most populous country on Earth is in the ascent? Wizard! Robots becoming more useful? Astounding perception!
The average Mechanics Illustrated article is just about as precognitive.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
We've shifted all the money over to non-war bullshit like praising the homosexual agenda, watering-down the combat arms with females, spending millions rehabbing non-deployables who should be kicked out, employing thousands of majors to work on power-points, doubling-down on suicide prevention classes every year, and covering every surface of every building with sex harassment posters... I'm surprised this dude has kept his job THIS long.
"I also predicted this due to ever-growing social spending leading to increasing cost-cutting pressures on everything else. I'd like to claim authorship of this repeatedly successful prediction method, but I cannot."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
When 92 years old you reach, look as good, you will not.
The right wing dingbats are cool with it, after all when they win the next election they'll be using Obama's powers to silence liberals just like Obama used Bush's powers (enjoy your unstoppable unitary executive commander in chief)
Stop building tanks and jets we must.
and apparently he's been senile for the last 15 years...
Be seeing you...
When 92 years old you are, less senile you will be not.
The think tank should remain. Defense Department has to be ready for the next thing. Nations lose wars because they fight the next war the same way they fought the last one. A think tank like that might keep you ready.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Fortunately he's not the only one doing this stuff, although he might be the only one who was full time.
SIGMA is a non-profit group of science fiction writers (originally all with PhDs) who do futurism consulting from time to time to the US government and non-governmental organizations. Interesting group of folks, some of them are currently involved with the Century Starship project. Think of an American hard-sf writer and chances are they're a member.
Yesterday.
FTFA: the Pentagon's Yoda has amassed a loyal following of supporters and protegesâ"sometimes called Jedi Knights. Not least is former Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld,
Aw, c'mon already. He's just another Bush crony. If he was any damn good, we wouldn't be fighting an endless money-pit war on terror to the tune of some 3,000 deaths or flying military drones all over our back yards. Is this his idea of 'future military threat?'
I bet his crowning glory among the given company has centered around how to strip tax dollars out of the budget and inject into privatized miltary for the past 40 years.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
For Pentagon, future there isn't. Retirement there is, and suffering. Like the sound of millions of voices from the future, suddenly silenced.
why was this nodded down? seems like a rather accurate assessment about how those who come into power rarely, if ever, take any action to reduce the powers they inherited, even if they criticized those powers before taking office.
These kinds of people are useful, even if they don't make specific predictions that often.
Besides, you could employ this guy for several years and it'd cost less than some missiles do.
Ludwig von Mises predicted it way back in 1921!!
So "the men who stare at goats" was a documentary?
So money is tight, so instead of cancelling useless, super expensive programs like F-35 or stopping tank production (we have hundreds of functional, mothballed tanks, yet we keep making them so we can keep the factory open, despite the fact that tanks are drone fodder and totally useless).
So instead of trimming a hundred billion in waste, we get rid of a very low cost office whose job is to make sure we can anticipate the next threat?
FAIL
It only counts if he used quatrains to do the predicting.
Everyone has lost the fact that dude is 92 years old.... Time to retire, it is! Workaholics...sheesh. Go take a break already!
Like any "futurist," fortune teller or psychic, the accuracy of his predictions is based on having even the slightest clue, making vague or broad enough predictions that they're almost universally applicable, and relying on selective memory to erase all the predictions you made that didn't pan out. (Like some war with China that was mentioned in TFA.)
Which isn't to say that a think tank devoted to thinking about future wars and military tactics or strategies is a bad idea, or charlatanism, just to say that his ability to predict the future is being wildly overstated. I'm sure he has a sharp military mind, and good analytical skills to make the correct predictions he did, but that's a far cry from predicting the future.
I mean, I knew Google was going to be huge before their IPO... now that their stock's over $1,00 per share, does that qualify me as a technology or stock market futurist?
While the USN has been slow to adapt, relying on more conventional aircraft carrier refit packages to add complements of drones, in reality the paradigm shift means that drone frigates make a lot more sense, in terms of force projection and our actual enemies faced.
As well as the secret drone mods we do to "commercial" shipping units.
That and shifting to a shorter supply train using solar and wind resources to reduce our logistics.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
... and he's telling them something that they don't want to hear.
Pentagon's futurist "predicted" every single thing that USA created for the world's future..
Be careful what you think, let ye become it, you do!
Frankly I doubt the Chinese leadership is anywhere near that stupid.
War IS stupid. What the hell do you think they'd do?
Of all the weapons the Pentagon relies on to defend the United States, one of the strangest and most secretive is Andrew Marshall, a 92-year-old man who's spent the last 40 years staring into the future trying to predict the next big threat to America. In his role as the Pentagon's visionary sage, Marshall is credited with predicting the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of China's global prominence, the role of autonomous weapons and robots in warfare, and even helping end the Cold War.
His most recent predictions included "damn kids on the lawn", the loss of a his pants, and "there are 4 monkeys in the attic - I'm sure of it"!
Mr Marshall will be missed.
My studio - www.graylands.ca
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Back in the 70s?
Sure - it's a very safe prediction to make if you had his job. There were basically three possible outcomes: the USSR lost, the US lost or there was a nuclear war and we all lost. In two of these outcomes he's probably out of a job or dead regardless of whether he was right or wrong but predicting that the USSR will lose is the one scenario where he gets to keep his job and so the only scenario where he has to worry about being correct. So what would you predict?
Cynicism aside what we would really need to know to see whether he is good at predictions is how many other "yodas" the Pentagon had making predictions and getting it wrong. If you toss enough coins you are likely to find one which comes up heads 10 times in a row.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Stop arguing with yourself, AC. You sound like an idiot.
Moving your piece in Chess to prevent an attack on weak squares is more important then your response to an attack. That's what he did & anyone who thinks China isn't a threat to the US is a moron.
the weaponization of drones was predicted nearly 100 yrs ago by tesla.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
To be called upon at a more dire time in human history.
(geez, it can get WORSE?!?)
Everyone wants to stop eventually.
The primary role of the Pentagon is to envision what warfare of the future looks like. They take a 20 year view and ask the following questions (and run the following scenarios):
1) Who is/could be the enemy?
2) What does the battlefield look like (jungle, desert, urban, etc).
3) What kind of weapons/tactics will be used against us.
4) Most importantly, what type of military hardware would we need to have in order to counter that threat 20 years out.
They then take this 'long view' and use that as a road-map to invest in future weapons technologies. Mind you; this road-map gets updated every year. Then again, every year, the Department of Defense (DoD) retires 5% of old military technology, and buys up 5% of what's new... and at the end of that 20 year cycle, you have a 100% refreshed military that his hopefully ready/capable to counter whatever threat is coming at us today.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in the 90's, the war plans changed to a dual-theater conflict between 2 large nation-states (i.e. Russia & China). That is the military they built up to fight, essentially a land war in East Asia. When 9/11 happened, DoD was caught *completely* off guard. The reactionary spending that took place cost hundreds of billions more than it should have to up-armor Humvee's and build MRAP's simply because they had failed to plan for battle in the mountains of Afghanistan/Iraq engaged in guerrilla warfare. (Perhaps this is why it was time to retire Yoda?)
If you shut the think tank, the Pentagon will no longer be the R&D arm of the DoD, and within 10 years, certainly within 20 we will be a completely reactionary military force. From there, I do not see how we could or would remain a military super power. I'm not stating this in order to take a position on this being good or bad; I just wanted to put it out there that this would be the consequence of eliminating this central, core component of the Pentagon - and the role it plays in our entire national defense establishment.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
Which were used by the US at least since 1959 and various other examples in use or in development since then.
Oh, and as for the AirSea Battle Office, some apparently believe that it is redundant and superfluous as other parts of the US military already got that covered.
Since the ASB Office was first announced in August 2011, the Pentagon has faced charges that it is redundant with missions performed by other parts of the defense bureaucracy. It has often struggled to define how the ASB Office differs from other areas of the Pentagon, and to explain the value it adds to the services.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
"Now, facing budget cuts, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel is considering reorganizing"
How about starting with combining our military into one unit, and getting rid of all the triplicate work. Why in 2013 do we need separate Navy, Army, and Marine core?
Predict Apple? NO!
Predict Microsoft? NO!
Predict Oracle? NO!
Predict Intel Corp? NO!
Predict AMD? NO!
Predict BSD or netBSD or or NeXT STEP or Linus Tarvalds? HELL NO!
Sorry to write but Andrew Marshall IS the reason the Pentagon and White House and Congress 'Mind Think' have utterly failed.
QED
someone is going to take a huge shit on his grave when this decrepit and useless prick dies
If so we are truly in trouble.
Predicting the demise of the Soviet Union or the rise of China is pretty easy. Empires made up of different ethnic groups always tend to collapse (Roman and Mongol empires). As for China, large countries are either destined for domination or collapse. So the fact that China's still existing means it's destined to reclaim its former glory as a world power.
What I'm more interested in is his predictions about the development of war technology. How much of his vision is genuine insight and how much of it is wish fulfillment? So he "predicted" the use of remote controlled airplanes in warfare, then maybe some general thought, Hey, that's cool, and decided to spend some money on the weird idea. Even if the research project started small, consistent funding eventually led to the development of drones.
I wonder, if this guy predicted mechas, would that lead to the production into gigantic, piloted robots?
Sounds eerily like James Farentino's present-day "Mr. Tideman" character from the 1980 movie, "The Final Countdown." A powerful, mysterious character connected at high levels with the US government/military, [SPOILER ALERT, but you've had 33 years] he is revealed by the end to actually be Cdr. Richard Owens, who got transported from the present back to 1941 with the aircraft carrier, but got separated and left behind when the carrier returned to the present through "the storm" (wormhole?). The commander, an accomplished amateur historian, presumably has changed his identity and used his knowledge of all the twists and turns since 1941 to build power and wealth and advise the US government in the intervening years.