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."
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.
They didn't say he was a fucking psychic. Why do people get so stupid over the idea of "futurists"? No one says he magically foresaw things that no one in the world could. Just that he was consistent enough for them to rely on.