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The Pentagon May Retire "Yoda," Its 92-Year-Old Futurist

Posted by timothy on from the as-he-himself-foresaw dept.

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."

18 of 254 comments (clear)

  1. Interesting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    He never saw it coming

    1. Re:Interesting by zifn4b · · Score: 5, Funny

      Let me re-word that for you: Saw it coming, he never did.

      --
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    2. Re:Interesting by Ransak · · Score: 4, Interesting

      In all fairness, he was busy being one of the men who stared at goats. That book/movie was closer to fact than fiction in many, many areas.

      --
      "Powers. I have them."
    3. Re:Interesting by RabidReindeer · · Score: 4, Funny

      Let me re-word that for you: Saw it coming, he never did.

      Saw it coming, he did not.

    4. Re:Interesting by ebno-10db · · Score: 5, Funny

      If you're a zillion years old, short, live in a swamp, and can raise starfighters with your mind, nobody gives a damn if you're dyslexic.

    5. Re:Interesting by MightyYar · · Score: 4, Funny

      Do, or do not. There is no spoon.

      I am a banana!

      --
      W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
  2. off from left field with a tin foil hat by Balthrop · · Score: 4, Funny

    uh the title makes it sound like they are going to uh assassinate the nice old man

    1. Re:off from left field with a tin foil hat by Dexter+Herbivore · · Score: 5, Funny

      Nope, then the title would read: The Pentagon May "Retire" Yoda, Its 92-Year-Old Futurist

  3. Well... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Well... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      He came up with the concept of Air-Sea Battle, which is a new method to coordinate the Air Force and the Navy in a future maritime war.

      Likely with China, as he predicted their rise to challenge US dominance back in the 80's when they were still weak.

      He predicted in the 70's that the Soviet Union's economy was in terrible shape despite them seeming robust and strong at the time.

      He predicted the need for precision weapons in the 60's, back when carpet bombing in Vietnam was still the norm.

      In 2003 during an interview he discussed the use of predator drones moving from surveillance to a strike platform, which really began in earnest in 2009-10.

      Not a bad track record.

    2. Re:Well... by TWiTfan · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I would be more curious as to WHEN he predicted this stuff. There is a BIG difference between sitting in 1970 and saying "The Soviet Union will collapse at some point in the future" and saying "The Soviet Union will collapse in the late 1980's or early 1990's." The former is pretty much useless information. The latter could be very useful.

      I would also want to know how much he got wrong. If the signal of what little he got right was drowned out by the noise of much more stuff that he got wrong, his information would also basically be useless.

      As I've never met a "futurist" yet whose predictions were worth much of a damn at the end of the day, I would be very skeptical of the usefulness of his office.

      --
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    3. Re:Well... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Translation:

      He did what any dimwit with a brain could do: he realized that importing everything from somewhere else (e.g. China) would significantly increase the economic power of that somewhere else, and with economic power comes available funding for military power.

      This was obvious back in the 1980s when China was just beginning to crawl out of the dark ages of the cultural revolution? ... [citation needed]

      He predicted what lots of others predicted about U.S.S.R.

      Back in the 70s? ... [citation needed]

      He observed that snipers and assassins were around centuries before he was even born, and were useful, and would therefore probably continue to be useful.

      WTF does that have to do with predicting the fact that Laser and GPS guided PGMs would become a dominant weapons system when most others were howling about how expensive they were? And AFAIK snipers are still not the dominant form of infantry after all these centuries.

      He mentioned a plan for drones to be weaponized that took six years to complete.

      How many others mentioned that in 2003? I happen to know for a fact that the weaponization of drones was done in great haste by a few people in the post 9/11 period leading up to the invasion of Afghanistan. It was not a cleverly thought out plan that took several years to carefully execute, it was hacked together by a handful of air force personnel and a civilian armorer. Very few people were predicting the explosion in drone operations we have seen in the last six to seven years back in 2003.

       

      That's not a prediction.

      Let's call him "Captain Obvious".

      That's not criticism it's whining let's call you "Spoiled Brat Boy"

    4. Re:Well... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    5. Re:Well... by Solandri · · Score: 4, Informative

      Air-Sea had been a Navy concept since before world war 2. They believed it so much they built carriers, and coordinated land based planes with carrier based planes very effectively, even when the land based planes belonged to the army. Read about Midway.

      Coordination within a single branch of the military is trivial. Coordination between the different branches is a nightmare. Each branch likes to do their own thing, and doesn't want to bother with or be bothered by the needs and wants of the other branches. e.g. The Air Force has been trying to kill off the A-10 ground attack aircraft for almost 20 years even though it's the best ground support asset in their arsenal. The Army would love to take over operating the A-10, but federal law limits them to rotary winged aircraft in combat roles. (Ironic considering the Air Force began as the Army Air Corps.)

      The divide and interservice rivalry is so deep and entrenched that when I was working on a project for the Army, the higher-ups had mandated that an Air Force officer ride along with them in the Humvee to force the two branches to coordinate.

      China was not weak back in the 80s. China was not weak in the 60s. They were an economic powerhouse even then. Douglas MacArther warned Never fight a land war in Asia".

      China was an economic footnote in the 1960s and 1970s. They were in the midst of the Cultural Revolution and were busy lynching anyone who could potentially have contributed to the country's economic development. Their economy took 30 years to double from 1950-1980. From 1980 to 2000 it doubled every 10 years. They didn't become notable on the world stage until (1) Deng Xiaoping began adopting capitalism in the 1980s, and (2) the Soviet Union fell allowing China to emerge from its shadow.

      And MacArthur wanted to nuke several Chinese cities to discourage China from entering the Korean War.

      Everyone but weapons system planners knew that the Soviet Union was going down as early as the 70s, because economists had predicted it even earlier, just by looking at empty shelves in soviet super markets and the drastic cut back in Soviet aid to its over-extended empire. They hung Castro out to dry, in the late 60s.

      As someone who grew up during that time, nobody believed the Iron Curtain was going to come down during our lifetime. It was like the stars in the night sky - always there, always had been there, and always would be there. The Soviets were so secretive that even if they hung Castro out to dry, you couldn't be sure if it was because they were having economic problems, or if it was because Castro had insulted the Soviet Premier's wife about her cooking at a state dinner. The events of 1989 remain one of the most shocking and indelible in my memory - right up there with Challenger and 9/11. Like the millions of people who now claim to have attended Woodstock, plenty of people now claim to have predicted the fall of the Soviet Union in hindsight. But believe me, even in the early 1980s if you had predicted on TV that the Soviet Union would crumble within a decade, you would've been laughed out of the studio.

  4. Stupid Move by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:Predicting The Probable by rockout · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Envisioning the implosion of a corrupt, bankrupt police state? Brilliant! Most populous country on Earth is in the ascent? Wizard!

    The difference between someoldguy and "Yoda" appears to be that someoldguy is really good at predicting the exact same things in hindsight.

    --
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  6. Re:What did he say about Iraq and Afghanistan? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    He either called it and they ignored him, in which case he's not useful

    No. In that case he'd be useful, it's just that they didn't use him. If you go out without an umbrella and it rains, that doesn't mean the umbrella is useless and should be discarded, it means the umbrella is potentially useful and you should consider using it.

  7. Re:Just one anachronism... by squiggleslash · · Score: 5, Funny

    That's how stunningly accurate were his predictions. Nobody at the time could figure out why he choose that name, but a mere 7 years later...

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