Deep inside the Pentagon, at the very center of it in fact, there is a single door with a small innocuous sign set above an access card swipe. The sign reads, simply, "Office of Net Assessment." Nothing more. There are no outward indicators at all that behind the door there is a legend at work.

The Office of Net Assessment is very small. At any one time there is one officer hand-selected from each of the military services and the Coast Guard, three or four civilian researchers, one administrative sergeant, one secretary, and two managers. Oh, and then there is the boss. There's at most 13 or 14 people, and yet the office and what it does for America are almost without measure because this is the de facto personal think-tank for the Secretary of Defense. From behind this door come decisions to conduct studies in such a wide range of topics that it truly staggers the imagination. Studies that have as a starting point scenarios that are 10, 20, even 50 years down the line. It is, I think, what everyone hopes goes on in the Pentagon, but which rarely does: Rational, blue-skies, open-minded, non-parochial, long-range thinking about our national defense.

Net Assessment was set up in 1973, during the Nixon Administration, and the man put in charge was an economist named Andrew Marshall. It tells you something about both the man and the office that despite the fact that Marshall's position is technically a political appointment, he has been appointed to his spot by every single president since Nixon. You read that correctly, I used the present tense. Andrew Marshall, aged 92, is still the director of the Office of Net Assessment. Known as "Andy" to his friends and affectionately as "Yoda" behind his back, Marshall's genius is in being open to new ideas, and that alone is rare enough in military circles, let alone within the Pentagon.

Think about that for a second. Despite all the ideological and political differences between the parties of the Presidents year in and year out, each one of them held one thing to be true, Andrew Marshall and the Office of Net Assessment are valuable resources that must be maintained regardless of which party is in power. All of them, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and now Obama held that one thing in common.

And now, in what must be one of the most fuddle-headed ideas to ever come from the Five Sided Puzzle Palace, it seems that some penny-wise-pound-foolish bean counter is considering putting ONA on the chopping block for budgetary reasons*. Which is, on the face of it, not only absurd, but practically obscene since the normal operating budget of ONA is only around $5-10 million dollars, which may seem like a lot, but that is out of the $538 BILLION dollar defense budget.

What does America get for that money? Something that is almost incalculably valuable: creativity.

Most of the work creating the reports that ONA generates is not actually done by the 13 people in the office. Yes, usually there are seven or eight intellectual projects going on "in house," but a lot of the time spent by those in the shop is actually spent either overseeing one of the contracts let by the office, attending various experimental war-games sponsored by the office, or listening to and evaluating projects that have just been completed. And who is actually doing these projects? Again, that brings us to Marshall again. He is unique precisely because he is so completely open to new ideas that he will at least listen to a pitch by almost anybody. So some of the projects are done by academics at various universities, others are run by one of the war colleges, some are created by independent scholars, while still others are developed and created by one of the various defense-related think-tanks around the country. (Never to one of the politically biased or focused ones though.)

Of course all of this is hard for outsiders to learn because, even as he is the fuel behind honest inquiry across the defense intellectual community, the final products that are turned in to Net Assessment are often classified. Why? Because not all of them are good, not all of them are necessarily as realistic as they should be, or the results that come out might be spun for political reasons by any number of people. Not putting any of his bosses, Democrat or Republican, in a bind is part of what he has added to the stability of the office. Besides, it is just not right when you work on the defense of the nation to embarrass your political leaders.

For example, about a decade ago Marshall commissioned a study to look at what might happen if global climate change was not only real, but was drastically accelerated. This is exactly what the office should be doing. The basic question was something like this: "What would be the security implications if, say, the temperature went up by five or six degrees and stayed that way for a century?" Unfortunately, the report was leaked. (It is now openly available here.) Predictably the leaked story was picked up and twisted for patently political reasons, first by the Guardian, then by a series of publications back in the States, either in an effort to embarrass the then-President, or to "prove" that the Pentagon believed in climate change. (For the record, that was not the point of the danged study. Although the services have now all independently agreed that climate change is a reality and we have to deal with and prepare for it, in 2003 that was not the case. Moreover, the report was not about "What causes climate change?" or even "Is climate change real?" It was assuming a hypothetical "what if," and then examining the resultant situation from a security perspective.)

In any event, with any luck wiser heads will prevail and ONA will continue, because it is exactly this sort of creative thinking and willingness to consider situations far downstream from the present that America needs quite desperately.

*Did you notice the obscene use of anonymous sources in that Washington Post article linked above? Another point of evidence for you.

The opinions here reflect those of the author alone and not the USG, DoD, the US Army, or any other affiliated unit. I can be reached at R_Bateman_LTC@hotmail.com.

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