European Stars and Stripes (Newspaper) - July 25, 1994, Darmstadt, Hesse                                Military for the 21st Century continued from Page 1 a a a. Range budget questions Marshall who Heads the office of net assessment keeps an Eye on the Long View. Probably the. Only current government official who participated in. The entire cold War a he began As a nuclear strategist in 19-19 and has been kept on in his current Job by every. President since Richard Nixon the 72-year-old thinker a is struggling to save the . Armed forces from becoming paralysed by their own successes in the cold War and a desert storm. A. A his message is less a prescription Ian a warning a to avoid the Fate of other nations  Milit Aries Slid from Triumph to obsolescence. And his thinking is commanding top level attention in Washington As the end of the cold War and mind boggling leaps in. Technology have spurred a willingness to re examine Long held military assumptions. His cause in t being Hurt by the ascension Early this year of two old  key positions a of William Perry As defense Secretary and of adm William a Owens As vice chairman of the joint. Chiefs of staff. ,. In 1992, Pentagon strategist Andrew Marshall distributed a report Catling the . Inventory of tanks aircraft and ships a a Millstone that could Drain resources and thus impede innovation. It urged an end to the acquisition of such a Sunset systems according to Marshall the information age will spark a Quot military revolution just As artillery did in. The 1.5th a Century and Industrial age machinery did Over  150 years. The next 30 years he suggests May see the beginning of the end of the Industrial Era of attrition warfare among his other expectations. A mass armies May be replaced by smaller More professional forces  firepower and fighting a from a distance rather than closing with and destroying. The enemy. The main Mission of Forward ground forces May shift from laying direct fire to spotting targets for Quot standoff Quot weapons and assessing the damage. A the ascension of such standoff a weaponry May blur a distinctions among air land and sea warfare. For a example the Best Way to halt an iraqi tank attack May be not with . Tanks but with a submarine launching Quot Brilliant Quot missiles from.100 Miles away that Zero in on. Tie sound of russian built tank  the new forces probably won uld require less logistic support a fewer transport ships and planes a but far More targeting intelligence. Such information no longer would trickle through a military bureaucracy but would be beamed from Quot sensor to shooter Quot a directly from a satellite to a tiny screen inside a Pilot s Headset or into the warhead of a missile. A a military formations May become less hierarchical with Mic file management staff eliminated and front line commanders plucking intelligence from the United states or from space. Soldiers May use a continually updated electronic display of the whereabouts of Friend and foe. What Marshall envisions is a far cry from desert storm which he considers a late Industrial age conflict with Only hints of the High tech future a that is using new equipment in old ways. Meanwhile he is warning Perry. That an Early Lead is no guarantee of remaining on top. Quot countries that have very Good positions can lose them very rapidly Quot Marshall says. Quot the British Are . Rather than imitate Britain s  after its a Victory in world War i Marshall contends the .military should look to Germany in 1935, when the lean wehrmacht restricted in size by the treaty of Versailles combined the tank radio machine gun and air plane to create the Blitzkrieg. The upshot the germans  British and French in 1940 despite fielding.1,000 fewer  Way to grasp what warfare could be like in 30 years is to  Marshall s methods of spreading his ideas. Operating from a windowless submarine like office in the Pentagon s lowly a ring he commands a staff of. Only 13. And avoiding direct confrontation with the huge . Military establishment he employs stealth distance and precision. J Quot it s intellectual warfare within the system and he s been Brilliant at that Quot says Daniel Goure a former. A Pentagon strategist. The Low profile Marshall Battles by proxy recruiting allies to take the fight Public. He also practices a kind of Quot information dominance Quot knowing More than other players do. Quot in a transitory environment. He provides continuity Quot Owens says. A and Marshall attacks simultaneously on Many fronts. He relies heavily on a Cabal of former aides dubbed Quot St. Andrew s prep and an informal network extending from a a the joint chiefs of staff to the Central intelligence Agency. To Harvard University and across the defense Industry. T Marshall is a prolific writer whose opus is  almost entirely classified. Most of his Quot assessments a projects sometimes spanning years of meticulous research largely based on super secret intelligence a Are allowed 1 out of his office Only one copy at a time. For example he worked on the idea of the military revolution for several. Years before unveiling it a lot of top officers especially those stationed in the Field Are. Still Only vaguely aware of it. So his adversaries frequently Don t even know they Are under attack. Bythe time they realize it the Battle May be. Over. A Quot a a. Marshall employs such tactics because his revolution Calls into question some of the services Crown jewels and some of the defense Industry s biggest programs the Navy s aircraft carriers the army s tanks the air Force s fighters and bombers. If those platforms Are indeed Quot Sunset systems Quot As Marshall believes the armed services and defense contractors alike face a big shake up. Over the years Marshall s studies amount to a secret history of much of the cold War. In the mid-1970s, in response to startling intelligence about soviet War plans to sabotage european ports and Cut . Supply lines across the Atlantic Marshall and James Roche a former aide and now chief strategist for Northrop Grumman corp., wrote. A paper laying the foundation for the Navy s plan to bottle up the soviet Navy in the . A few years later Marshall s office produced a study that helped defense Secretary Harold Brown dissuade president Carter from withdrawing a s. Troops from South Korea. It predicted that South Korea Japan and Taiwan would respond to a . Pullout by acquiring nuclear 1 weapons. Well ahead of most Sovi ecologists Marshall noticed weaknesses of soviet society. Trained As an economist he began in the late 1960s to believe that the Cia was seriously underestimating the Burden that soviet defense spending was imposing. That Contention sparked a fight he pursued against the Agency for 20 years. In 1977, when Many Sovi ecologists were still predicting that the tanks used during the persian Gui War Are part of the Quot Sunset systems Quot Dod planner Andrew marshal would like to see come to an end. At right Secretary of defense William Perry dropping a round into a mortar at fort penning a is a philosophical ally of Marshall s.  would become More like the United slates., he focused on the environmental and demographic crises. That were undermining the soviet system. A few years later he commissioned a formal project on the vulnerabilities of the soviet Empire. Fearing that a weakening soviet leadership might be tempted into a desperate preemptive nuclear strike against the United states Marshall recommended in the Early 1980s a Quot doomsday project Quot to update Eisenhower Era defences. The resulting $9 billion project led to construction of new secret bunkers for . Leaders and provided them with Mobile vans with nuclear hardened communications systems. In 1986, Marshall s analysis of president Mikhail Gorbachev s View of the War in Afghanistan helped overcome the opposition of the joint chiefs of staff to shipping stinger anti aircraft missiles to the afghan resistance. The chiefs worried that the Downing of soviet pilots by . Weaponry would provoke a soviet offensive against Pakistan. But Marshall argued says one participant. In the discussions that sending stingers would convey a message to Gorbachev that Quot this was t his War yet and that his military was bungling it and could t win  Marshall again weighed in on Korea in 1991, with a still secret study warning that the North koreans could sweep through South korean defences and win a War within 10 Days before the United states could do much. Earlier this year the White House requested a copy. Quot As far As i m concerned it s Only Rumor that Clinton read it recently Quot Marshall demurs but Marshall s most significant contribution May Well be hts work on wars of the next Century. He first began noting soviet worries in the mid-1970s that . Technological advances would revolutionize warfare. He began his own project in 1989, at quarterly meetings of Quot St. Andrew s  Marshall Laid before his former assistants two questions with the waning of the cold War would a Multi Polar w orld produce new military competitions and could one of those Powers a probably China maybe Japan or India or even Russia a leapfrog the United states by acquiring 21st-Century technology China is seen As one of the forces that could leapfrog the . Military. A amps Dave Diazo the services Are being urged to develop High tech tracking and sensing systems. In 1991, Marshall circulated a draft of a study of the emerging military revolution written by Andrew Krepinevich a former aide to his Quot College of cardinals Quot an informal group that included Perry and Owens. A year later Marshall let the cat out of the bag he distributed a report panning the . Inventory of tanks aircraft and ships As a Quot Millstone Quot that could Drain resources and thus impede  the air Force was apoplectic Quot recalls Krepinevich. Basically the report called for halting the acquisition of such Quot Sunset systems Quot and slashing the defense budget. Marshall lost that round. A. Then in february Perry whose car once sported the License plate Quot i tech Quot became defense Secretary. A month later Owens became vice chairman of the joint chiefs. Suddenly the military began to pay attention to Marshall s ideas. Today five task forces and dozens of attendant study groups Are Weavering away at the Pentagon exploring the. Implications of a military revolution. A combined report to the defense Secretary is due at summer s end and there is talk in the Pentagon that billions of dollars May be allocated in line with its recommendations. Already the army has shifted its budget Over the past year from trying to improve current infantry weapons to trying to develop new ones. Indeed equipment purchases have generally been put on hold As the military pauses to consider the new world in fiscal 1995, the . Army will buy no tanks the air Force no fighters and the Navy Only a six ships. One Way the military brass might thwart Marshall s ideas is by adopting the rhetoric but resisting the Content. The army says Brig. Cen. Edward g. Anderson Iii of the combined arms come is moving from being Quot people organized around weapons systems Quot to Quot people a organized around  but others such As Goure the former Pentagon strategist worry that the army is simply Quot Chrome plating Quot its tank Force. Nonetheless the services Are studying information age warfare and conducting innovative War games. The Navy is contemplating building Stealthy Quot Arsenal ships Quot specifically designed to strike deep Inland with ballistic missiles that can reach up to 120 Miles in a few minutes. The army is beginning to look at marrying space surveillance systems the digitized Battlefield instant communications and Long Range precision strike ability. Despite such stirrings of change in the military Marshall and his allies still Aren t sure that the United states can stay on top in the coming Era. Quot what s different from the 20s and 30s is that there in t quite this leap of vision yet Quot he worries. 16 the stars and stripes monday july 25, 1994 the 5tars and stripes 17