Mysterious, he is: Andrew W. Marshall, 92, is known as Yoda to Pentagon top brass because of his bald head and uncanny ability to predict what the state of warfare will be 20 to 30 years in the future
Somewhere inside the Pentagon sits a notoriously tight-lipped man whose words Defense Department top brass take as gospel and whose mysterious office exists to predict the future. Andrew W. Marshall, 92, is nicknamed Yoda both for his bald head and uncanny ability to foresee advancements in military technology and warfare strategy decades in advance and has done so for the Office of Net Assessment since Richard Nixon gave his the agency's top job back in 1973.
And though Marshall has accurately predicted the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of China, and the advent of drone warfare, and is credited with helping end the Cold War, the 'Pentagon's futurist-in-chief' could see his entire office axed if some bureaucrats get their way.
For the last twenty years, Yoda has been using the force to contemplate scenarios of an American war with China, a nation whose military spending could outpace our own within 20 years. As for predictions, he's said that performance enhancing drugs will one day very soon be just as important as technological developments.
'People who are connected with neural pharmacology tell me that new classes of drugs will be available relatively shortly, certainly within the decade,' Marshall told Wired in an extremely rare interview from 2003. Marshall has given very few interviews over the years and very rarely allows himself to be quoted in the press.
'One of the people I talk to jokes that a future intelligence problem is going to be knowing what drugs the other guys are on,' he said.
He's proven his predictive prowess with the fall of the Soviet Union, which he helped catalyze, and managed to keep his office afloat through every presidency since Nixon's. But on October 15, Defense News reported that Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and his department were considering getting rid of the internal think tank in light of serious budget cuts.
Marshall is so revered in the tight, smoke-filled circles in which he's traveled for 40 years, however, that critical voices have chosen to remain nameless. And its mysteriousness is working against it. 'You can't quite tell what the nation is getting out of it,' a former senior defense official who spoke on the condition of anonymity told the Washington Post.
That's because reports out of Marshall's office - which cover everything from potential nuclear strike outcomes, to energy use in Asia, to U.S. military superiority and any number of warfare and security topics - are so classified that the only person who can read many of them in the Defense Department is the Secretary of Defense himself.
Even officials speaking on the record aren't saying much on the subject.
'The Department of Defense is currently assessing our missions, structure and programs in light of an evolving set of strategic challenges, as well as a constrained fiscal environment,' Lieutenant Colonel Damien Pickart, a Pentagon spokesman, told the Post in a statement. 'It would be premature to comment on pre-decisional issues.'
Regardless of his office's usefulness as a whole, no one seems to deny Marshall's personal gifts as a gazer into the politico-military world of tomorrow. 'Mr. Marshall's brain is highly networked,' John Arquilla, Navy professor who has known Marshall for decades, told the Post while praising his 'mental suppleness.'
His age, Arquialla said, isn't an issue, either: 'His mind is as sharp as ever. He's gotten not just a second wind but a third wind in recent years.'
"Marshall is so revered in the tight, smoke-filled circles in which he's traveled for 40 years,"
Notice that your rulers smoke but do not want YOU to. Figure it out.