WASHINGTON The Bush administration has asked one of the Pentagon's most unconventional thinkers to conduct its far-reaching review of the U.S. military in the clearest indication yet that senior officials intend to shake up America's armed forces and the weapons they use.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has selected Andrew Marshall, head of the Pentagon's internal think tank, and has asked him to report back his preliminary recommendations by the end of next week.
Mr. Marshall is a figure of some controversy in defense circles for his outspoken criticism of some of the traditional pillars of U.S. strategy and procurement policy. He has questioned the usefulness of the new F-22 fighter, the crown jewel of the air force's acquisition program, and has called the army's heavy tanks and the navy's aircraft carriers possible deathtraps that ought to be phased out before they prove to be the horse cavalry of the 21st century.
Whether or not these conclusions will be part of his final report, Mr. Marshall has a long and close association with Mr. Rumsfeld, and his appointment Thursday was viewed by senior Pentagon officials as the second clear sign in a week that the new defense secretary plans to make a dramatic impact on the military. President George W. Bush pledged during his election campaign to improve the quality of the armed forces, and aides said he plans to spend most of next week visiting military bases and laying out his ideas.
[On Friday, Mr. Bush confirmed that the Pentagon would do a "top-to-bottom review of what's happening in today's military," including missions and spending priorities, The Associated Press reported from Washington. Other officials said the study included a consideration of how much further the large arsenal of U.S. nuclear weapons could be safely reduced.]
Mr. Bush stunned some senior commanders this week by deciding not to seek an immediate increase in the Pentagon budget. Before proposing new funding, Mr. Rumsfeld told the top brass Tuesday, the administration wants a fundamental review of the U.S. military's strategy, structure and missions.
Responding to a reporter's question about the defense budget Friday, Mr. Bush said there would be no "early supplemental," meaning an add-on to the current allocation of $297 billion.
Pentagon officials said that Mr. Rumsfeld had an understanding - though not quite a promise - that, once the study is finished, the White House would support as big an increase in the defense budget as he deems necessary.
The review is on an extraordinarily fast track. Mr. Rumsfeld gave Mr. Marshall the assignment Tuesday. Mr. Marshall is to wind up the review by the middle of March.
Mr. Bush said Monday that the goal is to set a "long-range vision for the military." According to Pentagon insiders, Mr. Marshall's orders are to undertake a broad analysis of likely adversaries, the nature of future wars, how many conflicts the United States should be prepared to fight at once and what forces it would need to do so. The answers to those questions could dramatically affect the size of the military and the weaponry it buys.
The military's opposition to Mr. Marshall's recommendations is "likely to be fierce," predicted a person involved in the review.
But Mr. Marshall holds two aces. He has a decades-long relationship with Mr. Rumsfeld. And the Bush campaign's defense stance, laid out in a speech at the Citadel in South Carolina in September 1999, relied heavily on ideas nurtured by Mr. Marshall over the years.
The publicity-shy Mr. Marshall is something of a legend in national security circles, both for his longevity and for his far-reaching network of acolytes across the government, academia and the defense industry. At 79, he is said to be the only current Pentagon official who participated in virtually the entire Cold War, beginning in 1949 as a nuclear strategist for Rand Corp., then moving to the Pentagon as a civilian official in 1973. He has been kept in his current job by every president since Richard Nixon.
Despite his age and experience, Mr. Marshall's views are hardly conservative. In recent years, he has gained a reputation as a radical reformer and has antagonized many top officers by arguing that:
•The military is too focused on Europe and not enough on Asia and needs to shift its geographical and spending priorities.
•The air force's new F-22 fighter has too short a range to be of much use in the 21st century, when the military may not have bases near its adversaries.
•As Third World nations acquire cruise missiles and other precision weapons, the army's heavy tanks and the navy's aircraft carriers are becoming sitting ducks.
Since the end of the Cold War, Mr. Marshall has focused heavily on the rise of China, sponsoring war games that look at possible U.S.-Chinese confrontations and provoking critics to say that he is looking for a new enemy to replace the Soviet Union.
"Most U.S. military assets are in Europe where there are no foreseeable conflicts threatening vital U.S. interests," one of Mr. Marshall's closely held studies concluded in 1999. "The threats are in Asia." It also argued that by 2025, India would be more important than Russia in U.S. foreign policy.
The sort of military that Mr. Marshall has advocated would look far different from the current one, but it would not necessarily be larger. Each of the armed services would have to be able to move troops quickly over long distances and carry its own fuel and supplies without many overseas bases.
Mr. Marshall's future air force might emphasize missiles, missile defenses and long-range bombers - which the air force is not currently buying. A navy reshaped by Mr. Marshall's views might radically cut its fleet of surface ships and be built around submarines and "arsenal ships," basically barges loaded with land-attack missiles. And the army might be split into a small, fast-moving combat force and a larger, lower-tech peacekeeping and small-war force.
As part of Mr. Marshall's review, the Pentagon is also expected to scrutinize the nuclear balance, looking at both offensive missiles and defenses against missiles.
Mr. Marshall spent most of his career thinking about nuclear conflict. When he joined Rand in 1949, atomic warfare was the central issue. In the early 1980s, he pointed to demographic and environmental indications that the Soviet Union was drifting into crisis.
He did not get as much top-level attention during the Clinton era but Mr. Bush's defense advisers, particularly Richard Armitage, a former Pentagon official, liked Mr. Marshall's ideas. Many of the themes that he developed during the 1990s were reflected in Mr. Bush's speech at the Citadel, which was largely written by Mr. Armitage and John Hillen, a Wall Street executive and former army officer.
"Today, our military is still more organized for Cold War threats than for the challenges of a new century - for Industrial Age operations, rather than for Information Age battles," Mr. Bush said then. It was a line that could have been taken from any number of reports produced by Mr. Marshall's office, formally known as "the Adviser to the Secretary of Defense for Net Assessment."
Nuclear Review Tests Brass
In directing the Defense Department to consider further cuts in nuclear weapons as part of the review, Mr. Bush is testing the military leadership's view that reductions in the U.S. arsenal beyond those already planned would undermine their ability to deter war, The Associated Press reported from Washington.
The United States now has about 7,000 strategic nuclear weapons and under the START-2 agreement with Russia that number will fall to between 3,000 and 3,500. In 1997, Washington and Moscow agreed in principle that a follow-on treaty should drop the numbers to 2,000.
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, wants to go even lower, to 1,500 warheads. In an assessment last year, the Joint Chiefs of Staff said going below 2,000 warheads would make the existing nuclear targeting plan untenable and undermine the bomber force.