Net Assessment For The Secretary of Defense

Net Assessment
for
Secretary of Defense
Future Implications
from
Early Formulations
Dr. Phillip A. Karber

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Why? and For Whom? i
1. Need for a National Net Assessment 1
2. Net Evaluation Subcommittee 15
3. Systems Analysis as Surrogate 37
4. Demise of Net Evaluation 47
5. The 1970 Blue Ribbon Defense Panel 67
6. Laird’s Search for a Strategy Dialectic 77
7. The Pentagon versus the NSC 85
8. Net Assessment Method and Process at NSC 93
9. National Net Assessments 105
10. Lessons Learned 111
WHY? AND FOR WHOM?
Strategy is the great Work of the Organization.
In Situations of life or death, it is the Way of survival or extinction.
Its study cannot be neglected.
Sun Tzu1
The conduct of Net Assessments for the Secretary of Defense originated in the early
1970s. During this period the national security consensus had eroded in an expensive
and frustrating military intervention, a climate of economic pressure where military
budgets were headed toward fiscal constraint prevailed, and new threats appeared on
the horizon. Net Assessment was viewed then by far-sighted leaders as a method of
helping the US remain competitive in a changing security environment. It is the thesis
of this paper that Net Assessment for the Secretary of Defense is a lesson from that
earlier era that remains relevant today and should not be forgotten.
The performance of Net Assessment is an explicitly defined job requirement of the
Secretary of Defense and a statutory responsibility of the office. It is not discretionary,
and the US Code is very specific in requiring that:
The Secretary of Defense shall transmit to Congress each year a

report that contains a comprehensive net assessment of the defense
capabilities and programs of the armed forces of the United States and
its allies as compared with those of their potential adversaries.2
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
Thus, according to US law, Net Assessment is both a product of and agent for the
Secretary of Defense.
As the “Clausewitzian” personification of the one chosen to address strategic
questions,3 the Secretary of Defense is the bridge4 between the Presidential policy
vision and the direction of the Armed Forces in the their readiness to defend the
nation against a variety of contingencies.5 This dialectical6 interface is normally called
“strategy development” and, if asked, most American’s would likely believe that
having a dedicated organization assist the Secretary of Defense in pulling together a
comprehensive assessment of the US and its potential adversaries is not just common
sense,7 but essential to getting an important task done, and building public confidence
C.
D.
II
WHY? AND FOR WHOM?
that it is being done right.8 Certainly the US Congress does; and they have repeatedly
asked for “net assessments” and even mandated them in Department of Defense
legislation.9
For nearly four decades the concept of “net assessment” applied to issues of
international security has been “based on an intellectual approach that,” at the highest
level, “is for the use of the Secretary of Defense.”10 But it has also taken on attributes
that transcend an office in the Pentagon. The term “intellectual movement” fits any
idea that procreates a dedicated following, is taught as a serious cognitive enterprise in
leading educational institutions, and broadens its appeal to other applications. By this
definition, Net Assessment has become an “intellectual movement,” and what some
might call a “rhetoric of inquiry,”11 one that is noted for, and takes pride in, “speaking
truth to power.”12
The concept of Net Assessment has spread from the halls of the Pentagon to be used
by multinational alliances,13 to pique the interest of potential competitors,14 and, post
9/11, as a model for other types of security related agencies.15 It is now taught as policy
in
10
11
International Conflict
14
III
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
“methodology” in some of the nation’s (at least the Capitol’s) leading Security Study
programs16 whose syllabi aim “to increase your influence in the real world through the
development of superior strategic analytical thinking” with Net Assessment “methods
that you will be able to use … immediately and upon graduation.”17 Indeed, there
are acolytes who go by the name Jedi18 and call the “Pentagon Strategist”19 and their
mentor, Yoda.20
WHY? AND FOR WHOM?
All great intellectual movements worthy of the name have founding stories or “creation
myths.” Net Assessment’s parentage seems to have come from opposite directions.
On the one side, the canonical telling of “net assessment” origins has focused on the
vision of Andy Marshall, his RAND colleagues, and the internecine politics of the
NSC.21 On the other side, it can be argued that “the term ‘net assessment’ was used
before Marshall came into the government in the early 1970s.”22 Some types of “net
assessment” were already being performed in the Pentagon 23 and, as he himself has
pointed out, the White House hosted a similar sounding role, “during the Eisenhower
Administration, the NSC Net Evaluation Subcommittee (NSEC) performed what
was considered to be the net assessment function at the national level.”24
Marshall has eschewed paternity for naming Net Assessment. “I did not pick the
name of the office or the phrase to designate this particular form of analysis.”25 For
serious students of national security, the bragging rights as to “who is the father?” of
an intellectual movement is not as important as grounding the idea of Net Assessment
as a serious analytical concept whose meaning is neither uncertain nor institutionally
illegitimate.26
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
But as we look to the future, there is also a downside to this origin story—that the
institutionalization of Net Assessment, which was originally intended to be a direct
extension of the Secretary of Defense, has not been formalized—it remains fragilely
and tenuously linked to the longevity of one person. In part that is to the credit of
the intellectual power of an individual that did not need form to follow function in
order to be influential with no less than ten successive Secretaries of Defense. But the
fact that the original mandate remains unfulfilled in part also reflects institutional
“friction” where bureaucratic jealousies and the sheer pressure of day-to-day events
conspire to prevent the Secretary of Defense from exercising his role at chief strategist
for the nation’s defense.
The kind of input needed for strategy development when facing a long-term rivalry
with a hostile major power is different than that for traditional multi-polar military
contingency planning or normal foreign relations. For a quarter of a century, the
American National Security establishment struggled to find a mechanism by which the
senior leadership of the country could receive the information necessary to formulate a
national strategy that was not only viable in the short term, but competitively sustainable
over an “enduring rivalry” with another superpower.27 The term “Net Assessment” as
a process and method of thinking has evolved to represent the kind of foundational
material necessary for the implementation of a successful national military strategy
in a long-range competition.28 However, it neither came quick nor easy and if not
appreciated, the flames of intellectual honesty and substantive depth can all to quickly
be snuffed out by “party line” and political correctness.
While the term “net assessment” has been used to describe a variety of functions by
a variety of interpreters, to be of help in developing competitive national strategy it
necessarily involved: not merely intelligence gathering but the comparative evaluation
of forces and military establishments; not only the critical appraisal of fighting assets
but the systems that produced, trained maintained and sustained them; not just as
a snapshot in time but a developmental stream combining past trends with future
projections; not as a single point “bottom line” but a process that involved innovative
approaches, heuristic thinking29 and a willingness to provoke the kind of constructive
debate that comes with challenging status quo assumptions.30
The
WHY? AND FOR WHOM?
The many achievements of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment over the last 40
years and the contributions of its founder, Andrew Marshall, have been documented
elsewhere.31 What has not been addressed is what motivated it and why it was thought
important to report directly to the Secretary of Defense. It is the questions of why?
and for whom? rather than what? or how? that are the focal points of this paper.
On
1
NEED FOR A
NATIONAL NET ASSESSMENT
For senior statesmen and their advisers, the task of evaluating
external security threats and identifying strategic opportunities
is a perennial challenge. This process is an exercise familiar to all
states and is the antecedent of effective national strategy and policy.
It requires significant intellectual effort, curiosity, creativity,
and a tolerance for uncertainty in the exploration of alternative
futures. But this task has vexed statesmen throughout history, who
have frequently misperceived the threats and behavior of their
competitors.1
From the founding of the Republic up to the late 1880s, the assessment of foreign
threats, 2 anticipation of long-terms trends impacting on American security, and/
or the development of national strategy tended to be on an ad-hoc spur-of-the-
moment basis. The approach for addressing potential US military operations against
foreign opponents was neither institutionalized nor “based on any high-level, long-
range, strategic planning, but just happened.”3 The Spanish-American War not only
Journal of Military and Strategic Studies

PHILLIP A. K ARBER
introduced the US to global force deployments but raised the need to consider conflict
with other great powers outside the North American hemisphere; thus the first Service
offices dealing with problems of national strategy were formed.4
For the first half of the twentieth century, the United States had neither a strong
tradition of strategic assessment nor a coherent method of integrating it with long-
range planning or strategy development.5 The Army had borrowed the Prussian6
“applicatory system”7 which had been developed for tactical training of field grade
officers.8 Subsequently adopted by the US Navy 9 under the better known rubric of
“Estimate of the Situation” (EoS), it became the driving methodology for War Plan
Orange—the dominant American theater strategy of the interwar period10 —and was
based on “four reasoned elements:”
Step 1: “Statement of the Mission;”
Step 2: “Assessment of Enemy forces and intentions;”
Step 3: “Assessment of Own forces;” and,
The Road to
Tactics
10
NEED FOR A NATIONAL NET ASSESSMENT
Step 4: “Evaluation of possible Courses of Action.” 11

These “elements” were addressed in sequential steps from top to bottom that, despite the
appearance of inductively bringing external information into the process, nonetheless
reflected a linear deductive reasoning process.
This deductive method was embedded in US Army and Navy contingency and war
planning in the early twentieth century,12 and the “strategic estimate” process became
endemic to the “American Way of War.”13 As a method it demonstrated three positive
aspects. First, it showed sensitivity to the Clausewitzian “primacy of the political” with
the national “policy” (mission) as the starting point of strategic logic14 and as defined
by the Commander in Chief15 or his Cabinet level representatives—the Secretary of
War and the Secretary of Navy.16 Second, the emphasis upon comparative assessments
of relative force generation in a context that required national mobilization17 and trans-
oceanic deployment became a staple of the planning.18 Third, the system legitimized
the brainstorming of innovative and relevant strategic concepts, including utilization
of the intellectual resources of the national War Colleges of the Army19 and Navy, 20 as
11
14
Military
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
well as debating alternative courses of action based on the comparative assessment.21

On the other hand, the “strategic estimate” process as institutionalized in the
American military Services evidenced at least seven serious sins. Preeminent among
them: political guidance was generally a fiction.22 Few politicians were able to articulate
the kind of clear guidance that mission-driven planning required.23 Moreover, once
confronted with the derivative plans attempting to implement his long-range strategy,
the Commander in Chief:
• Not infrequently ignored them;24
• Revised the objectives without realigning resources;25
• Gave them only cursory attention or endorsement;26
• Made changes that were incompatible with the existing plan;27 and/or,
Orange
4
• Inhibited serious contingency planning for real threats.28

Top down policy guidance for long-range military planning tended to come in
“sound bites” from the White House29 and “telegrammed reporting” from the State
Department, with policy and strategy—either so general or timidly narrow as to be
useless—demonstrating the link between policy and strategy more in the breach than
observance.30
If politics had primacy, there were also secondary but serious problems within the
military side of the strategy development process, particularly in inconsistent and
asymmetrical assumptions buried in war plans not subject to civilian oversight or
critical review. While “balance assessment” was a critical link in the deductive chain
between guidance and options, the bifurcated process of G-2 evaluating the threat
and G-3 appraising its own relative capabilities produced a dangerous weakness in the
process: they were often neither truly comparative in the metrics they used nor objective
in diagnosing strengths and weaknesses of both sides.31 Third, where the German
Tactics
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
training system had stressed initiative and imagination in developing alternatives, the
American system gravitated to a “school solution” that reduced rather than expanded
the range of creative options32—for example, boiling everything down to a simplistic
naval “Maritime” or army “Continental” strategy33—and cross service coordination
was incomplete at best, and not infrequently inconsistent.34 Fourth, at the peak of
the industrial revolution and at a time of epic technological innovation, American
national planning assumed that technology was something to be addressed by Service
armament bureaus rather than viewing new systems with radically new capabilities
as a form of strategic breakthrough.35 Fifth, there was little systematic recognition
of uncertainties,36 treatment of entropy37 or appreciation of an opponent that reacts
Tactics
Military Planning in the Twentieth Century

to threat reaction.38 Sixth, the assumption that the process was linear and could be
addressed in successive steps ignored the iterative nature of most strategic problem
solving where there is a constant interplay between deduction and induction.39
Lastly, because the whole planning system essentially involved “scaling up” to the
theater level what was basically a tactical approach, a number of issues unique to strategy
either got left out or were not addressed coherently. Tactical thinking does not include
or tends to ignore disconnects between ends and means,40 key asymmetries between
major rivals,41 problems of prioritization between different fronts,42 the contribution of
allies and alliance management,43 or the manipulation of strategic postures to induce
inefficient resource expenditure by the opponent.44 Strategy is not just tactics writ large
because the latter, focused on the immediate engagement with the opponent, provide
no coherent foundation for a long-range competitive approach trying to avoid direct
conflict.
Tactics
40
41
conventional assault.
44
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
Strategy has long been recognized as a critical element in national security. The
Commander in Chief has a prime responsibility in its articulation but this does
not take place in a vacuum, and is frequently impacted by broader issues of foreign
policy, Congressional funding and popular support. When new threats arise and
are recognized with plentiful resources, the discussion of strategy tends to take back
seat to issues of modernization and execution, but when enemies are distant, small or
multiple, the strategic choices that a country must make and the risks associated with
them take on renewed importance.
The “surprise” at Pearl Harbor has tended to mask the abject failure on the eve
of World War II of American strategic assessment: both in substance and process.45
Strategic change—the rise of new challengers under the pressure of receding
resources—has not infrequently been associated with a “Strategy Gap” where the
continuance of an old strategy may be irrelevant to a new environment but a new plan
may also have blind spots or be unrealistic on what is needed to implement it. The
problem of strategic failure is not just one of embarrassment or expensive remediation;
in a multi-polar nuclear world a failed strategy can endanger the nation and imperil the
survival of allies. Although “bad strategy” is fairly evident after it fails, there has been
little attention given to how to diagnose it or prevent its consequences pro-actively.46
“Strategicide” means death by failed strategy. It describes a situation where a plan
of action is a “self-inflicted wound” on the organization that developed it.47 The term
is a construction of the Greek “stratēgos” (commander’s intent) and Latin “caedere”
(to kill)—and literally means a leader’s plan that is more deadly for its inventor than
the opponent. In plain English, “Strategicide” describes an institutional defeat where
mistakes in “systematic planning” are endemic to the casual chain of disaster.
Particularly stark in America’s pre-war misconception was a “political” strategy
that encouraged the forward deployment of US forces and their symbolic “deterrent”
posture in the Philippines. This indictment applies not only to the political leadership
but the gross inadequacies in planning by the uniformed military. In short, there
was a fundamental breakdown in the joint planning process within and between the
institutionalized services, not to mention the upstart Air Corps.48
For the United States, like others hiding behind oceanic barriers, there was a real
danger that, as Lord Tedder once remarked about the tendency of strategists to draw
conclusions from the later stages of wars, when “after some years of lavish expenditure;
the Commander knows that he can more or less ‘count on a blank cheque’.”49 One of
the leading planners of the era, Vannevar Bush admitted:
We have done military planning of actual campaigns in time of war

well, and we have done military planning of a broad nature in time of
peace exceedingly badly. Yet both have been done largely by the same
individuals … .
Why the striking contrast? First, peacetime planning deals with facilities and
techniques of the future rather than the present. Second, the bond that holds men
in unison under stress of war becomes largely dissolved when peace returns. Third,
peacetime planning is done in a political atmosphere.50
The danger of learning from the wrong end of a war is an important point, because,
if the old von Moltke dictum is true that “no battle plan survives first contact with the
enemy,”51 then success, even survival, in the initial period of war puts a premium on
getting strategic assessment as right as possible under conditions of uncertainty “in the
fog of peace.52
As with most human phenomenon, the explanations for America’s “Strategicide” of
the inter-war period are complex and multivariate, but five key components particularly
relevant to the modern environment suggest five hypotheses:
1. That the rise of a National challenger in a region where the stabilizing
powers are over-committed and understrength puts a premium on
depending upon political deterrence that, because it increasingly looks like
a con, not a commitment, was asymmetrically perceived and actually gave
an incentive for prevention rather than precaution.
2. That Depression Economics and the national mood of isolationism
eviscerated the best efforts of planning, and thus produced a charade at
home and provocation abroad.53
they are violated.

PHILLIP A. K ARBER
3. That multilateral Arms Control—the strategic Naval Arms Limitations on

Capital Ships—produced an environment where unilateral self-constraint
was more pressing, in order to save resources, than hanging tough to enforce
opponent observance.54
4. That the “fog of peace”55—including a State Department led politicized
strategy of symbolic forward deployment for deterrent purposes and the
need to appease Alliance politics56 —overrode and papered-over deep
concerns in military planning about the disconnect between capabilities
and expectations.
5. That discontinuities in Military Service institutional interests and
differences in interpretation of how to implement them (where the Army
was gearing up for a long forward deployed campaign in Europe and the
Navy was trying to back out of exposed forward vulnerability in the Pacific)
made realistic planning a farce.57
None of this excuses Japanese culpability in starting an aggressive war, but the extent
to which Americans were shocked at the disastrous turn of events during the first six
months has much more to do with a failure of a planning system that not only did not
anticipate the danger, but actually provoked preemption.
Large institutions do not like “blank slate” strategic planning, and the military even
less. It’s a lot of effort that frequently goes to naught. In the words of one senior
British military officer on receiving request from the Foreign Office to participate in
post-World War II strategic guidance: “I am afraid that it means more work for the
Joint Planners, but I do not see how we can get out of it.”58 Yet the military is even
more uncomfortable operating in the absence of strategic intent. Despite recognized
deficiencies in Services planning prior to World War II, the US military ended the
conflict without any clearer peacetime planning structure than it started with. In fact,
“as of V-J Day the Joint Chiefs of Staff had received no specific directive to continue
to address basic military problems jointly in peacetime as they had during the wartime
The Road to
latter.
10
years.”59
In 1945 Life Magazine declared in headlines: “We are in a different league now
… . How large the subject of security has grown, larger than a combined Army and
Navy.”60 Despite a broad recognition of the need for unified military organization to
replace the bi-service divide,61 and acceptance of greater peacetime civilian oversight
as articulated by the Eberstadt Task Force on National Security Organization,62 it
was not until passage of the National Security Act of 1947 that there was an attempt
to articulate a “National Security Strategy”63 and structure a competitive assessment
1.
considerations.
Parameters
ss each year
1.
11
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
process to support it.64 The purpose of this legislation that created the first integrated
National Military Establishment65 was not just for efficiency but to insure effective
“unified strategic direction of the combatant forces.”66 And along with strategy came
recognition of the need to “assess” the “potential military power” of the United States,
which was declared the first “duty” of the National Security Council.
… for the purpose of more effectively coordinating the policies

and functions of the departments and agencies of the Government
relating to the national security, it shall, subject to the direction of
the President, be the duty of the Council … to assess and appraise the
objectives, commitments, and risks of the United States in relation
to our actual and potential military power, in the interest of national
security, for the purpose of making recommendations to the President
in connection therewith … .67
Thus, the first provision specified for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the 1947 National
Security Act was the mandate “to prepare strategic plans and to provide for the strategic
direction of the armed forces.”68
Despite its sweeping nature, the 1947 “act did not, however, create a holistic
4.
enterprise;”69 civilian participation in competitive strategy and oversight of contingency

planning remained weak.70 “Its roots lay in the British Committee of Imperial Defense,
a cabinet agency for coordinating national security matters,” but this “arrangement
was more suited to Cabinet than to presidential government.”71 The raising of the
traditional Army staff system of G-2 Intelligence/G-3 Operations system to a national
level and for “joint” application made the process of strategy development both rigid
and turgid.72 Thus, as early as 1949, what would be the first of many reorganizations,
argued for broader civilian participation in the higher realms of strategy development:
Much has been written and said about the incapability of civilians to deal with
military matters. Military science, it is said, can be the province only of the military.
That may be true on the battlefield. It is not true in the realm of grand strategy. Modern
war cannot be left solely to the generals.73
This issue was compounded as the Secretary of Defense took on more and more
responsibility for “grand strategy”74 that required understanding of strategic concepts
as well as the ability to critically evaluate them relative to other options in order to
make prudent decisions on budgets, force structure trade-offs, and major weapons
system procurements, let alone issues of overseas campaigns, alliance war planning,
nuclear deterrence or considerations of negotiated arms control.75
Political Science
Secretary of Defense
2
NET EVALUATION
SUBCOMMITTEE
The group involved was called the Net Evaluation Subcommittee of the National
Security Council. And it was a quite interesting group because it had been established
during Eisenhower’s time to do reviews of the results of a thermonuclear war between
the United States and the Soviet Union. The net assessment, in other words, was what
happens to each country in the event of that kind of a war.1
The creation of “the absolute weapon” changed both the nature of war and the role of
civilians.2 In the conventional era military leaders could treat the initial period of war
as indeterminate, buying time to convert peacetime resources into a mass instrument
of an “intra-war strategy” designed to meet and defeat the opposing forces. But in the
nuclear age three millennia of recorded military art was turned upside down: the early
strikes were likely to be decisive; the national mobilization base could be destroyed
before most military assets were ever deployed; and, the destruction of opposing forces
was secondary to the slaughter of the society that they were to protect. Strategy came
to mean a plan of enforced “inaction and indecision”—what some called the “end of
strategy”3—a nuance as strange to traditional military thinking as it was important
to civilian leaders and therefore imperative for their intervention both on the decision
to use nuclear weapons and in the planning process to prevent being confronted with
that contingency.4
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
It has become accepted wisdom that the nuclear age introduced and legitimized
the rise of non-military “strategists” and with them a new era of methodological
innovation in forecasting and assessment beyond traditional military planning. But
for the first post-war decade civilian grand strategists were few, and their impact
ephemeral, with little evidence of a coherent strategy process. The newly formed
“Department of Defense” had trouble grappling with service integration and its own
role in adjudicating resource allocation versus operational requirements. The Joint
Chiefs created a structure to go through the motions of strategy development5 but this
represented more of a political forum for internecine battle and budgetary bargaining
than a unified vision of to how address the Soviet Union as a rising challenger.6
Various luminary committees addressed pieces of the nuclear problem, but produced
more controversy than consensus. The one civilian led effort at integrated assessment,
long-range planning, and strategy articulation—NSC 68—was first sidelined as too
ambitious, then in less than six months, with the outbreak of war in Korea, superseded
as insufficient.7
As the nuclear era evolved into second-generation technology—jet bombers,
hydrogen bombs, ballistic missiles, SAMs, and tactical nuclear warheads—it brought
with it increased appreciation of the need for “netting” a much more complex “balance:”
the interaction of very asymmetric offensive and defensive weaponry; the “gray area”
overlap of nuclear and conventional forces represented by “dual capable” systems;
and the potential of damage-limiting counter-force preemption versus apocalyptic
counter-value targeting. Thus, in the late stages of the Truman Administration, as
the Korean War dragged on and concern over Soviet atomic weapons development
and conventional military buildup mounted, the National Security Council sought a
comparative analysis of the emerging offensive threat relative to American defenses.
On 31 August 1951 the NSC directed that:
… the Director of Central Intelligence prepare, in collaboration
NET EVALUATION SUBCOMMITTEE
with the Interdepartmental Committee on Internal Security (ICIS),

the Interdepartmental Intelligence Conference (IIC), and the Joint
Chiefs of Staff (JCS), a summary evaluation of the net capability of
the USSR to injure the Continental United States, as of mid-1952.8
The title of the NSC Directive clearly indicated its need: “A Project to Provide a More
Adequate Basis for Planning for the Security of the United States.”9 The intelligence
side of the studies was completed and distributed in October of 1951. However, the
JCS report was not finished until 1952, and, “because of the sensitive nature of the
JCS study, it was not distributed outside the JCS organization” and “members of
the working group which drafted the summary evaluation were briefed orally on its
contents.”10
While there was recognition that the “summary evaluation represents a step forward
in planning for the security of the United States” and it was hailed as “an example
of the caliber of work currently to be expected,” it was also criticized as a study that
“falls far short of supplying the estimates essential to security planning”11 in several
important areas.12 There were also identified structural problems—“three primary
reasons why” the work failed to meet the NSC requirement:
We lack knowledge of Soviet plans and intentions and our knowledge

of Soviet capabilities cannot be considered complete.
The basic underlying studies required to produce the statement
mentioned in paragraph 3-a do not exist.
There is at present no machinery to plan, guide, coordinate and
produce an appraisal or estimate based on the integration of national
intelligence with military, political and economic operational data
10
11
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
dealing with our own capabilities.13
Senior Staff recommendations from the NSC and CIA14 to correct these deficiencies
and continue the effort met serious “opposition” by the JCS who “just submitted to
the Secretary of Defense a lengthy memorandum on the subject” arguing that “no
additional machinery is needed to produce “Commander’s Estimates,” the JCS being
the agency responsible for and capable of producing such estimates.”15
This sparked a serious debate on the very nature of how “red” and “blue” information
is aggregated, assessed, and converted into the kind of input necessary for long-term
strategy development. In the subsequent NSC debate on this issue, President Truman
pushed General Smith, Director of the CIA, to address the JCS complaint and make
the case for a “net” approach:
The Joint Chiefs, said General Smith, do not believe that the production
of such estimates requires the creation of any new machinery. With
this view General Smith said he could not agree, but added that if the
present evaluation actually met all the requirements of the President
and the Council there was, of course, nothing more to be done.
General Smith then noted that the Joint Chiefs of Staff did not believe
that the Director of Central Intelligence was the appropriate official
to prepare Commander’s Estimates. With this view General Smith
found himself in agreement, but he went on to say that he did not
think that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were, themselves, the appropriate
body to prepare the kind of estimate which the President and the
Council required. The data which must be amassed to provide the
kind of report that was required would by no means be purely military
data. Those agencies of the Government which were concerned with
passive defense, civilian defense, sabotage and the like, were also
directly or indirectly involved in the preparation of such estimates.
Plainly, he continued, the problem was too large and too complicated
for any one Government agency to solve by itself. It seemed obvious
to General Smith that the National Security Council alone was
the proper agency to guide and coordinate such studies. Obviously
it could not do this directly, but it could do so by calling on the
instrumentalities available to it. With all deference to the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, concluded General Smith, the problem which concerned
the Council transcends the purely military sphere, although General
Smith conceded that it might well be possible, as suggested by the
14
Joint Chiefs of Staff, to have that body monitor such a study provided
the National Security Council was assured that the Joint Chiefs of
Staff would make use, in its preparation, of the resources of all the
Government agencies which were required.16
While others chimed in, at the President’s request it was General Omar Bradley, JCS
Chairman, who explained the service position:
General Bradley stated that he did not differ fundamentally with the
views expressed by General Smith. On the whole he was inclined to
believe that the NSC Staff was the group best fitted to undertake
studies such as these in the future. No single agency could do such
studies and no single agency should try. As to the furnishing of
information on United States capabilities and possible courses of
action in the military field, General Bradley emphasized that the Joint
Chiefs were wholly in favor of the “need to know” rule on sensitive
material. Within this reservation, however, the Chiefs were prepared
to reveal whatever was necessary for the preparation of such studies.
In point of fact, there were too many people who were curious about
our war plans and had no legitimate interest in them. General Bradley
promised that the Joint Chiefs would do anything in their power in
order to achieve the kind of estimate needed, but would only monitor
the effort as a last resort.17
With the Presidential election and imminent change of Administrations, it would

have been easy and expected if the issue had been allowed to slide forward to the next
watch, but Truman felt strongly enough about the issue that one of the last acts of his
White House tenure was to set up an ad hoc Special Evaluation Subcommittee18 to
provide the future President and his senior leadership with a comparative assessment
of the relative nuclear balance between the US and the Soviet Union.19
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
It is in this context that “the origins of net assessment within the United States
government can be traced to the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.”20
As an experienced practitioner of old-school theater campaigning and the first
Commander-in-Chief facing the imminent vulnerability of American civilization,
Eisenhower realized that nuclear war was too important to be left to traditional
planning.21 Intercontinental delivery systems and multi-megaton warheads brought the
prospect of decisive surprise attack to the forefront of security demands for immediate
decision-making in which there would be no time for consideration of unexplored and
unprepared options:
… ‘the problem of the total decision’ … . ‘no executive can undertake

the responsibility for altering the face of our world unless he has
strategic and tactical information of the highest reliability.22
With little or no time to make new plans, the strategic nuclear era introduced the “come
as you are” war, and “total decision” brought with it with it the need for anticipatory
crisis management, the pre-consideration of a wide-range of strike options and laying
the groundwork for post-war recovery ahead of time.
Rather than relying on the joint military planning system that he knew well,
Eisenhower looked to “a fine group of fellows” from the scientific and business
community to address issue of revolutionary technologically and long-term competitive
posturing.23 Military aid Andrew Goodpaster described the President’s style:
He wanted to get, as we came later to express it, all of the responsible

people in the room, take up the issue, and hear their views … . If
somebody didn’t agree, he was obliged to speak his mind and get it
all out on the table or in the Oval Office; and then in light of all that,
the President would come to a line of action, he wanted everybody to
hear it, everybody to participate in it, and then wanted everybody to
be guided by it.24
As Commander-in-Chief, he ultimately drew on this own “net” appreciation of the

various inputs for strategy development, but behind these considerations were detailed
comparative assessments that served as the basis for desiderata.
While the new Administration was at pains to differentiate themselves from their
predecessors, on this issue President Eisenhower’s National Security Council adopted
continuity rather than change for change’s sake.25 Thus, as approved by Truman, the
ad hoc Special Evaluation Subcommittee (SEC) operated under the aegis of the NSC
with an interagency membership that included the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Central
Intelligence Agency, the Interdepartmental Intelligence Conference (IIC) and the
Interdepartmental Committee on Internal Security (ICIS). Using an interagency staff
temporarily assigned for just four months, the SEC was located in the Pentagon and
chaired by a direct Presidential appointee, Lt. General Idwal H. Edwards, USAF
(Ret.)—who was in fact nominated by the Joint Chiefs of Staff under a gentlemen’s
agreement with General Smith.”26
The initial effort was tasked to evaluate Soviet capabilities to “inflict direct injury on
the United States up to July 1955”27 and was chaired by Lt. General Idwal Edwards, 28
with representatives from the above agencies and a small but full-time active military
staff.29
Studying the initial phase of war, or when it was assumed the Soviets’
atomic or nuclear stockpile was likely to be unleashed, the Committee
utilized reports from each of the agencies represented by its members
and had full access to relevant classified reports.30
The Edwards committee reported its conclusions to the NSC on 18 May 1953—
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
with considerable emphasis on the danger of surprise attack and on the warning that
deployment of multi-megaton thermonuclear weapons in the Soviet arsenal would
dramatically change the military balance.31 There was a significant difference of
opinion between them and the President on the actual ability of Soviet bomber pilots
to navigate intercontinental missions, and the Chairman was called back again on 4
June to continue to debate the implications of deficiencies in US continental defenses
that made the surprise appear more effective.32
The Edwards’ Subcommittee received high praise for the quality and thoughtfulness
of its analysis. It differed from earlier attempts:
… in that (1) it was projected for two years into the future, through
mid-1955; (2) in addition to the continental United States, defined key
installations overseas were considered; (3) instead of using maximum
estimates of Soviet strength, as had been substantially done before, the
evaluation used a probable estimate level in this regard, and assumed
a Soviet strategy regarded as being consistent with these estimated
capabilities.33
The results of the Special Evaluation Subcommittee were shared with other high level
study efforts which added to the “usefulness of the Edwards Report.”34
The results of the ad hoc committee raised issues serious enough for President
Eisenhower to commission a separate Continental Defense Committee headed
by Special Evaluation Subcommittee member and its CIA representative Lt. Gen.
Harold Bull. As part of his study, the general requested the views of various NSC
members on the desirability of institutionalizing the kind of work done by the first ad
hoc Special Evaluation Subcommittee. With the added advantage of seeing the results
of the Edwards’ Subcommittee, the new CIA Director, Alan W. Dulles, responded
with thoughtful insight that is worth recording at length:
In response to your request of June 15, for the views of this Agency on
organizational arrangements to provide the best possible continuing
production of Net Capability Estimates, the following thoughts are
submitted:
There is no need to argue the necessity for reliable estimates of net
capabilities as the basis for national policy formulation. These can only
be prepared by careful integration of gross-capability intelligence of
the enemy with our capabilities and plans, so that the net result of the
th
interplay may be forecast as accurately as possible. This need is not

confined to the problem of defense of North America but is equally
inescapable for planning US requirements and commitments in any
part of the globe.
The President and the NSC in practice and pursuant to statutory
authority depend on the Director of Central Intelligence, representing
the coordinated views of the Intelligence Agencies, for foreign
intelligence estimates, and on the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, speaking as their representative, for military advice. Thus what
is required to furnish the President and Council with guidance in the
most useful and complete form is the effective amalgamation of the
functions of the two.
Responsibility for such combined analysis cannot rightly be assigned
to one of these advisers to the exclusion of the other, for both are
coordinate staff officers serving the same commander. Each must
consider the factors developed by the other in order to eliminate
reliance on arbitrary assumptions and produce valid and realistic
forecasts.
It is my view, therefore, that the President and Council should establish
a permanent subcommittee on Net Capability Estimates to be
composed of: The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; The Director
of Central Intelligence and that this subcommittee be charged with
providing, on its initiative or as requested by the Council, estimates
of net capabilities as needed to support the formulation of national
policy.
The manner in which this subcommittee would discharge its function
should be left flexible and might very well differ substantially
according to the nature of the estimate undertaken. It should have
authority to secure support and information from all executive
branches of the government and should be required to consult with
such agencies and interdepartmental committees as may be able to
contribute significantly to any estimate. The subcommittee should
take such action as may be necessary to preserve the security of highly
sensitive information such as US war plans and intelligence sources.35
The Bull led Continental Defense Committee issued a prescient 80 page report in July
and on 12 August the Soviets detonated their first hydrogen bomb.36
As a result of the Edwards Subcommittee work, interagency participants and NSC
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
observers recorded a number of “lessons learned:”
Personnel and Facilities. If it is accepted that a tightly-knit operating

group is the appropriate method of operation, questions of personnel
and facilities become important. In the case of the Edwards
Subcommittee, these were handled by the furnishing of facilities in
the JCS area of the Department of Defense and by the furnishing of
secretarial and other personnel by the JCS and CIA. It is believed that
these arrangements were satisfactory, and that they could be repeated
without strain on the contributing agencies.
Target Date. Since national policy in the field of continental defense
is now laid down comprehensively in NSC 5408,13 with programs
extended for some years into the future, it appears unlikely that there
will be a major overhauling of this policy during 1954, barring drastic
changes in the intelligence picture of Soviet capabilities or intentions.
The Edwards Subcommittee completed its work in four months,
but found that this was too short a period in which to go into all of
the important aspects … .37 To allow six months or more for a new
evaluation would throw the completion after 1 October 1954, and
would eliminate its usefulness as a supporting element for work on the
FY 1956 budget. However, this disadvantage appears outweighed [by
above argument] …
Scope. The Edwards Report considered not only the continental
United States but also key US installations outside the US, considered
in terms of the usefulness of such installations to US counteroffensive
action. There was some difficulty about the definition of such overseas
installations, leading to a misunderstanding affecting the JCS
submission. Apart from avoiding a repetition of this, the scope of the
Edwards Report appeared workable.
Projection. The Edwards Report projected its conclusions forward for
two years, and General Edwards recommended that future studies
adopt a projection period not greater than this. For planning purposes
it would be desirable to have a longer projection period, since many
policy decisions cannot bear fruit for three or more years. However,
from a working standpoint, it would be extremely difficult to get a firm
enough picture of either Soviet or US capabilities, in order to do the

“war-gaming” exercise. The Planning Board should consider whether
the policy considerations should outweigh working difficulties and
limitations.38
The combined weight of these “lessons” argued for converting the ad hoc nature of the
Edwards Subcommittee example into a more permanent process.
External exigencies and the positive example of the Edwards’ Subcommittee
combined to demonstrate not only that traditional “Commander’s estimates” were
inadequate but that there was an alternative method:
Importance of the Net Evaluation … In view of the usefulness of the

Edwards Report and the subsequent recommendations of the Bull and
Jackson Committees, the importance and desirability of continuing
net evaluations of Soviet capability to injure the United States may
be regarded as established. For purposes of Council consideration
of problems relating to continental defense or the defense of US
installations overseas, it is meaningless to have gross estimates of
Soviet nuclear capabilities, air strength, etc., unless these are merged
with existing US and Allied defensive capabilities so as to produce an
evaluation of the net Soviet capability, present and prospective.
Organizational Problem … Method of Operation. Experience
with the 1951–52 project demonstrated emphatically that it was
not satisfactory to conduct a net evaluation on the basis of one-shot
contributions by several agencies, melded by one agency or by a group.
The Edwards Subcommittee operated on the basis of continuing
exchange of material by a tightly-knit operating group producing in
effect “successive approximations” leading to a final refined product.
Wherever the responsibility may be placed, and on whatever basis
agencies participate, this method of operation is essential. Moreover,
this method of operation can also be employed—as it was by the
Edwards group—to minimize the security problem involved in the
handling of sensitive information that must be supplied particularly
by JCS, CIA, and FBI.39
Thus, the ad hoc group was not disbanded but continued in limbo while interagency
debate shifted from “what” and “how” to “whom?”
As the JSC and CIA debated organizational structure and prerogatives40 it became
40
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
obvious that the addition of the word “net” was neither accidental nor unimportant.
Admiral Radford and others infer that all they need is the normal
estimate of gross capabilities which they in the Defense Department
can then use in working out the net capabilities. This view is not only
an oversimplification of the problem but it puts the Director in the
position of abdicating his responsibilities for estimating for “The
Commander” the Bloc’s probable intentions and probable courses of
action. This the Director cannot do in a satisfactory and useful manner
in a vacuum, excluded from knowledge of our own deployments and
our own capabilities. If the Director’s estimates are done in this
manner he is asked to estimate the thinking of the Kremlin leaders
which is based on their intelligence of our capabilities which they most
certainly know in great detail, whereas the Director in his estimate
is permitted to have no such comparable knowledge. The Director’s
knowledge of US and allied capabilities and dispositions must be
at least comparable to the intelligence possessed by the Kremlin
leadership. To think, as I believe Admiral Radford and the military
in general do, that the Commander’s estimate is made by G–3 after
receiving a G–2 contribution overlooks the sound procedures which
govern all good staff operations in the G–2/G–3 field.
No G–2 makes his estimates of enemy capabilities, probable courses
of action, or probable intentions or advises his Commander in an
operational vacuum. By the closest hour-by-hour contact and joint
daily or more frequent briefings, he is always able to make his estimate
of probable hostile courses of action based on not only the enemy’s
new capabilities in manpower, weapons, organization, training,

leadership, dispositions, etc., but also from his estimate of what the
enemy probably knows concerning our own strengths, dispositions
and intentions.
The Director as our National G–2 should have the same rights and
duties as any G–2 in the lower echelons has. Otherwise he cannot
fulfill his legal responsibilities.
Although I recognize that a case can be made that the “national level”
presents different problems with a justified restriction on revelation
of war plans, certain planned courses of action, certain dispositions,
weapons development, etc. should be made available to DCI and IAC
on a very strict “need-to-know” basis, I believe a clear definition of
intelligence requirements in the operational field could be worked out
jointly and I doubt that a knowledge of detailed war plans would be
necessary. In general, DCI should get only operational information
which it is reasonable to expect the enemy to have in whole or in part.
We have no present mechanism to meet our minimum needs. We
are blocked by self-imposed departmental restrictions or ground rules
which severely limit our intelligence investigation of our own force—a
handicap not imposed on our enemies.41
By 23 June 1954 42 the basis of compromise had been reached—the ad hoc approach
became institutionalized with the same remit and structure albeit a new title: Net
Capabilities Evaluation Subcommittee.43
The focus remained on “direct[ing] the preparation of a report assessing the net
capabilities of the USSR, in the event of general war, to inflict direct injury upon the
continental United States and key US installations overseas.44 The actual work was
still to be done at the Pentagon employing assigned interagency “temporary staff”45
41
44
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
integrating inputs from a broad array of sources under the direction of a retired three-
star general officer “chosen by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the
Director of Central Intelligence.”46 The process was to be supervised by the interagency
Subcommittee consisting of expanded representation from relevant departments47 but
the most notable innovation was the naming of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs as
the titular head of the Subcommittee—a compromise that allowed the JCS to retain
their “primus inter pares” dignity while bringing in the external data and expertise
necessary to make it a “net” evaluation.48
The CIA had been particularly frustrated in producing meaningful reports about
the “threat” posed by potential enemies without having the data and insight into the
strengths and weakness of “friendly” forces. In addition to the strategic threat of
intercontinental attack, this issue had been particularly problematic in the “theater”
context of NATO’s fledgling efforts where US forces remained in the minority.
… experience has subsequently highlighted the vacuity of estimates
prepared without clear knowledge of our own capabilities. With respect
to Soviet Bloc capabilities to attack Western Europe, all estimates
through 1950 had been able to proceed on the assumption of virtually
no Western opposition. From 1951 onward, this assumption became
increasingly less valid, and in the preparation of the estimates there were
prolonged discussions leading finally to the use of a fairly meaningless
formula that the Soviet Bloc could “launch” a lot of campaigns,
including a full-scale offensive in Western Europe. Whether any
meaningful answer could have been provided in Washington without
duplicating the activities of SHAPE is doubtful, but the fact is that
no machinery existed even for getting and incorporating (with proper
credit) the current conclusions of SHAPE. As they finally stood the
estimates were certainly not helpful to anyone on this point.49
While the focus of the 1950s evaluations was on “intercontinental attack,” the challenge
of placing the US-USSR long-term competition in the context of a war in Europe and
the need to consider allied capabilities was a perennial concern that would persist for
decades.
Finally, President Eisenhower weighed in on Valentine’s Day 1955, with a “get it
done” directive for a retitled “Net Evaluation Subcommittee” (NES):
Pursuant to the recommendations of the National Security Council

in NSC Action No. 1260–b (November 4, 1954) and my subsequent
approval thereof, I hereby establish a permanent procedure to provide
integrated evaluations of the net capabilities of the USSR, in the event
of general war, to inflict direct injury upon the continental US and
key US installations overseas, and to provide a continual watch for
changes which would significantly alter those net capabilities.
Each integrated evaluation should:
a. Cover all types of attack, overt or clandestine;
b. Include consideration of the several courses of action which the
USSR is capable of executing; and
c. Take into account the estimated future status of approved military
and non-military US defense programs.
Each integrated evaluation report should estimate from the practical
standpoint the extent and effect of direct injury, including radioactive
fall-out, upon the continental US and key US installations overseas,
resulting from the most probable types and weights of attacks which
the USSR is capable of delivering during approximately the first thirty
days of general war, taking into account the effect of US counterattacks
during this period … .
Integrated evaluations should be submitted to the Council on or before
October 1 of each year, and relate to the situation on a critical date
normally about three years in the future. In addition to these annual
integrated evaluations, an integrated evaluation should be submitted
to the Council at such times as the Subcommittee feels that a change
has become apparent that would significantly alter the net capabilities
of the USSR to inflict direct injury upon the continental US and key
US installations overseas.
Subcommittee members are designated to act as individuals, but
each shall have the right to consult, at his discretion and under
appropriate security safeguards, with his agency or committee prior to
Subcommittee action on matters normally within the cognizance of
his committee or agency … .
The Subcommittee will have a staff, composed of individuals
assigned by member agencies, as required by the Director, and under
the direction of a Director whom I shall designate. The Director
may be compensated through the National Security Council from
contributions by the member agencies.
The Net Evaluation Subcommittee hereby established is empowered
under the terms of this Directive to call on any agency of the
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
Government for relevant information, evaluations, and estimates,

subject only to establishment of appropriate security regulations
and procedures for the handling of highly sensitive information as
provided under paragraph 5, above.
Distribution of each completed Subcommittee report will be
determined at the time by me.50
In a footnote to the Directive, the President explicitly addressed the JCS “hot button”
issue in stating that access included “Information such as that relating to war plans, new
weapons and equipment, techniques and tactics for their employment, the vulnerability
of US defenses, and domestic and foreign intelligence sources and methods.”
The Eisenhower “Directive” not only institutionalized the process, but created a
long-lasting precedent in terms of how a “national net assessment” should be organized.
The initial NES assigned professional staff consisted of two Army Colonels, a Navy
Captain, an Air Force Colonel, a Marine Colonel, a Phd. CIA officer, at least one other
civilian (probably FBI)51 and a number of supporting staff.52 By 1958 an all new staff
had rotated into the NES and the mix was two Army Colonels, two Navy Captains,
two Air Force Colonels, one Marine Colonel and one CIA Phd.53 Five years later,
the staff had doubled to sixteen: three Army Colonels, four Navy Captains, three Air
Force Colonels, one Marine Colonel, four CIA and one State Department civilian.
The Director was a three-star retired general officer, backed up by a two-star Deputy
Director, a brass heavy pattern that reflected Presidential importance and continued
throughout the life of the NES:
• Lt. General Harold L. George, (USAF retired): 1955-1956;54
• Lt. General, Gerald C. Thomas, (USMC retired): 1956-1958;55
th
• Lt. General Thomas F. Hickey, (US Army retired): 1958-1961;56 and

• Lt. General Leon W. Johnson, (USAF retired): 1961-1963.57
Over the eight years of the Eisenhower Administration, the Subcommittee produced
at least one report a year,58 and had no less than 37 Presidential level meetings.59
In addition to the controversy and creative compromise that created it, several
other factors stand out about the success of the Net Evaluation Subcommittee. First,
their work was marked by subtle distinctions, an emphasis on comparative data, and
operational context.60 Second, they not only informed the Commander-in-Chief,
but had a dramatic impact on his own evaluations.61 Third, they were able to address
some of the most sensitive and controversial areas of US national security in the
1950s and did so with high discretion and a complete absence of leaks.62 Fourth, their
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
work continually stimulated additional questions, which were then referred to other
organizations or used as the terms of reference for a new committee dedicated to that
follow-on topic. One example of this, was the famous Technological Capabilities
Panel that produced the Killian Report, which itself was a major contribution to the
art of competitive strategy.63 Last but not least, the NEC established a precedent in
justifying the need for a “national net assessment,” developed a model of how to do it
and set expectations of expected output.
It has been widely observed that as President, “Eisenhower’s background made
him his own secretary of defense” and he left strategic planning to the military and
looked to his political appointee managers to implement budgetary guidance rather
than strategize.64 But by the end of his Administration, Eisenhower himself noted
that the traditional coordinating committee approach as set up by the Naval and War
departments, and carried over into the Department of Defense, was too slow and
too cumbersome for the atomic age. In an address to a special session of Congress he
argued that:
Strategic and tactical planning must be completely unified, combat

forces must be organized into unified commands, each equipped with
the most efficient weapons systems that science can develop … .
We must strengthen the military staff in the Office of the Secretary of
Defense in order to provide the Commander in Chief and the Secretary
of Defense with the professional assistance they need for strategic
planning and for operational direction of the unified commands.65
This meant that a Secretary of Defense could no longer be content to focus merely on
force generation but had to get educated on and involved in force design and application.
In the Defense Reorganization of 1958 the JCS were pushed to drop their traditional
coordinating committees in exchange for “an integrated operations division” utilizing
the traditional line “numbered J-Directorates of a conventional military staff” in
order to effectively interface with “the unified and specified commands.”66 Thus, the
coordinating “Strategic Plans Committee” was “divided to form the nucleus of the
new” J-3 Operations and J-5 Plans and Policy Directorates.67 Ironically, the more the
JCS moved toward a Command orientation,68 the more the planning, forecasting and
assessing functions69 of the Joint Strategic Objectives Plan (JSOP)70 became caught up
in the narrowly defined linear programming and budgeting rather than thinking “out
of the box in terms of alternative options or long-range competition.71
While President Eisenhower was more than willing to delegate traditional military
matters to the military and let civilian appointees manage budgets, he recognized the
centrality of nuclear weapons to US foreign policy as well as in defense72 and was not
willing to delegate the authority of the Commander-in-Chief to be mentally prepared
in thinking through the unthinkable. The vehicle by which the Administration
attempted to both develop and propagate its strategy was a National Security Council
document staffed across all relevant agencies known as the Basic National Security
Policy (BNSP):
Issued annually, and purporting to set forth the basic strategic concept
for the United States, BNSP has been described … as ‘a detailed
outline of the aims of US national security strategy and a more detailed
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
discussion of the military, political, economic elements to support

the over-all national strategy. In it, the Eisenhower Administration
announced that the United States henceforward would place main but
not sole reliance on nuclear weapons. With this guidance, the Joint
Chiefs of Staff were expected to prepare a Joint Strategic Objectives
Plan (JSOP)which would project force requirements five years into
the future.73
However, because there was continued disagreement within the Administration

and between the services over the meaning and comprehensiveness of a “Massive
Retaliation” doctrine, in the absence of Commander-in-Chief clarity, the military
“were not getting clear guidance in this area.”74
The end product … has thus far been a document so broad in nature
and so general in language as to provide limited guidance in practical
application. In the course of its development, the sharp issues in
national defense which confront our leaders have been blurred in
conference and in negotiation. The final text thus permits many
different interpretations. The protagonists of Massive Retaliation or
of Flexible Response, the partisans of the importance of air power
or of limited war, as well as the defenses of other shades of military
opinion, are able to find language supporting their divergent points of
view. The ‘Basic National Security Policy’ document means all things
to all people and settles nothing.75
The effect of widespread dissatisfaction with the loose generality of the BNSP language,
was not to focus on clarity and specificity at the National Security Council but rather
ridicule and dismiss the whole idea of top down deductive articulation entirely.
Over at the Pentagon the historic American phobia over a “General Staff” nonetheless
remained,76 and the results showed. Yet despite legislative authority and responsibility
for both DoD strategy as well as resource planning, the Secretary of Defense lacked
the diagnostic and prognostic talent necessary to make informed strategic judgments.
Under the postwar organization of the military establishment the
Secretary of Defense presumably had the authority to establish a
strategic concept and require agreement on force size and composition.
But he labored under several severe handicaps. He lacked any
independent basis on which to assess what the Services were
Security
demanding. And, in the American tradition, he tended to assume that

it was impossible for him to understand, much less learn, the art of
military planning. That was a mystery that could only be performed by
the military staffs themselves. To argue with veteran commanders in
these circumstances seemed presumptuous and dangerous. Military
judgment was sacrosanct.77
Up until 1961, this was a bi-cameral culture, with the Secretary of Defense having
limited ability to bridge the two worlds of military strategy and civilian resource
allocation, and raised a fundamental question as to whether his role was “Umpire or
Leader?”78
Polity
3
SYSTEMS A NALYSIS AS
SURROGATE
His flair for quantitative analysis was exceeded only by his
arrogance. Enthoven held military experience in low regard and
considered military men intellectually inferior. He likened leaving
military decision-making to the professional military to allowing
welfare workers to develop national welfare programs.1
With respect to the “coordinative” versus “command” style, President Kennedy

addressed this decisively.2 He needed and wanted a Secretary of Defense “who,
unlike Eisenhower’s Pentagon chiefs, would not only implement the administration’s
decisions” but also vigorously “initiate policies regarding weapons selection and
strategy.”3
It is probably not too much to say that in less than three years,
McNamara brought about two revolutions within the Department of
Defense. He redesigned the military strategy and forces of the United
States. At the same time, he installed an entirely new method of
making decisions within the Pentagon.4
Kennedy’s SecDef aggressively pursued what he believed to be a new, but necessarily

revolutionized,5 “proper role of the Secretary of Defense”—to “grasp the strategic issues
Dereliction of Duty
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
and provide active leadership in developing a defense program that sensibly relates US
foreign policy” and “military strategy” with “defense budgets, and the choice of major
weapons and forces.”6
There were several reasons behind the management “revolution,” and they primarily
had to do with the new Administration’s negative attitude toward the Joint Staff
approach to planning:
• Their advice was perceived at the White House to be the product of consensus
among the services rather than what was best for national security;7
• Another was that the Joint Chiefs also produced analyses and recommendations
at a tortuously slow pace;”8
• And, they frequently seemed opposed to major Administration initiatives and
contemptuous of their strategic wisdom.9
With this attitude at the top, selecting an activist SecDef who was not in awe of
“military experience” and giving him the mandate to introduce innovative strategy
frequently at odds with Service preferences,10 combined to structure the SecDef as
“chief strategist.”11
The Secretary of Defense—and I am talking about any Secretary
10
Defense Policy
11
SYSTEMS ANALYSIS AS SURROGATE
of Defense—must make certain kinds of decisions, not because he

presumes his judgment to be superior to his advisors, military or
civilian, but because his position is the best place from which to make
these decisions.12
Much to the dismay of critics of “defense intellectuals,”13 a corollary of this positional

vantage-point, was the belief that “modern-day strategy and force planning has become
largely an analytical process.”14
Secretary McNamara correctly viewed the DoD as a “bilineal organizational
structure,”15 and, impressed with the controlling “dual chain” management system he
had experienced at Ford Motor, tried to introduce that approach in the Pentagon.16
During his tenure the Systems Analysis Office operated as “analytic policemen”17
keeping military advice “honest” and as a surrogate means of both option planning and
performance assessment. While it was recognized that the uniformed military could,
in theory, present a range of alternative strategies, nevertheless, inventing creative
options was not a recognized JCS strong suit.18
Nor was a passive position in the strategy development process practical for the
14
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
SecDef. The following retort is worth revisiting because the argument still fuels a
relevant debate:
It would limit the Secretary of Defense to the role of judge rather than
leader. Though he could select one of the alternatives presented in the
JCS list, he would be unable to challenge the particular objectives
and alternatives which the JCS chose present. He would be unable
to get independent evaluation of the JCS estimate of the amount of
military force required to attain a particular objective with a given
degree of confidence. He would be unable to probe for and suggest
an alternative mix of forces which might achieve a given objective at
a lower cost.
Challenging, testing, probing, checking, and suggesting alternatives
in an informed and responsible way are more than any one man can do
by himself. He would have to have a staff to help him, and that staff
would have to become deeply involved in the matters in the province
of the military professionals. This is the only way the Secretary of
Defense can exercise initiative and avoid becoming a captive of the
information generated by the military staffs. In the most direct sense,
it is the only way the country can be assured of achieving a significant
degree of civilian control.19
Thus, the issue was not so much the development of alternative options, although
there were certainly cases where that need was articulated, and few challenged the
responsibility of the SecDef to be the Pentagon’s Chief Strategist.
Rather, the question raised by McNamara and his team was the “due diligence”
the Secretary would give in thinking through the inputs to the strategic choices he
would make and his need “to have access to independent and sophisticated analysis”
that would “enable him, not to ignore institutional factors, but to see them in proper
perspective in making operational, management and policy decisions … .”20 As the
“Clausewitzian” personification of the one chosen to address strategic questions, 21
the Secretary of Defense is the bridge22 between the Presidential policy vision and
the direction of the Armed Forces in their development of contingency planning.23
40
Figure 1. DoD Planning Systems Relationships
This dialectical 24 interface is normally called “strategy development” and, if asked,

most American’s would likely believe that having a dedicated organization assist
the Secretary of Defense in pulling together a comprehensive assessment of US and
potential adversaries is not just common sense, 25 but essential to getting an important
task done, and building public confidence that it is being done right.26
41
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
If it is admitted that a Secretary of Defense has the requirement to take on the role
of evaluator rather than just a ladler of resources—and, in making those decisions,
has a fiduciary responsibility to consider long-range trends, assess US and potential
adversary postures, and develop alternative strategic concepts to cope with change—
then the need for immediate and confidential staff support to the SecDef as Chief
Strategist was axiomatic in its logic and unchallengeable as common sense. The most
basic argument for the PPBS approach to strategy rested on six major arguments:
• Decision-making on the basis of openly debated National Interest;
• Considering needs and costs simultaneously rather than sequentially;
• Explicit consideration of alternatives rather than as “straw men;”
• Active use of an analytical versus accounting staff;
• A multi-year rolling force and financial plan versus fixed budget ceiling; and
• Open and explicit analysis rather than implicit and intuitive assumptions.27
This was a real improvement and, whatever the complaints, few argued for a return
to the old system, and McNamara pushed it to the extreme: “I equate planning and
budgeting and consider the terms almost synonymous,” with “the budget being simply
a quantitative expression of the operating plans.”28
Practically, however, there were several problems in the McNamara approach. First,
unlike at Ford Motor where the “analyst policemen” were actually embedded at every
level of every organization, Enthoven’s Systems Analysts were, like a sophist watching
the shadows on Plato’s cave, outside the military organization looking in with surrogate
measures of effectiveness.29 Second, and more subtle, having hooked the Pentagon on
the PPBS—with its linear programming so helpful to careful auditing30 —it reinforced
the military predisposition to favor material force structure over ethereal strategizing.31
As illustrated in Figure 1 above,32 although the PPBS system depended upon Strategy
“input” to initiate it and incorporated opportunities for Assessment feedback, its
sequential multi-year cumulative linearity made the process rigid and the strategy
unreflective.
However, turning planning into an “administrative auditing process”33 came at a
cost of imagination and creativity.34 “In the extreme, the approach” of PPBS in the
late 1960s carried the danger “that strategy would emerge de facto from a stream
of acquisition decisions, rather than independently providing the basis for those
decisions.”35 Third, with “analytic policemen” tending to treat the military as planning
criminals and all the resultant years of open warfare between OSD and the Services,
animosities were so deep that basic cooperation, let along joint brainstorming, took
more effort than it was worth.36
It is easy to dismiss the McNamara era gap between civilians and uniforms by
demeaning clichés like “military mindset” or “effete intellectuals.”37 However, on
closer examination the difference is not whether one side was thinking correctly and
the other idiots, but rather that they were thinking differently.38 The classic Chinese
strategist Sun Tzu gave a definition of the “strategic arts” that is relevant here:
… the Five Strategic Arts are:
First, measurements;
Second, estimates;
Third, analysis;
Fourth, balancing;
The
logic.
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
Fifth, triumph.39
Sun Tzu’s list of five key attributes is not random but reflects both a hierarchy of
abstraction and differing forms of reasoning.40 As illustrated in Figure 2, the five
elements are actually sequential and can be hierarchically placed on an ordinal
scale that ranks deductive logic on one end and inductive empiricism on the other.
Traditional military thought treats the lower order empirical issues as the common
sense part of “the appreciation of the situation” that comes with experience based
judgment, but the area they tend to emphasize is deduced guidance from political
superiors articulating National Interests, definition of threats and allocating resource
commitments. The systems analysis perspective starts at the other end of the spectrum
focused on collecting and measuring as much information as possible in order to
inductively derive their comparisons and conclusions.41 The senior military leaders
are afraid of uncertainty in national objectives and political will, while the civilian
strategists sought to avoid subjective qualitative judgment. But neither of these two
40
41
system.
44
Figure 2. Hierarchy of Assessment Perspectives
approaches can cover the range of thought required for sound strategy development.
If intuitive experience is weak without structured empirical verification, the danger of
quantified systems analysis is introuvable data42 and, even worse, not knowing what is
missing. The more rigorous and empirically dependent the measurement, the greater
the chance of its significance being distorted or overwhelmed by the unknown.
This highlights the value of “net” evaluation or assessment efforts. Because they
employ abductive reasoning—inference to the best explanation43—they can avoid
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
some of the major pitfalls of linear deduction or entropic induction making conscious
estimates to plot trend data, analyze asymmetries, as well as explore the interactions of
strengths and vulnerabilities. Another advantage of abduction is that it offers a bridge
that spans the spectrum from induction to deduction; and is thus a useful integrative
device in contrast to strategy inferred from either “first principles” or a “data dump.”
Compared to the command presumptions of SAC or the quantified data of the Systems
Analysts, the work of the Net Evaluation Subcommittee provides an excellent example
of the value of an abductively driven methodology—one that uses empirical data where
available, but does not shrink from hypothesizing expectations where it is not.
Charles Sanders Peirce

4
DEMISE OF NET EVALUATION
Secretary McNamara was … a very powerful man. He just felt he
had enough trouble in trying to overcome resistance in NATO and
he didn’t need any more resistance, especially from within his own
building … so he arranged with the President that that was the
end of the Net Evaluation Subcommittee, which in a way was too
bad, because something like that was needed, and still is needed.1
There were two prime areas during the Kennedy Administration in which the method
of comparative force balances had an impact on strategy, and where strategy had an
impact on method. The first was strategic forces; and the second was the conventional
balance in Central Europe. Both topics were hotbeds of politico-military controversy,
both issues were debated utilizing the leading edge analytical tools of the day. The
methodology and studies of the Net Evaluation Subcommittee, and the NESC itself,
were at the center of both controversies.
President Kennedy had campaigned on closing the missile gap, and both the 1961
Berlin Crisis and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis underscored the importance of
strategic balance.2 Although there was no shortage of controversy, this was an area
where refined Force-on-Force analytical techniques had been in development for over
a decade and one of the leaders in using them to inform the political leadership was
the Net Evaluation Subcommittee. A major initiative of Secretary McNamara was in
developing a robust but not open ended rational for American strategic force levels—
particularly the fielding of the new generation Minuteman ICBMs to offset the
growing vulnerability of manned bombers.3 In his memorandum to the President, the
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
SecDef based much of his initial targeting priorities and missile allocation “derived
from studies performed in June 1961 by the Staff of the Net Evaluation Subcommittee,
under the direction of Lieutenant General Thomas Hickey.”4 Likewise, when the JCS
responded, they also deferred to NESC data and analysis.5
In theory, the strategic analysis of the Net Evaluation Subcommittee should have
continued to provide “common ground” between the civilian strategists and military
leadership, but all too soon those in the middle of the road got hit from both directions.
First, the JCS used the unfinished research of the NESC as an excuse to prevaricate;6
and then OSD responded with a 17 page attack on Subcommittee methodology in the
snide condescension that came to characterize whiz kid critique.7 The underlying issue
was fundamentally not one of force structure, resources or NESC methodology but
the philosophy of “controlled response strategy.”
“With a December 22 memorandum to McNamara, Charles J. Hitch,

Assistant Secretary of Defense (Comptroller), enclosed a 17-page
evaluation of the Hickey Report. In the memorandum Hitch stated
that his evaluation concluded that the requirements for a controlled
response strategy were exaggerated in the Hickey study, and its
feasibility underestimated. “I see no reason why we cannot have a
satisfactory posture for a controlled response strategy by 1964 if not
sooner. I reject the suggestion implicit in the Hickey Study that all of
these advanced capabilities must be achieved before it makes sense to
abandon the spasm war concept.” There was nothing in the Hickey
study necessitating “a change in the decisions you have already made
for FY 1963 procurement.”8
The Kennedy Administration wanted to reduce the spasm effect of a full strategic
strike by introducing various options of numerical restraint and target withhold short
of Armageddon while the JCS believed that the best chance of limiting damage to the
US homeland and saving American lives was to “go ugly early.”9 In retrospect this was
not an issue that was going to be decided by sharp pencils and simulations: no matter
which way it went, both sides were literally playing with fire by making assumptions
about human nature in a nuclear exchange.10
For the next three years the issue of “controlled response strategy” was at the heart
of the internal American strategic debate. In early 1963, President Kennedy issued the
following Directive:
The NESC will develop studies of a series of general wars initiated

yearly during the period 1963 through 1968. Comparative results
in each year war will be determined with emphasis on the degree of
damage sustained by the US and an analysis will be made to identify
significant trends in national defense capabilities.11
Based on Presidential tasking, the NESC laid out a careful research program focused
on attempts to limit the mass casualty effects of an initial US/Soviet strategic nuclear
exchange.12 In the words of the only civilian assigned to the NESC:
… there was a feeling, particularly among the top people in the

Kennedy administration, that Eisenhower had let the whole nuclear
weapons issue get too much out of hand, and that there were a lot of
nuclear weapons around, and that the idea of a nuclear war was just
kind of a spasm war—everything lets fly and you don’t know how
to stop it. And there were a lot of people in the Cambridge group,
Harvard and MIT, that thought that should change.
And one of them was a man named Thomas Schelling, quite a
prominent figure in academic circles, who had done a lot of work
on games and modeling of various diplomatic situations as well. He
persuaded Walt Rostow that there ought to be a study of what was
10
11
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
called war management and termination. And the basic idea was to
try to get away from the idea of just sort of a massive, all-out attack
on the Soviet Union and try to think about a more managed kind
of conflict, and especially how do you stop that kind of a nuclear
war. Walt persuaded Maxwell Taylor, who was then the chairman
of the Joint Chiefs at that point, to use an NSC apparatus [the Net
Evaluation Subcommittee], over which the Joint Chiefs had control,
to do this study of war management and termination … .
According to Goodby, the military staff on the NESC were very skeptical of this
idea of war management and termination.
And I think they had good right to be, at that particular point, because
we couldn’t do it; there wasn’t the command and control capacity to
manage a nuclear war. And they didn’t really feel that nuclear war
was something that you ought to treat as a conventional war. And, on
that issue, I shared their point of view one hundred percent. In other
words, the idea that you would consider nuclear weapons the same
as kind of a nuclear artillery and plan to use it in increments did not
really appeal to me, at least at that point. And, at that point, it simply
wasn’t feasible to do it anyway, because we just didn’t have the tools
to do it with … .
To me, this whole idea of, well, if we send a message by one explosion
here that takes out a city of 50,000, they’ll do this … . these things
are so terribly destructive that I can’t imagine a military commander,
once it started, saying, “Well, gee, they sent a better signal than we
did, therefore we’re going to quit” … .
I think there was a feeling among the military that these were
horrendous weapons that really would come close to destroying
civilization. … their basic idea was that if you get into a war, you do
not hold back, you do not give the enemy the initiative. And … their
worry was that, okay, you send a signal … by a nuclear weapon, and
you give the enemy the initiative, and he comes back with everything
he has. And their preference would be, if we’re going to get into a
nuclear war, then let’s go in it with everything we have and hope for
the best. And that was the basic philosophy.13
On this issue, the uniformed military were generally on one side, the Administration’s
civilian strategists on the other, with the Net Evaluation Subcommittee in the middle.
Thus, the net evaluation project for 1963 was directed to study “The Management
and Termination of War with the Soviet Union.”14 The terms of reference were
14
developed by an interagency panel headed by Walt W. Rostow, Counselor and

Chairman, Policy Planning Council, Department of State, and were based on the
report of an interdepartmental group under Mr. Thomas C. Schelling which examined
certain long-range aspects.15 The NESC did a thorough job of studying the issues and
concluded that “full consideration must be given to the problems of war management
and termination in all planning for war” and that doing so “will increase the likelihood
of a successful application of political actions and military forces to deter the Soviet
Union from intensifying a war should one occur” as well as “cause Soviet leaders to
seek to end the war under conditions acceptable to the US.”16
The study was very balanced in its assessment and in differentiating what was desirable
from what was likely. What the general issue of “limited nuclear war” raised, and the
NESC was uncovering, was the radical redefinition of the role and responsibility of the
Commander-in-Chief in the nuclear age.17 It highlighted the uncertainties involved
in trying to fight a limited nuclear war, but constructively identified ways of reducing
them. These included:
• Anticipatory Planning;18
1.
4.
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
• Creation of a National Command Center;19

• Establishing a Reconnaissance system for “pre-war, intra-war and post-war”
monitoring and its direct link to the National Command Center.20
If the United States was going to fight a nuclear war, let alone attempt a “controlled
response strategy” these would be essential, and their absence reinforced the impression
that promotion of “limited options” was way ahead of the ability to execute them.21
The NESC study ran afoul of the Administration in three areas. First, in asking for
clearer “strategy guidance”22 and recommending an expansion of the NSC to provide
the Commander-in-Chief with his own war planning staff in peacetime23 it clashed
with the Secretary of Defense who responded with intense antagonism.24 In trying
to honestly develop controlled response options, the NESC brief-out 25 managed to
unintentionally convince President Kennedy that whatever “window of opportunity”
may have made limited nuclear war feasible or desirable, it was rapidly closing.26
General Taylor presented the Net Evaluation Subcommittee report 2

and introduced General Leon Johnson, with the suggestion that the
President might wish to question him about the report.
The President asked whether, even if we attack the USSR first, the
loss to the US would be unacceptable to political leaders. General
Johnson replied that it would be, i.e., even if we preempt, surviving
Soviet capability is sufficient to produce an unacceptable loss in the
US.
The President asked whether then in fact we are in a period of nuclear
stalemate. General Johnson replied that we are … .
The President said these fatality figures were much higher than those
he had heard recently in Omaha.4 As he recalled it, SAC estimated 12
million casualties.
General Taylor said these were higher casualty figures than the
President had ever seen. Today’s figures include two new factors:
1. Soviet weapons were targeted on US cities.
2. The use by the Soviets of huge megaton weapons was included in
the computations for the first time … .
General Johnson replied that no matter what we do we can’t get below
51 million casualties in the event of a nuclear exchange.27
President: I have been told that if I ever released a nuclear weapon on
the battlefield I should start a preemptive attack on the Soviet Union
as the use of nuclear weapons was bound to escalate and we might as
well get the advantage by going first.
Speaker: Gen. Johnson stated he did not consider this necessarily true
under the circumstances which exist.28
A “period of nuclear stalemate” was in direct contradiction with NATO’s declaratory

MC-14/2 Deterrent Strategy which depended upon American willingness to initiate
early strategic strikes in the event of a failing conventional defense. Thus, the NESC
briefing brought to a head the nuclear linkage between US intercontinental strategic
forces and NATO committed assets at the theater level—particularly the role and
vulnerability of forward based strike aircraft—at a time the administration was trying
to create a firebreak between Europe’s conventional defense and nuclear deterrence.
Of the wide variety of strategic issues addressed during the McNamara tenure, with
topics ranging from intercontinental nuclear exchange to the Vietnam War, none cut to
nuclear strategy.
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
the core of strategy development like the debates associated with the Administration’s
push to convert NATO war plans to “Flexible Response.”
One of the first major policy changes ought by the Kennedy

administration in 196` was to reduce the reliance on nuclear weapons
for deterrence and defense and increase the reliance on conventional
forces, especially in NATO. This change in strategy was not officially
adopted by NATO unit May 1967. During the interval, millions of
words were written and spoken, both in this country and in Europe,
regarding the merits and implications of this change.29
Under Secretary McNamara’s direction, the Enthoven Systems Analysis group had
been attempting to measure the Central European convention balance, in part to
identify the prospects for conventional defense, and in part to generate support for the
idea.
These types of static side-by-side comparisons popularized by Systems Analysis
throughout the 1960s had both positive and negative aspects in terms of assessing a
major theater military balance. On the constructive side, they made a contribution by:
• Defining different categories of weaponry and not relying on the traditional
“division counts” that had been quite misleading;
• Trying to compare apples to apples by differentiating active versus low
readiness and reserve forces;
• Carefully delimiting the geographic scope of the comparison; and where
military assets were being counted;
• Contrasting the different approaches to logistics and support; and
• Highlighting anomalies and inconsistencies.
As illustrated in the following figure, this was the first time in the Cold War, that an
attempt was made to explicitly compare and contrast NATO and Warsaw Pact force
levels and relative advantages.
On the other hand, there were also serious flaws in the approach;
• A tendency to downplay or paper over disturbing asymmetries—for example,
the Warsaw Pact advantage in offensive tank and armored formations;
• A tendency to tip the scales in counting—for example, including quarter ton
Jeeps in NATOs truck count, which made 30% difference for blue, but was
not a factor for red;
• A tendency to make optimistic assumptions about NATO mobilization and
reaction time;
• A tendency to highlight differences between American forces and Soviet, but
ignore equal or even greater anomalies between US and NATO units;
• A tendency to pretend that Nuclear Weapons were out of the equation, when
in fact both sides had thousands deployed and “dual capable” systems were a
Figure 3. M-Day Land Forces in the European Central Regiona

in Mid-1968
Force NATO Warsaw Pact Comparison
Divisions c
Divisions
Personnel
Notes:
a
major feature of the forces as well as future contingency plans; and,

• A tendency to treat side-by-side comparisons as if they reflected military
face-to-face combat—and with it the utter disregard of military operational
planning.
Unfortunately for the credibility of the comparative process, most of the negatives
appeared to not just be issues associated with “bean counting” but reflected a less
than honest effort to load the analytical dice and use weighted scales to sell a the
Administrations political message.
The Net Evaluation Subcommittee study plan for 1964 focused on the NATO-
Warsaw Pact military balance in Central Europe. This was the first time the NESC
had focused on a major theater where the complexity of conventional, tactical nuclear
and strategic nuclear forces overlapped. Secretary of State found the study interesting;
There are some findings of the report on which I should like to

comment. First, I agree completely that political and psychological
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
factors will be important, and in some situations may be determining,

in the decisions to release nuclear weapons. It is for this reason that
I have always felt that we need not only a wide range of options, but
also effective means for exercising initial and continuing control by
the President, over the use of all types of nuclear weapons. I believe it
would be helpful, if it has not already been done, to brief the President
on what can and cannot be accomplished with existing systems and
procedures in exercising selective control over the use of tactical
nuclear weapons in Europe. We should then seek means of remedying
deficiencies in present control systems.
Second, I was impressed by the description of the restrictions of
SACEUR’s flexibility in the use of NATO forces in limited aggression
situations. I concur in the judgment that “situations may arise in
which the risk inherent in degrading NATO’s general war posture
in Europe is more than offset by the advantages of bringing decisive
conventional forces to bear in a limited conflict.” While we must
exercise considerable care to avoid the impression among our allies
that we are prepared to contemplate a World War II conventional
hostility limited to Europe, or that we would not carry out our nuclear
commitments, it is important that we place our emphasis on the more
likely sort of contingencies, with the expectation that in time our
allies will agree with the wisdom of such action. This suggests that
SACEUR should prepare, by the way of planning or training, more
than he has in the past for contingencies in which some degrading of
his general war posture is permitted by higher authority in order to
cope with a limited conflict. In particular, I would hope additional
effort would be directed at the problem of unpremeditated conflict
arising from the present unsettled situation in Central Europe.
I understand that this, and other ideas to improve SACEUR’s
capabilities for situations less than general war are under continuing
discussions among Ambassador Thompson, Mr. McNaughton and
General Goodpaster. I hope that we will be able to reach a considered
judgment about this matter at an early date.
Third, I fully endorse the position that there should be continuing
inter-agency work on improving our crisis management capability,
to include a timely development of contingency plans identifying
the politico-military courses of action in anticipation of a crisis.
Pursuant to an exchange of correspondence between the Secretary of
Defense and me, we have established a small senior level coordinating
committee precisely to fill this need.
Fourth, I am entirely in accord with the suggestion that there should
be close State-Defense collaboration in developing the portions of the
JSCP and JSOP having to do with national and military objectives
and strategic concepts.30
Rusk concluded by assuring the JSC that “we will make every effort to avoid creating
delays in the JSCP and JSOP timetables as a result of Department of State participation.”
The “most recently completed NESC study was an evaluation of a “war conducted
in 1964 between the US, its Allies, and the Soviet Bloc based on current US war
plans” with the overall purpose to “evaluate the validity and feasibility of this type
of analysis as a basis for providing guidance for political-military planning.”31 As one
of the participants remembers, “I stayed with the Net Evaluation Subcommittee for
another” study, and the next one was on NATO.” But:
… there we also ran into a disagreement with the top people in

the Kennedy Administration; not over fundamentals, but over
implementation mainly. What Kennedy wanted to do was to
change NATO strategy away from the idea of heavy reliance on
nuclear weapons, which was the Eisenhower notion, and to what
was called Flexible Response, something that Maxwell Taylor had
been advocating for a long time and that Kennedy felt was the right
approach. That doctrine said that you do not use nuclear weapons
automatically, you try first to see what you can do with conventional,
in effect. I supported the basic policy and hoped, in a study that we
were asked to do in that Evaluation Subcommittee, that it would be
shown that that was a feasible policy. Well, we traveled to Europe and
talked to a lot of military commanders and concluded that in order
to have a successful conventional defense, there was a great deal of
work that needed to be done. You just couldn’t adopt that kind of a
strategy without making some pretty significant changes in the way
the military was structured, and basically said that in our report to
the NSC. Briefed Maxwell Taylor on it, who was a little taken aback,
but not nearly as taken aback as Robert McNamara, the Secretary of
Defense. We briefed him on the findings of the report one morning,
and he was highly critical and said we hadn’t taken various things into
account. And of course there were some things we hadn’t taken into
account. Our basic stance, though, was not that we were quarreling
with the idea that we ought to have a good conventional defense in
Europe, but that we were moving too fast in trying to persuade the
NATO countries that it should be done basically overnight. The result
of that was that the Net Evaluation Subcommittee was essentially
discontinued.32
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
Lest the intent be missed, the interviewer asked: “What was the motivation behind
McNamara’s disagreeing?” And: “Was it because you were running against what was
essentially a political decision and you were coming up with, say, the hard facts, that
this won’t [work]?” Answer: “Yes, essentially that’s what it was.”
Thus, in the name of maintaining the Pentagon “on message,” McNamara fired for
effect in a Memorandum to President Johnson:
Having studied the 1964 Report, I do not feel that a brief survey of
this type qualifies as a basis for planning guidance. As a broad survey
of the problem, it is not without merit; but our strategic planning
today is increasingly based upon more detailed studies of specific
problem areas, such as those included on the Secretary of Defense’s
annual “Project List” and other studies conducted by the Joint Staff
and military departments … .33
The economy involved in eliminating a major study group is obvious.
We can, I feel, make better use of our limited study skills while
simultaneously improving the product delivered to the consumer.
Participation in DoD studies by other government agencies is, of
course, welcomed when warranted by the subject matter. Similarly, we
remain responsive to requests for study reports from other interested
agencies of the government.
In summary, while the annual study program of the NESC had
value and relevance in 1958, its contribution today is marginal when
compared to the battery of specific studies which have become major
functions of the JCS and DoD during the intervening years. It therefore
appears logical to terminate the requirement for the NESC.34
The final coup de grace was the last sentence: “Attached is a draft implementing
directive for signature.”
The response of the JCS was telling and ironic. Originally, in the mid-1950s, they
had felt that a special study group reporting to the Commander-in-Chief infringed
on their prerogatives. However, throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Net
Evaluation Subcommittee had done yeoman service and been a very constructive
process of reconciling military strategy with national policy in a reflective and recursive
process. Where the JCS had been a major force at the beginning of the Kennedy
Administration and often a source of contention within it, by the mid-1960s:
The Joint Chiefs of Staff … were composed primarily of men little

known to the public—men with no real public image. They were not
“yes men,” but they were selected by the president and Mr. McNamara
because if was felt “they would not kick over the traces.” The were not
men who would “pound the table.” They were not strong Chiefs of
Staff in the tradition of “Ernie” King or George Marshall.35
In this light, it is interesting to note the reaction of the JCS Chairman to McNamara’s
ditching of the NESC:
The Joint Chiefs of Staff have reviewed the 1964 NESC Report 2
pursuant to our meeting with you on 6 July 1964. This memorandum
covers only those questions relating to national planning. Issues
regarding NATO defenses were dealt with in JCSM–8–65, dated 8
January 1965, subject: “Issues Concerning NATO Raised by the 1964
NESC Report (U).”3
The 1964 NESC Report raised three major questions regarding
planning:
a. Do the Joint Chiefs of Staff lack guidance for the preparation
of military plans which could be provided by a Basic National
Security Policy or other compilation of strategic planning
guidance having national endorsement? (Pages 2–3, 33, NESC
Report)
b. Should JSOP and JSCP sections dealing with national and
military objectives and strategic concepts be discussed among
planners of the Department of State, the Department of Defense,
and other appropriate agencies? (Pages 4, 33–34, NESC Report)
c. Should US military and political departments undertake more
extensive cooperation in identifying specific potential crisis
situations and examining them in the light of the political-military
measures which they might require? (Page 34, NESC Report)
With respect to the requirement for a Basic National Security Policy,
its compilation into a single document is desirable in principle, but, at
the present time, the Joint Chiefs of Staff do not lack policy guidance
for the preparation of military plans. Necessary guidance is obtained
through both face-to-face meetings and a continuing exchange of
written memoranda with the Secretary of Defense. Guidance also
results from meetings with the President, National Security Council
meetings, National Security Action Memoranda, National Country
Policy papers, and National Planning Task papers.
Lack of a Basic National Security Policy has not handicapped the
Strategy for Tomorrow

PHILLIP A. K ARBER
Joint Chiefs of Staff in developing basic short-range (JSCP), mid-

range (JSOP), and long-range (JLRSS) plans, as well as specific
contingency plans.
Finally, there are in existence some 200 contingency plans prepared by
unified and specified commands as a result of both broad and specific
directives in the JSCP. These plans represent the military planning for
crisis situations in a wide variety of situations and a large number of
countries and areas.
There is no evident need to provide additional organizations for crisis
planning.36
Thus, on 18 March 1965, the Net Evaluation Subcommittee was dissolved by
Presidential order with little fanfare, no eulogy for its long existence and many
contributions—no one attended the funeral.37
There was a post-script however. Even though the Administration finally won its
political battle to have Flexible Response adopted by the Alliance, the adoption of a
new strategy did not satiate the need for “net evaluation.” In fact, three postmortem
examples underscore that point. First, the ink was not even dry on the NESC “death
warrant” when the State Department, noting that similar issues related to conventional-
nuclear forces and strategic issues of targeting restraint were associated with the rise
of new nuclear power in Asia, asked for a similar type of project be established related
to China.38 Second, as the US attempted to revive arms control discussions with the
Soviet Union, various intelligence issues that could impact the strategic balance kept
recurring, and it was not uncommon for observers to note: “There is no agreed-upon or
disagreed-upon net evaluation within the US Government.”39
Third, a case could be made that having adopted a new NATO strategy in advance
of the material assets necessary to make it viable, the real work (as opposed to
salesmanship) had only just begun. In short, the more serious the desire to reduce
NATO dependence upon nuclear deterrence, the greater the need for:
• Detailed balance diagnosis as a reflective monitoring mechanism to calibrate
progress (or lack of it);
• Prognostic trend analysis, to identify key vectors in both sides rapidly changing
conventional technology;
• Prescriptive identification of key transformational technological, force
structure and arms control proposal would be needed to first establish a capable
conventional defense and then convert it into a credible deterrent.
The fundamental mistake McNamara and President Johnson made was to assume that
because Systems Analysis had done a couple of studies in the mid-1960s, this would be
enough to break Alliance drift and Pentagon institutional inertia. It wasn’t.
Indeed, toward the end of the Johnson Administration, when McNamara was gone
and NATO had already adopted Flexible Response, General Maxwell Taylor, now
Chairman of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, sent an interesting
recommendation to the President:
In the course of the Board’s continuing appraisal of the adequacy of

our Government’s intelligence coverage of Soviet plans and actions
affecting US national security, we have had discussions of the
desirability of reinstituting a periodic examination of the relative
strategic strength of the United States and the USSR. We have noted
that the Net Evaluation Subcommittee of the National Security
Council which had been charged with this work was inactivated in
1963 and that no other agency in the government has been given
the responsibility for continuing an interdepartmental analysis of
this matter.2 Meanwhile, from the intelligence point of view, we see
the increasing need for reliable information on the status of Soviet
advanced strategic military capabilities, and on related Soviet research
and development efforts.
Based on discussions with former members of the Net Evaluation
Subcommittee, our conclusion is that the former evaluation procedure
would hardly be adequate to cope with the current problem which
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
is now far more complex than the one which confronted us in the
past. These complexities arise from the growing sophistication of
strategic offensive and defensive weapons systems, the many unknown
factors with regard to the performance of these new weapons and the
sensitivity of the kind of study which we have in mind.
The kind of analysis we envision would call for an evaluation of the
composition, reliability, effectiveness and vulnerability of the strategic
offensive and defensive forces of both sides, to include their command
and control systems. It would also call for a close study of the urban-
industrial structure of both nations in order to assess the probable
effects of strategic attacks on urban-industrial targets. These analyses
should be based upon the best available information and foreign
intelligence. A by-product of the kind of new study we are discussing
would be to focus attention on the gaps in the intelligence data and to
accelerate measures to collect the missing pieces.
After the development of the best possible understanding of the
likely performance of the opposing strategic forces, it should then be
possible to construct one or more scenarios for war game purposes in
order to measure the interactions of these forces in nuclear war. The
results would then permit our best military and scientific minds to
draw pertinent conclusions as to the relative strength of our forces
and the considerations which should influence future decisions and
actions in the strategic field.
The agencies interested in such a study and with a contribution to
make to it include the White House, State, Defense, JCS, CIA, Justice
and AEC. Since the study would draw heavily upon the scientific
community, the President’s Science Advisory Committee should be
included as a participant.
Taking into account this breadth of governmental interest, the
question arises as to the best way of organizing it. The old Net
Evaluation Group did not have adequate scientific support to carry
on a study of the scope which we are proposing. Furthermore, it
reported through a committee chaired by the Chairman, Joint Chiefs
of Staff to the National Security Council. Under present conditions,
the Board believes that the proposed study could best be done under
the Secretary of Defense acting as executive agent for the President.40
Their bottom line: “It is the recommendation of your Board that the Secretary of
Defense be directed to prepare proposed terms of reference whereby he would undertake
the net evaluation studies in collaboration with the appropriate other government
40
agencies, along the lines suggested above.”

The new Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford, after consulting with JCS Chairman
Wheeler, formally demurred:
In response to your request that we look into Max Taylor’s suggestion

for a resumption of the sort of study last conducted by the Net
Evaluation Subcommittee of the NSC in 1963, I have had my staff
review existing studies to determine whether a new NES-type effort
would be worthwhile.
Needless to say, the NES studies were initiated in the 1950’s at a
time when our strategic capabilities were far less than they are today
and more significantly for purposes of a new study, we lacked the
analytical capability to assess relative US and Soviet performance in
various scenarios. General Wheeler and I find that existing current
material fully covers the ground of the Net Evaluation studies.
Our intelligence in regard to Soviet capabilities has vastly improved, as
reflected in periodical NIEs on Soviet strategic offensive and defensive
systems, updated versions of both of which will be forthcoming
shortly (NIEs 11–8 and 11–3). Each year the Joint War Games
Agency writes a Soviet objectives plan (RISOP) which they game
against our SIOP. These results give us a very detailed evaluation of
our near-term capabilities against the Soviets and their capabilities
against us. When dealing with capabilities over the next ten years, the
DOD strategic force and effectiveness tables, last revised on August
7, 1968, consider relative strengths in a number of different strategic
situations, and we have the capability of readily preparing additional
tables for any particular scenario not covered. The forthcoming DPM
on US strategic and defensive systems also covers much of the same
ground.
In the light of the availability of this material General Wheeler and
I are convinced that it would not be desirable to proceed with a new
net evaluation study.
However, in a personal note to Gen. Taylor, the SecDef was not so negative:
Dear Max:
Thank you for sending me a copy of the memorandum you propose
to send to the President in regard to the FIAB proposal for a new
Net Evaluation Study. In general you have done justice in presenting
my views, although there are many more evaluations going on than I
mentioned in my letter to Walt Rostow or than you mention in your
memorandum to the President.
I would like to emphasize, however, that while I believe a new
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
administration might wish to have a hand in initiating as far-reaching

a study as you propose, my main point is that existing studies and
existing coordinating mechanisms for bringing information to bear
on the problem are adequate to do the job.
This is not to say that there are no intelligence gaps, or that we
intend to rest on the merits of studies we have already completed. I
am convinced, however, that our current efforts are able to identify —
and take steps to fill—any gaps in our intelligence, our research and
development, and our analysis.
I believe that our current efforts have the interdepartmental inputs
that you feel would be the main benefit of your proposed study. What
is lacking most in our current efforts is the relaxed, long-range view
that could best be supplied by studies at IDA, Rand, etc. I have been
promoting such studies and would appreciate your help in focusing
such studies on the pertinent issues.
I have enclosed brief descriptions of a few of the more important
continuing efforts that we are making to evaluate the relative strategic
strength of the United States and the USSR. I would be glad to provide
briefings on any of these efforts to you personally or to the FIAB.41
The areas of study underway referenced by the SecDef included:

1. Political-Military War Games;
2. RISOP-SIOP War Games;
3. Post-Nuclear Attack Study;
4. Strategic Forces Draft Presidential Memorandum;
5. DoD Strategic Force and Effectiveness Tables;
6. Study of Sub-SIOP Options;
7. National Intelligence Estimates and Projections.42
What was not on that list was where the NESC had left off—the interrelationship
between the Conventional force balance in Europe, its relationship with dual-capable
and theater nuclear forces, and the continued dependence of NATO’s new strategy of
Flexible Response upon nuclear options.
Thus, while Maxwell Taylor and the FIAB appreciated the work being done as
outlined by Clifford,43 it was not an accident, that, following the election, they reported:
41
Comparative Evaluations of Military Capabilities. The Board

believes that national security interests would benefit from the
establishment of an interagency mechanism (representing civilian
and military departments and agencies) for making periodic,
comparative evaluations of the military offensive and defensive
capabilities of the US and the USSR. It is important that this be
an interdepartmental effort involving as participants all appropriate
elements of the Executive Branch. We envisage that from time to time
this body would evaluate the composition, reliability, effectiveness
and vulnerability of the offensive and defensive forces of both sides,
thus providing an informed basis for national policy decisions. An
anticipated by-product of such studies would be the identification
of significant gaps in the intelligence community’s coverage of the
USSR.44
44
5
THE 1970 BLUE RIBBON
DEFENSE PANEL
There is … no mechanism within the Department to provide an
integrated analysis which systematically places existing or proposed
programs in the context of the capabilities and limitations of the
United States and its allies versus possible antagonists.1
The conduct of Net Assessments for the Secretary of Defense originated in the early
1970s. This was a period when the national security consensus had eroded during an
expensive and frustrating military intervention, it was a climate of economic pressure
where military budgets were headed toward fiscal constraint, and at a time when new
threats appeared on the horizon. Net Assessment was viewed by a few far-sighted
leaders as a method of helping the US remain competitive in a changing security
environment.
This then was the environment in the first year of the Nixon Administration when
the President commissioned a number of outside efforts to examine government
organization and propose more effective and efficient structures. In April the Ash
Committee2 began its work on The President’s Council on Executive Organization.
Only three months later, in the summer of 1969, the Fitzhugh Commission3 started
studying the organization and management of the Pentagon,4 and there were similar,
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
if less known, efforts directed at State and the CIA.5 This one-year effort became
know as the Blue Ribbon Defense Panel (BRDP), consisting of sixteen distinguished
members, including a number of CEOs with defense related executive experience,
supported by a large staff of 46, a majority of whom were focused on researching the
problems.
Most of the Blue Ribbon Panel’s focus was on the Pentagon’s mismanagement of the
unmanageable6 by an un-managing management.7
The Department of Defense presents an unparalleled management

challenge. Many factors contribute to the scope of this challenge,
including: the size of the defense establishment; the variety and
diversity of its activities, all of which are closely interrelated; its
technological dependence; the annual authorization-appropriation
cycle; the political sensitivity of its operations; the obscurity of any
quantitative standards for measurement of success or failure; the
diverse origin and broad sweep of its policy guidance; the internal
divergences of interests within the Department; and the variances of
its objectives due to changing threats, shifting potentials for crises and
fluctuating national commitments.8
Four issues were raised by the BRDP of direct relevance to our interest: the failure
to control escalating costs as the US depended upon qualitative system performance,
the lack of realistic planning in the budgetary process, the need of the Secretary of
Defense to be directly supported by long-range planning and net assessment, and
growing concern that America was being overtaken by the Soviet Union in several key
areas of military balance.
Major issues addressed by the Blue Ribbon Panel were the failure to control waste and
cost overruns as well as the inability of the Defense planning process to forecast accurate
budgetary performance. “Although the PPBS is the major planning, programming
and budgeting procedure in the Department,” the BRDP concluded that “it has more
change.
Time
THE 1970 BLUE RIBBON DEFENSE PANEL
Figure 4. Plan vs. Reality
practical use as a budgeting device than as a planning and programming procedure.”9

While the PPBS had brought consistency and discipline to the frontside creation
of DoD budgets, there was a growing trend where the backside performance—the
discipline to match output with the plan—was breaking down.10
10
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
Subsequent studies over the last thirty years have shown how prescient the Fitzhugh
panel’s concern was.11 Figure 4 above illustrates the historic disconnect between the
FYDP projected plans and the actual budgetary performance. Depending on the
cycle, the FYDP was wrong when budgets were increasing, wrong when they were in
decline, and in fact, only one out of thirty year’s plans corresponded with what actually
happened. This breakdown in financial discipline is not only inefficient but produces
a disconnect where the budget takes on an alternate reality, one divorced from the
external environment and driven instead by internal constituents.12
In an extended Appendix, “Mechanisms for Change—Organizational History,”13
the Blue Ribbon Panel recognized that many traditional aspects of foreign relations had
become “strategic.” First, the declining distinction between peace and war converted
mobilization time from weeks to minutes and with it brought standing armies, “fleets
in being” and, with hair-trigger forces, the danger of strategic surprise. Second, the
introduction of weapons of mass destruction combined with intercontinental range,
not only created an environment of “reciprocal fear of surprise,” but held entire nations
in delicate balance of terror—one in which they could be destroyed. And third, the
increasing communicability and complexity of international relations produced a
security environment involving a much wider range of professional expertise in science
as well as a number of social disciplines. “As a result, the image of an expert military
profession, unchallengeable in its field, began to fade” in the strategy of the atomic
age—“military advice” had to be tempered with a wide range of civilian expertise.14
11
and the Secretary of
14
The Blue Ribbon Defense Panel picked up on the observation that “in a Cold War
military advice was essential but seldom determining,”15 and they focused on the
inadequate civilian contribution to strategy development without mincing words:
• “The Secretary of Defense does not presently have the opportunity to consider
all viable options as background for making major policy decisions because
important options are often submerged or compromised at lower levels of the
Department of Defense.”
• “A need exists for an independent source of informed and critical review and
analysis of military forces and other problems—particularly those involving
more than one Service, or two or more competitive or complementary
activities, missions, or weapons.”16
• “There is no organizational element within OSD with the assigned
responsibility for objectively making net assessments of US and foreign
military capabilities.”
• “There is no organizational element within OSD that is charged with the
responsibility for long-range planning for the structuring and equipping of
forces for other similar purposes.”17
The emphasis was not on replacing uniformed advice on military strategy, or even
changing their primacy, but in providing the national security leadership with options,
independent assessments, and non-canonical planning that did not get inhibited,
diluted or suppressed on their way to the top.
In order to address this perceived vacuum two quite different methodologies
were proposed—diagnostic comparative analysis and prognostic, diachronic trend
projection. Not insignificantly, as illustrated below in Figure 5, two of the Blue
Ribbon panel’s 113 recommendations called for the creation of special offices for these
respective foci with both reporting directly to the Secretary of Defense:
• Office of Net Assessment;
• Office of Long-Range Planning.
The BRDP argued that each of these functions was so unique that they not only
required their own separate organizations but also so important that they had to be
immediately reported to the top without interference from any of the other subordinate
organizations that might try to influence the independent analysis and projections of
which direction his Colonel’s eagles mounted.

PHILLIP A. K ARBER
Figure 5. Blue Ribbon Defense Panel Recommendations
these two functions.

The report also recommended a third group to serve as a SecDef coordinating
function, which would presumably have been the tasking and agent for these two
proposed offices.18
The case for an Office of Net Assessment was made with considerable passion in the
report:
Major program and policy decisions in the Department of Defense
tend to be based on an assessment of individual factors, such as the
apparent threat, the technological capability of the United States
and possible opponents, and cost effectiveness criteria. The Defense
intelligence community is concerned with foreign developments, but
does not make assessments of US capabilities. Threat assessments are
with.
made for comparison with the projected capability of some proposed

new US development. There is, however, no mechanism within the
Department to provide an integrated analysis which systematically
places existing or proposed programs in the context of the capabilities
and limitations of the United States and its allies versus possible
antagonists. The Secretary of Defense should have available, on a
continuing basis, the results of comparative studies and evaluations of
US and foreign military capabilities, to identify existing or potential
deficiencies or imbalances in US military capabilities.19
Thus, there was the perceived need for the comparative evaluation of both “US and
enemy capabilities” conducted by the same agent reporting directly to the Secretary
of Defense.
The BRDP was “concerned that no one ever put the strategic picture together” and
that this was “a vital function now performed by no one.”20 They argued that Secretary
of Defense “needed someone close to him who would be an unbiased advisor about
where the US military” balance stood relative to competitors.
A way was needed to bring enemy and friendly data together with
no restrictions on the information used and no limits on questions
as to its accuracy or relevance. Real diagnosis was needed, not just
assessments of the potential impact on the enemy in order to justify
military programs that the services had already decided to pursue.21
This in turn led to the unusual staffing recommendation, at least for then, that a Net
Assessment Group should “… consist of individuals from appropriate units in the
Department of Defense,” along with “consultants and contract personnel appointed
from time to time by the Secretary of Defense,” and the OSD/NA office “should
report directly to him.”22
The Blue Ribbon panel proposed that the trend projection and “critical review” of
strategy functions would be performed by a parallel Long-Range Planning Group,
similarly composed and likewise reporting directly to the Secretary of Defense with
the “responsibility for planning which integrates net assessments, technological
projections, fiscal planning, etc.”23
There is no organizational element within OSD that is charged with

the responsibility for broadly supporting the Secretary of Defense in
long-range planning which integrates net assessments, technological
projections, fiscal planning, etc. Force planning is currently initiated
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Military Departments within

the constraints of fiscal guidance to each Service and for each major
mission and support effort. In order to provide an overall balance
of forces, to prevent wasteful duplications, and to develop effective
but more economical alternatives to those conditioned by traditional
approaches of the Military Services, OSD requires an internal long-
range planning capability. The development of alternative solutions
should include consideration of all relevant political, economic,
and technological and military factors. To the extent to which
such a capability exists in the current OSD organization, it is too
fragmented and too limited by the pressure of more immediately
urgent assignments to be effective.24
Co-equal in design and chain of report with diagnostic Net Assessment, the Long-
Range Planning Group had two quite distinct functions. One was prognostic—to
identify major factors (domestic and foreign) potentially influencing the security of the
nation, project alternative vectors, track changes in these trends and alert the Secretary
of Defense to those which (for good or ill) might change the assumptions that the
national military strategy was predicated on. The other function was prescriptive—
to identify new approaches and/or create alternative courses of action, including
different military options, in order to both enlighten the deliberations and empower
the decisions of the SecDef.
On the surface, the integrative function of the Long-Range Planning Group would
put it higher on the food chain as a consumer of Net Assessment products. But there
was also a reciprocal and recursive feedback loop, where unexpected or newly emergent
trends would be fed back to Net Assessment in order for them to evaluate the impact of
this impending change. There was some dissent as to whether these two functions—
Net Assessment and Long-Range Planning—should be treated as two separate offices,
each reporting to a third coordinating officer in the immediate SecDef staff or whether
the functions should be integrated into an Assistant Secretary of Defense with an
overall mandate encompassing “Strategic Assessment.”
BRDP member Robert C. Jackson, who as Chairman of Teledyne Ryan Aeronautical
had substantial DoD experience and insight, felt so strongly about the need to integrate
the three functions—long range planning, net assessment and strategy development—
into an ASD level position that he took the extraordinary step of issuing a “Dissenting
Statement” represented in Figure 6 arguing that the position required confidentiality
and access that could only be achieved with a “direct report” to the SecDef.
The Panel recommends a Long Range Planning Group to provide

support to the Secretary of Defense with responsibility for long range
planning which integrates net assessment, technological projections,
fiscal planning, etc. The Panel further recommends a coordinating
Figure 6. Jackson Recommendations
group to assist the Secretary in coordinating the activities of the

entire Department. The Panel also recommends a Net Assessment
Group to conduct and report on net assessment of United States
and foreign military capabilities and potentials. I believe these three
groups should be assembled under an Assistant Secretary of Defense
for Long Range Planning, Coordination, and Net Assessment. This
Assistant Secretary would report directly to the Secretary/Deputy
Secretary of Defense.25
The proposed elevation from the BRDP slot of two Directors to Jackson’s integrated
Assistant Secretary had a strong precedent in another SecDef advisory position—
Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs— which had similarly
been upgraded from a Directorate to ASD.26
What is interesting about BRDP member Jackson’s proposal for an Assistant
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
Secretary of a combined office of Net Assessment and Long Range Planning, is

that his version of other aspects of DoD organizational structure was at once not as
radical as the BRDP (in terms of having multiple DepSecDefs, with the Services
and the Operational Commands reporting through them) and far more prescient of
what actually became implemented over the 1970s.27 Just as Jackson correctly forecast
the trend toward functional Under Secretaries, he argued that the position of ASD
for Assistant Secretary of Defense for Long Range Planning, Coordination, and Net
Assessment had to be autonomous and report independently to the SecDef .
Thus, despite differences among the BLDP as to how to organize the

unique functions, among all of the members there was universal belief
in and strong endorsement that “the Long-Range Planning Council
and a Net Assessment Group has merit.” Likewise there was universal
agreement that they “should report directly to the Secretary/Deputy
Secretary of Defense as special staff groups.28 Unfortunately, in the
succeeding thirty-eight years since the need was articulated, rarely
has Long-Range Planning and/or Strategic Concept Development 29
actually had the high level position or institutional resources envisioned
by the BRDP. Net Assessment is an exception, but its position has
also vacillated widely.30
6
LAIRD’S SEARCH FOR A
STRATEGY DIALECTIC
Net Assessment is … a comparative analysis of those factors,
military, technological, political, and economic which impede or
have a potential to impede our national security objectives with
those factors available or potentially available to enhance the
accomplishment of those objectives.1
The idea of having some type of assessment and planning functions performed in the
Pentagon was neither new nor particularly controversial, 2 but having a split portfolio,
with each reporting directly to the Secretary of Defense was.3 As the Blue Ribbon
Panel recognized, some of the functions of the proposed Long-Range Planning Group
already existed, albeit fragmented and dispersed in various parts of OSD.4 However,
this was not the case with Net Assessment which had to be created from scratch,
and thus there were at least two precursors to its formal establishment in Defense.
Laird’s long time special assistant, Bill Baroody Jr., established a “Net Assessment”
cell within the Secretariat5 temporarily assigned to an existing Long-Range Planning
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
unit headed by Col. Don Marshal.6 Baroody’s files suggest an interest in the Net
Assessment function that arose in 1969, simultaneously, if not antedating, the creation
of the Fitzhugh Commission analysis.7
The Blue Ribbon Defense Panel had placed a high stress on the importance of
understanding both “technological trends” and the increasing evidence that the
Soviet Union was closing America’s qualitative lead in a number of areas. Because
Johnny Foster was seen as part of a “triad” running the Pentagon—consisting of the
Secretary, his Deputy David Packard and the DDR&E—therefore some have drawn
the conclusion that “the net technical assessment function which the BRDP suggested
should lie directly with the Secretary of Defense… . Instead … lies with Foster and
with his deputy for Research and Advanced Technology.”8
Department of Defense leadership needed a higher level of analysis,
recalled Stephen J. Lukasik, who served as the Deputy Director and
then Director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA) from 1967 – 1974. The recognition of this demand within
the Department of Defense led the Director of Defense Research and
Engineering (DDR&E), John S. Foster, to establish the Office of
Net Technical Assessment, which was led by Fred Wikner. The office
focused on technical comparisons of US and Soviet systems but did
not address the grand strategic policy questions of American power
in the context of its ongoing competition with the Soviet Union. The
Office of Net Technical Assessment was eventually eliminated during
the Carter administration. Still, in the early 1970s, the need for a
higher level of analysis persisted.9
Based on my involvement with NTA,10 the types of projects they were undertaking11
10
11
L AIRD’S SEARCH FOR A STRATEGY DIALECTIC
and contemporary discussion with the people running it at the time, it is my strong
opinion that this office was set up in reaction to the ideas of the Blue Ribbon Defense
Panel, but was never intended to either implement or substitute for the BRDP
recommendation for the SecDef level “Office of Net Assessment.”
Laird’s long personal interest in trying to square the circle of “America’s Strategy
Gap”12 and create a “Strategy of Realistic Deterrence”13 naturally brought the topics
of Net Assessment and Planning together both substantively and organizationally.
The defense Report in which this combination was introduced was viewed as “the best
defined and most widely distributed statement yet of the meshing of foreign policy and
national security policy and strategy.”14 In his annual posture statement, he identified
five axes on which to assess military strategy.
• An identified “spectrum of conflict” ranging from “political agitation” to
“strategic nuclear warfare” with “insurgency, guerrilla warfare, sub-theater
conventional warfare, theater conventional, and theater nuclear” in between;
• The “national security strategy” as articulated by the Commander in Chief;
• National resources inputs measured in budget levels, active manpower and
foreign assistance;
• Military force posture output indices for General Purpose Forces, Theater
Nuclear and Strategic Forces; and
• Strategic concepts covering defense and deterrence based on “alliance
partnership,” “military strength,” and “negotiated restraint.”15
Laird viewed strategy as the great work of the organization, and he was the first
Secretary to go beyond “sound bite” comparisons and methodically juxtapose the
Pentagon’s changing military strategy on an explicit set of relational criteria plotted
over time.
focus itself was tactical and technical.
Secretary
of Defense
14
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
Addressing those five areas into a comprehensive appraisal was a monumental task,
but it fit Laird’s definition of “Net Assessment.” In his FY 1973 Annual Posture
Statement, Secretary Laird introduced the construct by giving “Net Assessment” its
own section in his report and underscoring its importance:
I said at the beginning of this Report that the business of peace is

a complex one. Net Assessment in National Security Planning is
an indispensable tool for coping with these complexities. In simple
terms, Net Assessment, in conjunction with Total Force Planning,
tells where we are, what we need to do, and how to get there.
To put it more fully, Net Assessment is a comparative analysis of those
military, technological, political, and economic factors:
• which impede or have a potential to impede our national security
objectives
with those factors:
• available or potentially available to enhance the accomplishment
of those objectives.16
A dialectical process of strategic thought through which “we are able to determine how
to apply our resources more effectively to accomplish our national security goals.”17
Where others, then and now, use the term “net” to refer to the juxtaposition of
ones own versus opposing forces, Laird’s definition went much further than military
balancing.18
Assessment and planning in the nuclear age are intimately related

to understanding of international relations on the one hand and to
weapons technology and possible use on the other hand. There is, of
course, nothing new in this dependence. What is new is the enormous
underscored in the original.

complexity that has entered into force planning since World War
II, compounded by dramatic technological advances, major world
economic adjustments, and a fragmenting of the past bi-polar world
structure.
The international environment is dynamic, confusing and in some
aspects disconcerting. The rate of change—political, economic, social
and technical—is perhaps the greatest we have ever known. Net
assessment offers a valuable tool for understanding and responding to
these challenges … .
It is important to re-emphasize that any realistic assessments and
resulting plans for military forces and new weapons systems must
include political, economic and social considerations.
Net Assessment plays a critical role in our Total Force Planning and in
the development of forces necessary to maintain our national security.
In these assessments we weigh the capabilities of potential enemies
against our capabilities and those of our allies. At the same time, we
must give careful consideration not only to the strengths of potential
adversaries, but also to the deficiencies in their capabilities and the
various constraints with which they must cope.19
Although the above was stated in a special section entitled “Net Assessment and the
Threat,” this was not merely “red baiting” in the guise of objectivity nor was it narrowly
focused on military comparisons.
Laird’s perspective had a much broader and more long-range evaluative ring to
it—like what would later be called “competitive strategy”—reflectively assessing the
environment one is in, relative to where one wants to be. Looking back, it would
not be inaccurate to describe Laird’s view of Net Assessment as a form of strategic
sociology—systemically integrating cultural, economic, technological, and political
trends20 —upon which planning would be based and against which new concepts could
be analytically tested.21
The Structure of Social
Politics and Social Structure

Daedalus The
System of Modern Societies
Societies
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
In the SecDef ’s view, the leader of the Defense Department had the responsibility
to be the synthesizer of military needs and civilian resources; a challenge befitting a
statesman, one that could not be delegated but had to be taken personally:22
We intend to accomplish this through a more coordinated emphasis

on Net Assessment in my immediate office and throughout the
Department of Defense … .
It is important to bear in mind, however, that Total Force planning
must be carried out both in terms of immediate as well as longer-
range phased objectives … . However, this will be a difficult task since
the apparent demands of the moment may sometimes have adverse
impact on what we hope to accomplish in the future.
In order to minimize this often troublesome problem, my Director
of Net Assessments will be supported by and work closely with the
Office of my Assistant for Long-Range Planning, whose task it will
be to assure effective coordination of the Net Assessment and Total
Force planning functions of the Secretary of Defense … .
As a former member of Congress, I am confident that our new
approach, with its emphasis on Net Assessment and Total Force
planning, will permit the Department of Defense in coming months
and years to be even more responsive to the Congress as we share the
responsibility for assuring our national security.23
The target audience of this message was clearly the Congress, and Laird was using
Net Assessment to forge a better relationship with them and was willing to make the
process an extension of his immediate office and direct staff in order to demonstrate
his commitment.
Thus, for a “Secretary of Strategy,” the tools of Net Assessment and Long Range
Planning were the left and right hands (brains) of strategy development 24 —respectively
diagnostic and prognostic—that, in combination would provide prescriptive input for
strategy development as well as negative feedback for course correction.25 It would
be through this dialectical “process” that the Department of Defense would be “able
to determine how to apply our resources most effectively in order to improve our
total capability to accomplish our national security goals.”26 It could be argued that
McNamara had also had a dialectical process: JCS and Services proposed; the Systems
Analysis policemen opposed; and the Secretary disposed.
But Laird’s model of Net Assessment was different. And the following seems to
capture his intent:
Net Assessment is based on an intellectual approach that differs

substantially from the modern examples … . At the highest level it is
for the use of the Secretary of Defense, and the questions that it tries
to answer are those that arise when the overall capabilities and future
shape of the American military are considered. It is not intended to
provide a day-to-day management tool to review the efficiency with
which existing missions are executed nor is it designed to alert the
Secretary of Defense to the danger of an imminent war.27
In short, Laird’s model of Net Assessment was not the beginning of a linear process
of programming and budgeting process, but an “off-line” device with which to think
strategically about theater balances and long-range competitive challenges.
Trends uncovered in Long-Range Planning or Net Assessment conclusions could
serve as a thesis that something may be amiss in US strategy or that there may be
a competitive advantage in doing something new.28 As illustrated in Figure 7, the
Pentagon with all the inertia of the Queen Mary—military services, Joint Staff and
organizations in DoD—can respond to the assessment with a proposed remedy that
is then debated; and SecDef, with the advice of the JCS Chairman and others, has
the opportunity to create a new synthesis.29 Laird’s point was that given the totality
of the Pentagon’s planning activity, a process that takes several years for each cycle
and involves an enormous amount of built up momentum, it makes it difficult for
the SecDef to ask questions he does not know the answers to, to innovate in rapidly
changing environments in real time, or to explore alternative options (in order to remain
competitive or exploit an unexpected advantage) that are outside institutional boxes. In
order not to disrupt the massive mainline planning machine or be held hostage by its
inertia, the Secretary thus adopted the BRDP position that it was prudent to have a
strategic assessment unit reporting directly to his office. Without this direct access, his
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
Figure 7. Laird’s Dialectic
inquires could not be asked or answe=red in confidence; or without some intervening

office putting their spin on the question or trying to grade, let alone influence, the
answer.
On the other hand, while this small planning cell or group was clearly expected to
engage the various services, departments, or components in discussion and dialogue
on emerging issues, the intent was NOT to create another bad experience similar to
McNamara’s Systems Analysis Office, where they were used as front line combatants in
the bureaucratic and budgetary wars. As a dialectic, it was informative and intellectual,
providing a perspective outside the formal planning process for SecDef to be exposed
to dissonant views and make his own synthesis; it was NOT an antithetical battering
ram with which to assault Service POM positions.30
7
THE PENTAGON VERSUS THE
NSC
National policymakers want to know how the US stands in
various types of international competition. They are interested in
our relative position and any trends that may affect it. Further, it
is most important to know what causes the trends.1
It has become Net Assessment folklore that Secretary Laird had chosen not “to
implement the Fitzhugh Panel’s recommendations to create a net assessment function.”2
But that interpretation not only is contradicted by the evidence above but also ignores
the then ongoing policy conflict between the Pentagon and the National Security
Council.3 Inadvertently caught up in the middle and stimulating a “net assessment”
organizational competition was a supplementary report on the changing balance
between the US and the USSR from the Blue Ribbon Panel effort.
From the perspective of the NSC it was business as usual, with assessment interest
stemming from strategic competition. Here are two different versions:
In November 1969, Kissinger had initiated Strategic Arms Limitation

Talks (SALT) with the Soviets. By the following spring he had begun
worrying that the Soviets might begin dragging their feet or otherwise
misbehave regarding the negotiations. He therefore convened a special
defense panel under K. Wayne Smith to explore programmatic steps
the United States might take to pressure the Russians should that
Time
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
prove necessary in order to reach a SALT agreement. During the

deliberations of Kissinger’s special defense panel, Charles Herzfeld
pressed Marshall and Schlesinger to assess where the United States
stood in the principal areas of military competition between the two
Cold War adversaries. In response, Marshall focused on the Soviets
and where they were headed, while Schlesinger concentrated on the
two sides’ military budgets. Marshall, however, ended up doing most
of the drafting of this “first net assessment” because of Schlesinger’s
commitments at the Bureau of the Budget. 4
Or:
By 1970, however, it was beginning to be clear that the US defense
budget would decline after the Vietnam War was over, while the
Soviets apparently were expanding their strategic nuclear forces
with an intensity that seemed both unbounded and directed toward
establishing clear superiority over the United States. The dominance
of US forces was eroding and a long term question was how well the
United States was equipped to compete with the Soviet Union in
military matters. The National Security Council appointed a study
group that worked on a net assessment in the last half of 1970. Its
report not only speculated on long-term developments in US and
Soviet forces, but recommended establishing a more permanent effort
to conduct net assessments in order to develop a picture of how the
competition was going over time.5
Differences over positions in the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks became intertwined
with varying degrees of alarm over the changing balance with the Soviets as well as a
personality turf war between Laird and Kissinger.
Across the Potomac in September 1970, just three months after the Blue Ribbon
Report, seven of the sixteen panel members, led by Lewis Powell,6 produced a
“Supplemental Statement”7 as a 35 page “Report on the Shifting Balance of Military
Power,”8 derisively called the “Red Book” around the NSC for the color of its cover
THE PENTAGON VERSUS THE NSC
and “Russians are Coming!” tone.9 However, the report’s call for “public discussion”
of “converging trends” and the need to assess the “threat to technological superiority”
and the contribution of negotiated “limitations on the ‘arms race’,” underscored the
need for some type of assessment that would not only function as the basis for military
strategy, but also be addressed to Congressional and public audiences.10
The “Red Book” highlighted three specific areas of major concern about “the
convergence of a number of trends” indicating “a significant shifting of the strategic
military balance against the United States and in favor of the Soviet Union;” with
particular concern over:
• “The growing Strategic superiority in ICBMs” coupled with “convincing
evidence that the Soviet Union seeks a preemptive first-strike capability;”
• “ The rapidly expanding Soviet naval capability;” and
• “The possibility that present US technological superiority will be lost to the
Soviet Union.” 11
Johnny Foster, one of the most influential leaders to hold the position of DDR&E,
was held in high esteem by the Blue Ribbon Defense Panel and quoted extensively in
the Supplemental “The Shifting Balance of Military Power” report. In particular, he
stressed concern about the long-range effects of Soviet R&D investment and concern
that the US was losing its competitive advantage in industrial base—long-range
competitive themes picked up by the Blue Ribbon report.12
The authors of the supplemental “Report on the Shifting Balance of Military Power”
admitted that “it does not purport to be an exhaustive assessment of the comparative
military capabilities” and emphasized that it had a public education purpose.13 But
one side effect was to sensitize the Kissinger NSC that some type of “net” effort at
assessing the US v. Soviet strategic balance was going to happen whether they liked it
or not and that, rather than defensively critiquing the failings of others, they should
get ahead of it, and take the lead.
Although its avowed purpose was to rally public opinion behind a strong defense,
the report was immediately buried. Nothing was heard of it for six months. The White
House intervened through Henry Kissinger, who asked the Deputy Secretary of
Defense to have his staff ‘review the Report in some detail for substantive accuracy
and for consistency with our other public statements before further consideration is
10
11
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
given to releasing it to the public.’ In other words, never was soon enough.14
Despite a cold shoulder from the National Security Council,15 this pioneering US-
Soviet side-by-side comparison also popularized, even within the DOD/NSC
community, the concept of a “balance” that should be periodically watched and weighed
via a methodology called “net assessment.”16 Because the “Red Book” intermixed
description and prescription, subsequent NSC emphasis would separate them with an
emphasis upon the “diagnostic” nature of net assessment.
In the fall 1970, the Nixon Administration began taking seriously the possibility of
meaningful conventional arms control in Europe. In an NSC Senior Review Group
meeting, chaired by the National Security Advisor, contrasted the opening position, or
more accurately, non-position with the past attention given to strategic forces:
This will be a brief meeting to review where we stand on MBFR
and agree where we go from here. We have identified a number of
approaches: 1) an approach that is basically political; 2) an arms control
approach which attempts to preserve or enhance our military position
through asymmetrical cuts. I have the impression from our work on
NSSM 84 and the NSC meeting that there is a general consensus that
symmetrical cuts of any significant size are not very desirable from the
security point of view. The only symmetrical cuts that would not be
undesirable would be so small as to be symbolic, and even these might
run counter to attempts to improve our posture. This leaves us with
an attempt to develop an asymmetrical approach. Conceptually an
asymmetrical approach represents a tough problem. Contrary to the
SALT exercise, we have developed no criteria for comparison—we
have no yard-sticks. Nor have we worked out questions of collateral
restraints, either symmetrical or asymmetrical. Our biggest problem is
related to the mobilization date. Ideally, we should develop constraints
designed to give maximum warning or to impede mobilization and
reinforcement. We haven’t yet worked out what specific constraints
would be most effective. (to Mr. Helms) We haven’t had a systematic
analysis of how our intelligence capabilities could be strengthened to
help us monitor an agreement. This is a tough problem.17
After discussion of substantive issues, the topic turned to the question of how to
14
proceed:
Mr. Kissinger: (to Wayne Smith) Let’s get a working panel to work on
this, chaired by CIA with DIA representation.
Mr. Packard: That’s a good idea. Also, we have some new capability
which we are looking at as an independent matter … .
Mr. Kissinger: We need a compilation of all the sources of our
information, what sort of information we get and what sort we
need. For example, I noticed a reference to the fact that if the Soviet
forces were returned to the Moscow and Kiev Military Districts this
wouldn’t help us. Why would it not help us somewhat to have Soviet
forces moved 1,000 miles back? Why would it be necessary for them
to go beyond the Urals? I can see the relationship of a move 1,000
miles back by the Soviets to a 3,000 mile move by the US, but it
should help some. (to Wayne Smith) Let’s get this compilation.
Mr. Irwin: At least we would get an idea of the time span of our
uncoverage.
Mr. Helms: The idea of a task force is first class.
Dr. Smith: Has anyone done any work on the recent Warsaw Pact
exercises in this regard? We could learn something from it.
Mr. Packard: We have done some work but nothing very detailed.
Mr. Kissinger: We must try to be as concrete as possible. For example,
we speak of troops being disbanded. Do we mean that these troops
would go into reserve status; would their weapons be destroyed; if not,
where would their weapons be moved? We must know what we are
talking about.
Over the next six months, the need for “Net Assessments” of US and Soviet forces,
and the role of doing it from the NSC as an interagency process began to take hold.18
There is some evidence that a contemporary paper—“Net Assessment of US and
Soviet Force Posture,” prepared in 1970 by Andrew Marshall, then a NSC consultant,
was either viewed as countering the supplemental “Red Book” report, or at a minimum
recommending further follow-up to it.19 In any case it was relevant to a whole new
area of interest in the balance of General Purpose Forces. Thus in a Summary,
Conclusions and Recommendations prepared for National Security Advisor Kissinger,
he highlighted the following:
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
There is considerable importance to having better, more finely tuned

net assessments of the relative position of US and Soviet force postures.
Crude measures were acceptable in the past, but are no longer so.
Moreover, the question of how we are doing relative to the Soviets
will be increasingly raised as a more important political question than
has been in [sic] the case in the past. A case can be made that in the
areas that we cared most about, namely, Naval forces, military R&D,
and strategic offensive forces, we have been until recently, rather far
ahead of the Soviets. They have now caught up in almost all of these
and may be on the point of passing us. All of this suggests that it will
be important to find some regular way to get better, more refined
assessments.20
In short Marshall was admitting that in the same areas that the “Red Book” had
highlighted, there were noticeable and negative changes in American competitive
standing. Recognizing that in the past there had been a subcommittee led by a “three
star general” that prepared net assessments, Marshall recommended to Kissinger that
the NSC:
… begin by organizing and conducting a major national study to

produce a net assessment of US and Soviet force postures as of end
1972. Since this will be the first net assessment made in some time
using the mechanism of a national study will allow one to bring in
whoever seems to be the most suitable and best able to contribute to
such an assessment. Such a study ought to run about a year to eighteen
months. The time will be needed to get the Intelligence community
up to speed in many areas now lacking adequate data. The virtue of
this effort also would be that it could bring to bear absolutely first-
rate people who would perform not only the function of producing
the initial estimate, but set standards for future estimates to come.
Moreover, a number of methodological improvements will need to
be developed. Subsequent assessments could be undertaken by an
organization within the government, institutionalized in whatever
seemed to be the most appropriate way. Indeed, one could draw
on the experience of having the national study to come up with
recommendations as to how best to organize and conduct future net
assessments within the standard bureaucracy.21
In conclusion Marshall recommended that Kissinger consider organizing “a national

study to produce a net assessment by end 1972. Moreover, he suggested that this group
be asked “to produce a plan for the regular supply of such assessments” and “tasked
with the development of appropriate methodologies and data bases for making such
assessments.”22
President Nixon had struggled with the organization of US intelligence, and with
the organizational recommendations on defense by the Blue Ribbon Defense Panel, 23
he directed James Schlesinger (then Deputy Director of the Office of Management and
Budget) in December 1970 to recommend options on how the organizational structure
of the Intelligence Community could be changed to bring about greater efficiency
and effectiveness. Completed in March 1971, Schlesinger produced “A Review of the
Intelligence Community,”24 focused on consumer views25 and found a fragmented effort
with unnecessarily competitive and redundant collection activities, a disorganized and
ineffective management, costly inefficiency, and analytical products that often suffered
in timeliness or quality.26 Although the report received most attention for its reform of
the management structure with a strong DCI who could bring intelligence costs under
control, it also focused on improving analytic quality27 and, at the end, recommended:
• “Periodic review by outsiders of intelligence products, of the main working
hypotheses within the community, and of analytical methods being used.”
• “A net assessment group established at the national level which, along with
the NSSM process, will keep questioning the community and challenging it
to refine and support its hypotheses.”28
After half a year of internal review and debate, the President incorporated much of the
Schlesinger study in a major reorganization of the American intelligence community
that also had significant implications for net assessment.
Intelligence
8
NET ASSESSMENT METHOD &
PROCESS AT THE NSC
How would net assessment studies be different in methodology
and style of analysis from other forms of analysis now undertaken
to assist top level decision-makers? The focus on comparison with
rival powers is not entirely new, but new methods of making
such comparisons need to be developed. As improved methods of
comparing the US and our competitors are developed, they will
provide further differentiation for net assessment as a particular
type of analysis.1
In November 1971, President Nixon issued a Presidential Memorandum on the

“Organization and Management of the US Foreign Intelligence Community,”2 focused
on more efficient use of resources and improvement in the intelligence product. The
Director of Central Intelligence was made responsible for “planning, reviewing, and
evaluating all intelligence programs and activities and in the production of national
intelligence” as well as setting up an interagency Intelligence Committee, chaired by
the National Security Advisor, and consisting of the Attorney General, the Under
Secretary of State, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, and the DCI.3
As part of the intelligence community reorganization the President also directed:
… that a Net Assessment Group be created within the National

Security Council Staff. The group will be headed by a senior staff
member and will be responsible for reviewing and evaluating all
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
intelligence products and for producing net assessments of US

capabilities vis-à-vis those of foreign governments constituting a
threat to US security.4
This represented a virtual mirroring of the above Schlesinger recommendations and

equally interesting, combined both functions within one office, and Andy Marshall
was recruited to lead the NSC’s “NAG”5—an acronym that became popular with
those who resented having someone grade their intelligence products.
Following the NSC’s lead,6 in December 19717 Laird formally implemented the first
and only Blue Ribbon Defense Panel recommendation up to that time, and established
an Office of Net Assessment reporting directly to the Secretary of Defense.8 Trying
to use the SecDef office as the E-ring strategic coordinator was one thing. However,
for it to also serve as surrogate lead for Long-Range Planning as a part-time activity
while ground-breaking a new methodology of Net Assessment, all without a dedicated
staff, was neither implementable nor sustainable. The very breadth of Col. Marshall’s
histrionic interest, indeed preoccupation with Vietnam and its “lessons learned,”
seemed to invert these assessment efforts from a relevant forward looking center-stage
to a retrospective backwater.9 Moreover, the position remained unfulfilled and the
function unaddressed while an intense OSD v. NSC dialogue on the subject of Net
Assessment went on between late 1971-mid 1972.10
The Secretary of Defense
10
NET ASSESSMENT METHOD & PROCESS AT THE NSC
This delay in filling a position that Laird wanted and had invested considerable
personal political capital in getting established, was not unique to the Net Assessment
function. For example, “in October 1972 Congress passed legislation creating a second
deputy secretary of defense position,” which was “a proposal Laird strongly supported,
even though he never filled the position.”11 Laird was not the only one side-tracked by
the politics. Over at the White House:
… bureaucratic tension between the NSC and the Pentagon over who
would be in charge of national net assessments prevented Marshall
from getting any started in 1972.12
The departure of Secretary Laird early in 197313 and the dispersal of his Long-Range
Planning staff, compounded the departmental disorganization produced by the
short tenure of Elliott Richardson (three Secretaries within six months) left the Net
Assessment office stillborn, albeit with a heroic mandate waiting to be filled.
In April 1972 Andrew W. Marshall arrived at the National Security Council as a
full time employee to head up the Net Assessment Group.14 After getting the office
organized with both assigned military assistants and secretarial support he laid out the
analytical mission:
In the past the US held a clear edge in nearly every aspect of

international competition; certainly we did so in military forces and
military R&D. Where and when we were challenged we were always
able to divert enough resources to the problem area to restore our
superiority. That is, we were able to buy solutions to our problems.
This is no longer the case. There is severe pressure to reduce military
expenditures, and this pressure is likely to continue. Thus there is a
high premium on thoughtful and inventive approaches to the defense
problem solution, and on carefully calculated risk taking. To make
this work, we must have a very clear description of the comparative
situation of ourselves and our rivals.15
It is not clear who this was written for, but the message was clear, “it was time to
play smart, not rich.”16 In the memorandum, Marshall explicitly recognized that “to
make this work, we must have a very clear description of the comparative situation of
11
14
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
ourselves and our rivals.17

Although at this stage the function was not called “competitive strategy,”18 that is
the descriptor that best captures what he intended.
The long-term competitive position of the US military establishment

compared with its counterparts should be analyzed and evaluated.
Since many of the basic assumptions of US foreign and defense
policy are in question and transition, the scope of even military net
assessments should be broadened to include political and economic
aspects.19
Particularly noteworthy here, was the warning against “bipolar simplicity” and a
rejection of the deductive “policy” driven “Estimate of the Situation” approach so typical
of past American “military strategy” analysis.20 Whether intentional or accidental, this
was putting meat on the bare bones of Laird’s view of Net Assessment as a form
of strategic sociology21—systemically integrating cultural, economic, technological,
and political trends—and the vehicle for doing so would be “Net Assessment at the
National Level.”22
Marshall came uniquely prepared, having spent the previous decade addressing
most of the problematic issues that would drive a comparison of rival strengths and
weaknesses. This experience and reflectivity covered issues of: long range planning
for analytical organizations, 23 treating uncertainty, 24 problems of estimating military
power, 25 addressing cost and delays in procurement, 26 technological forecasting, 27
employing special intelligence to gain insight into opponent decisions and structures, 28
Military
using organization behavior to improve intelligence, 29 asymmetries in “opposed force

design,”30 comparing rival research and development strategies,31 using bureaucratic
behavior to get a deeper appreciation of various balances,32 as well as thinking about
long-term competitive frameworks.33 The combined breadth and depth of this body
of work, led him to be skeptical about single point comparative methods and facile
claims of quick fixes, particularly those pitched by technological salesmen. If, within a
year, Schlesinger would bring the most relevant resume to the position of Secretary of
Defense,34 Marshall would equal it in breadth and depth of related analytical experience
applicable to strategy development, long-range planning and net assessment.
One of the first things Marshall did upon arriving at the NSC, was to lay out a
foundational game plan for what he called the “Nature and Scope of Net Assessment.”
Again, he went back to the same areas of alleged growing imbalance that had been
highlighted in the “Red Book” eighteen months earlier.
Areas in which the Soviet Union is alleged to have or be moving

toward superiority, such as naval forces, strategic nuclear forces, or
R&D require investigation.35
The idea was neither to counter nor mirror the “Red Book” hyperbole, but rather
substitute a diagnostic approach, and Marshall was candid about the challenge.
Net assessment in the sense we propose is not an easy task. The single
most productive resource that can be brought to bear in making net
assessments is sustained hard intellectual effort. The methodologies
for doing net assessments are virtually non-existent. Data problems
abound.36
Nevertheless, alluding in the same paragraph to the concerns raised in the “Red Book,”
he concluded that “whether difficult or not, the need for net assessments is clear.”
Admitting that “clearly the term net assessment is not well defined,” nonetheless in
this memo that launched the formal NSC Net Assessment activity, Marshall succinctly
articulated the basic principles of a Net Assessment approach, which emphasized seven
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
significant themes:37
1. Multi-disciplinary comparative breadth:
Our notion of a net assessment is that it is a careful comparison of
US weapon systems, forces, and policies in relation to those of other
countries.
Net assessments should aim at a broad and comprehensive examination
of the area of interest.
They are concerned with national security in its broadest sense,
embracing political, economic, and technological problems as well as
purely military ones.38
2. Focus on interactive “action-reaction” dynamics and trends:
They should look comprehensively at rivalries and the various types of
competition that ensue.
It is comprehensive, including description of the forces, operational
doctrines and practices, training regime, logistics, known or
conjectured effectiveness in various environments, design practices
and their effect on equipment costs and performance, and procurement
practices and their influence on cost and lead times.
Relevant trends in the international rivalries examined will generally
be of interest in net assessments. This will mean that more attention
to the recent past, in order to establish a basis for the description and
understanding of trends, will be needed than is usual in the current
style of analysis.39
3. Side-by-side comparisons should be placed in an operational environment,

theater of conflict, or contingent scenario:
They should evaluate the status of the competition in terms of
outcomes of potential conflicts and confrontations.
… Net Assessments, in contrast to other analyses, are the most
comprehensive, and in principle concern themselves with actual
outcomes of combat or of competitions.40
… work done in the past, in systems analysis studies and some NSSMs
40
… tends to focus on weapons systems choices in a simplified context.

The results of these studies tend to be expressed in terms of outputs of
various force levels and structures, such as submarines sunk, warheads
delivered, fatalities caused, etc. The assumptions which are made in
achieving the needed simplification may bias assessment outcomes in
the more likely contingencies.
4. Conclusions about combatant effectiveness needed to be modulated in

terms of production and support efficiencies which were key to sustaining
a long-term advantage:
They should compare the efficiency with which the various powers,
including the US, are conducting the competition.
Where there are areas of apparently great efficiency, or inefficiency …
net assessments should explain them.41
5. Claimed competitive efficiencies needed to be deconstructed so they could

be better understood, borrowed, and/or targeted:
It will highlight efficiency and inefficiency in the way we and others
do things, and areas of comparative advantage with respect to our
rivals.42
6. Include a range of potential competitors, not just the US-Soviet relationship,
and include both allies and enemies of our enemies:
The implications of multiple rivalries and balances, rather than bipolar
simplicity, should be examined.
It can be focused to deal with real or at least credible adversaries, rather
than the fictitious, highly abstracted and oversimplified antagonists
found in present study efforts.43
7. To be of maximum benefit to security policy and defense planning Net

Assessment should be descriptive, not prescriptive:
Aim at providing diagnosis of problems and opportunities, rather than
recommended actions. The focus on diagnosis rather than solutions is
especially significant.
The use of net assessment is intended to be diagnostic. It is not intended
to provide recommendations as to force levels or force structures as an
output.44
Although these seven themes were never articulated as formal “rules,” they were
41
44
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
reflected in both Marshall’s frequent questions and guidance to anyone tasked with
running a “balance” or “competitive” assessment who bothered to ask.
A number of the OSD/NA staff have reflected on what they perceived as a lack of
“methodology” for Net Assessment and Marshall’s reticence in trying to inculcate a
“school solution” in the staff or promulgate a “cookie-cutter” approach.45 Too many of
them, who served in his office as Military Assistants with overlapping service from the
mid-1970s to the 1990s, subscribe to this view to challenge it, or suggest that there was
an “early” versus “late” Marshall. Nevertheless, for the two-decades of near continuous
interaction I had with him, I found it not only easy to get Marshall’s methodological
guidance but concluded that he seemed to welcome discussing it. Certainly, the number
of times he referenced the need to work on “methodologies” between 1970 and 1974
while architecting what would become Net Assessment argues heavily against the
thesis that he was “against method.”46
Like most others, Marshall defined Net Assessment as “a comparison between the
US and some rival nation in terms of some aspect of our national security activity,” but
explicitly noted that the term had “two connotations” of equal importance. The second
meaning being that Net Assessment was “the most comprehensive form of analysis in
the hierarchy of analysis.” Admitting that “at present, net assessment as a distinctive
form of analysis is not clearly defined,” nevertheless he argued that “it is possible to
indicate the general nature of the analysis desired, and its objectives.”47
Net assessment as a specific form of analysis will become more fully

defined as various net assessments are produced, and specialized
methods of analysis evolve … .
New analytical tools are needed to identify problems and trends, and
to assist in shaping changes.
We see a number of ways in which net assessment can achieve major
advances in the art of analysis.48
These are hardly the admonitions of one “against method.” Rather it is recognition that
there are different of levels of analysis, each requiring their own unique methodologies;
a candid recognition that the state-of-the-art needed to be improved, as well as a
commitment to help develop relevant approaches.
As mentioned earlier Sun Tzu’s “Five Strategic Arts”49—measurements, estimates,
100
analysis, balancing, and triumph—provide the components of a “comparative

evaluation” or “what is termed, in today’s intelligence jargon, ‘net assessment’.”50
As a check list of important things to consider these items hardly seem innovative.
However, they take on more meaning if viewed as a series of sequential steps, each
with its own unique method, successively and cumulatively building on the steps of
their predecessor and adding a different set of unique intellectual tasks.
The situation gives rise to measurements. Measurements give rise

to estimates. Estimates give rise to analysis. Analysis gives rise
to balancing. Balance gives rise to triumph. Therefore, a winning
Strategy is like a pound balanced against an ounce. While a losing
Strategy is like an ounce balanced against a pound.51
Like Sun Tzu, Marshall defined the ultimate form of “triumph” as persuading the
opponent to drop out of a long-term competition52 rather than fighting a real war to
annihilation.53
In retrospect, Sun Tzu’s Sun Tzu’s “Five Strategic Arts” serve as a virtual index of
Marshall’s multi-tiered analytical framework:
Measurements: collecting empirical data in a comparable format;
Data is not available in important areas because US Intelligence has
not focused on some aspects of Soviet posture needed to make net
assessments … . For many … force components, intelligence is skimpy
on matters concerning logistics, general levels of readiness, etc.54
Data on US allies is incomplete and inaccurate. Data on our own
forces and programs is frequently not available in a form which permits
ready comparison with that available on the Soviets.55
Estimates: discovering, describing and distinguishing those

elements that are important but unmeasurable56 and not
overly depending upon quantitative data that are incomplete
101
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
or unknowable when significant qualitative factors need to be

considered;
There are many difficulties in providing a good net assessment of
the current military balance and future likely trends. For one thing
the Intelligence evaluation of the Soviet posture frequently does not
focus on some of the key aspects for making such a comparison. The
emphasis in US Intelligence has tended to be on order of battle, and
upon the technical characteristics of individual weaponry. Very little
effort has been put in to understanding Soviet military organizations,
their operational practices, and the basic military economics of the
Soviet military establishment … . If the President is interested in
establishing a good net assessment capabilities [sic], a substantial
Intelligence effort will have to be put on a number of areas that so far
have not been studied in depth.
What … follow … is my best judgment as to what the state of the
current balance is and what trends existm … . Hypotheses about what
the situation is provide a framework within which further work could
progress.57
Hypotheses about what the Soviets might be doing are just as important
to the inference process as the data itself. This leads, however, to a
biasing problem. Repeatedly in the history of Intelligence, especially
in the technological area, there has been excessive mirror-imaging.58
Analysis: evaluating competitive strengths, weaknesses,

vulnerabilities and opportunities and their change over time:
… there are many cases where the sorts of comparisons that we are able
to make now probably do not give the US forces enough credit. They
are higher cost, but have more capability than the Soviet forces. There
are numerous cases where the Soviets in the economical operational
practices, their lower readiness levels, etc., give us significant advantage
in certain circumstances. In most evaluations, the evaluators are not
able to feel sure enough to this kind of assessment because intelligence
on crucial aspects of Soviet forces is missing. Moreover, the US
military services consistently have an incentive not to give themselves
credit for superior capabilities in implicit comparisons made in the
course of military planning exercises for operations or for force posture
budgeting and programs.59
Balancing: anticipating opportunities for the application of

strength to vulnerability in juxtaposed postures over time:
Differences in US and Soviet force postures make any simple balancing
by specific weapons categories inadequate. We need, but … [do] not
have, adequate means of assessing capabilities of net force to deal with
another in specific contingencies. War gaming and other techniques
would have to be used in any more systematic effort to make such
evaluations.60
I think, that there is some reason to believe that there is a danger of
the US pricing itself out of the military competition with the Soviets.
Are the comparative economics of military forces running against
us—if so in what areas?61
The objective should be to supply the President and the NSC with
answers to such questions as:
• Do we have a problem?
• If so, how big is it?
• Is it getting worse or better?
• What are the underlying causes?62
Triumph: identifying and projecting into the future opportunities
for the conversion of favorable balances (i.e., imbalances) into
political outcomes:
What follows is also deficient in not dealing systematically with
Hertzfeld’s point that it would be highly important to try to assess
peace outcomes. I think that is absolutely true, and indeed essential.
The net assessment that seems must crucial to me is how do the US
and Soviet look in terms of their capabilities for the long-term political
and military competition they will be waging in the world.63
Some months ago … Dean Acheson … talked about the very late
40’s when in their view current basic US national strategy became
fixed in its essentials. The essence of the strategy was alleged to be
the notion that by building up our forces and putting some military
pressure on the Soviets, and containing them in the short-run, that
the resource strain would tell on them much before it did ourselves.
The Soviets would not have the will and the dedication to persist with
their policies. What seems to have happened, at least in Acheson’s
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
eyes, is that the opposite has taken place. They have persisted, and it is
we who now say that we cannot afford to spend the required resources
… . This highlights the key role an assessment of the comparative
economics and of the comparative effectiveness of the weapons
acquisition process and operation of practices can play in planning
future US strategy and forces.64
Here was a relatively simple formula for an enormously complex thought process. Sun
Tzu’s parsimony allowed one to see it sequentially while Marshall’s commentary took
it out of the realm of philosophy and grounded it in contemporary strategic issues.
Whether discussing how Net Assessment should be approached thematically, or
in comments in the above Sun Tzu cumulative research paradigm above, there was a
definite thematic underpinning evidenced in Marshall commentary. Just as Sun Tzu
ends his classic work on the importance of “knowing what we do not know,” Marshall
was brutally honest about the quality of data and the level of entropy—not knowing
what we do not know—involved at all levels of the assessment process.
Many aspects of the rivalries in which the US is engaged are frequently

neglected in decision oriented studies, and have also not had high
priority in our intelligence efforts. Thus the identification of gaps
in our intelligence data is likely to be an early by-product of the net
assessment process.65
Even more, Marshall viewed Net Assessment as a long-term research program,

so highlighting weakness is actually a means of potentially improving the process.
Moreover, he not only exercised this level of candor with his superiors, but promoted
explicit entropy recognition by all who worked for him.
104
9
NATIONAL NET ASSESSMENTS
The President has directed the preparation of a series of national
net assessments under the guidelines approved in NSDM 242.
The first national net assessment will evaluate the comparative
costs to the US and the USSR to produce, maintain, and operate
comparable military forces. It will assess the status of the competition
between the US and USSR in maintaining such forces, trends
in the competition, significant areas of comparative advantage
or disadvantage to the US and the nature of opportunities and
problems implied. 1
The existence of a National Net Assessment office and their interests are only
documented four times at the interagency level via the prime policy action vehicles2 of
that day: the National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) which commissioned
cross-departmental research and response; and the National Security Decision
Memorandum (NSDM) which recorded NSC formal positions. The authorizing
memorandums were:
• NSSM-178—Program for National Net Assessment, (29 March 1973);3
• NSDM 224—National Net Assessment Process, (28 Jun 1973).4
The first and only action memorandum commissioning the first and only interagency
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
National Net Assessment was debated for over a year5 before being signed out by
Henry Kissinger:
• NSSM-186—National Net Assessment of Comparative Costs and Capabilities
of US – USSR Military Establishments, (1 September 1973).6
The transfer of the office from the National Security Council to the Department of
Defense was made in memorandum:
• NSDM 239—National Net Assessment Process, (27 November 1973).7
These four Memoranda—written over seven months and representing in toto only four
pages—not only bracket the short happy life of the NSC “NAG” but more importantly
represent the rescue of the Blue Ribbon Defense Pane and Secretary Laird’s vision of
Net Assessment at the Pentagon. Combined with personal changes, they ended the
NSC v. OSD feud, they filled the vacuum left in DoD’s Net Assessment Office, and
brought the function into the immediate proximity of the Secretary.
Apparently NSSM-178 was personally drafted by Marshall as a remit for creating
a “Program for National Net Assessment.” There were several interesting features
about this short NSSM. First it was explicitly treated as a fulfillment of Nixon’s 1971
Memorandum on “Organization and Management of the US Foreign Intelligence
Community.”8 Second, it noted “the President had directed the initiation of a program
for the preparation of a series of national net assessments.” The words “series” and
“national” took on special significance: the former suggested this would be an extended
process not a one time product; the latter meant that it would be interagency and not
limited to one department.
As a first step in this process, the President has directed that a paper
be prepared which would:
• Define the national net assessment process, and discuss the range
and types of topics that would be addressed.
• Discuss methodology appropriate for use in preparing net
assessments.
• Establish reporting and coordination procedures for the program.9
NSSM-178 gave Marshall the opportunity to write his own NSC mission statement
as well as lay out a game plan for how to proceed, not just with the coordination but
cooperation of “an ad hoc group comprising representatives.”10 The response to NSSM-

178 by the Ad Hoc Group was submitted on time,11 commented on by the NSCIC
Principals,12 and reviewed by the President.13 NSDM 224 implied that there would be
multiple National Net Assessments. Likewise, it ratified the interagency nature of the
process under the direction of “a representative of the National Security Council Staff”
and specified that “requests for net assessments will be issued as National Security
Study Memoranda.”
The only national net assessment to be formally undertaken while Marshall was at
the NSC was National Security Study Memorandum 186. For over a year the NSC
had discussed the need for and content of a “National Security Study Memorandum
on National Net Assessment of the Comparative Efficiency and Effectiveness of the
US and Soviet Military Establishments,”14 Where NSSM-178 and NSDM 224 had
dealt with process, NSSM-186 was the vehicle of substance.
Finally, on 1 September 1973, Henry Kissinger signed out NSSM-186 calling for
a “National Net Assessment of the Comparative Costs and Capabilities of US and
Soviet Military Establishments.”
The President has directed the preparation of a series of national net

assessments under the guidelines approved in NSDM 242. The first
national net assessment will evaluate the comparative costs to the US
and the USSR to produce, maintain, and operate comparable military
forces. It will assess the status of the competition between the US
and USSR in maintaining such forces, trends in the competition,
significant areas of comparative advantage or disadvantage to the US
and the nature of opportunities and problems implied.
The President has directed that the analyses and comparisons required
by this net assessment be prepared by the Department of Defense,
in consultation with the Net Assessment Group/NSC, and with the
assistance of the Department of State and the Director of Central
Intelligence.
The complete assessment will cover all aspects of US and Soviet
military forces, and will take place over a long period of time. The
initial part of the net assessment will focus specifically on the ground
forces on each side. Comparisons of interests will include the costs
10
11
14
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
and performance of comparable military units. The analysis should

highlight the major determining factors in costs and performance on
each side, and any evident trends.
A first report on the net assessment of US and Soviet ground forces
should be forwarded to the Chairman, NSCIC, by 1 November
1973.15
As originally mandated in NSDM 224,16 NSSM-186 reiterated that the various

National Net Assessments would be managed by the head of the NAG with final
acceptance contingent upon review of the NSCIC.
There were several interesting aspects about NSSM-186 from the outset. First, as
it had become increasingly evident with NSDM 224 and NSSM-186 that the focus
of the initial National Net Assessments would involve comparisons of “military
establishments,” it was natural that the primary lead should be taken by the Pentagon.
But it was somewhat surprising that while the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
had been copied on the tasking,17 the JCS were neither directly invited to participate
in the production nor comment on the process.18 Second, there had been a subtle
shift in the title from “Comparative Efficiency and Effectiveness” to “Comparative
Costs and Capabilities.” The former were very subjective terms: “efficiency” relative
to requirement and resources; “effectiveness” relative to mission and opposition. The
latter were ostensibly “fixed” in terms of objective scale.
A third feature was also out of the norm. As had already been implied in NSDM
224, NSSM-186 now made it explicit that this comprehensive assessment would
involve multiple successive efforts and “take place over a long period of time.” As such,
it had an implied variance with the typical NSC standard operating procedure for
NSSMs which had focused on producing a timely and tightly argued response—a
tasking with a definite built in “sunset clause.” But under NSSM-186, these National
Net Assessments would be incremental, iterative and potentially infinite19—taking
successive bites of the apple as opposed to trying to swallow it whole in one culminating
gesampt final report and closure of the Study, as was typical with NSSMs. A last
unique feature at the very start of NSSM-186 was the abrupt change in the reporting
channel in the middle of the effort.
Per NSDM 224 and NSSM-186, the NSC Net Assessment Group would be
responsible for both producing the requirements and tasking for the National Net
Assessments as well as monitoring their progress and evaluating their final product.
In the White House the Net Assessment Group was a casualty of

several factors: the overwhelming demands on top-level decision
makers to focus on near-term foreign policy issues; the realization
that the Department of Defense had the depth of resources needed to
support a long-term net effort; and a fuller recognition of how difficult
it was and how long it would take to develop a net assessment effort in
the executive branch.20
The credibility of James Schlesinger as one of the most prepared Secretaries of Defense,
his personal role in defining the need for Net Assessment two years earlier21 and strong
personal relationship with Marshall 22 all combined to make this a smooth transition.
Within six weeks of the start of NSSM-186, Marshall moved from the NSC and
joined the OSD staff being assembled by Secretary James Schlesinger.
By the time Schlesinger had succeeded Eliot Richardson as defense

secretary in July 1973 and appointed Marshall to be his Director of
Net Assessment on October 13th, a further concern had arisen that
undermined definitional clarity. Marshall’s brief from Schlesinger
was to establish a viable net assessment function in the Department
of Defense (DoD). But aside from Melvin R. Laird’s December 1971
directive establishing the position in the Office of the Secretary of
Defense (OSD), little progress had been made on clarifying the
nature of net assessment or what it might produce, especially within
the Pentagon. In fact, neither Laird nor Richardson had appointed
anyone to fill the new position.23
Scarcely had Marshall arrived at the Pentagon, and within another six weeks, Kissinger
signed out NSDM 239 on the “National Net Assessment Process” which recorded
that “the President had directed that the responsibility for the national net assessment
program be assigned to the Secretary of Defense.”24
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
This was not just the transfer of an individual but the entire Net Assessment
Group25 to a three-room office on the A-ring. Importantly, the intent of the mission
that Marshall had written for himself in NSSM-178 and secured with NSDM 224
was neither given over to someone else in the NSC to pick up that portfolio nor was
the mandate materially changed with his move to the Pentagon.26 Marshall was now
responsible for conducting the Net Assessment he himself had commissioned but he
would not be reporting to himself to grade his own work. The structure that had been
established but unfilled gave James Schlesinger the opportunity to not only set up
the office but create and reinforce the precedent of the Director of Net Assessment
reporting directly to the Secretary of Defense. With its arrival, Net Assessment
initiated a new era in Pentagon thinking, one that would make a significant difference
over the next thirty-five years.
110
10
LESSONS LEARNED
Today, there is no rational system whereby the Executive Branch
and the Congress reach coherent and enduring agreement on
national military strategy, the forces to carry it out, and the
funding that should be provided-in light of the overall economy
and competing claims on national resources … . Better long-range
planning must be based on military advice of an order not now
always available—fiscally constrained, forward looking, and fully
integrated. This advice must incorporate the best possible assessment
of our overall military posture vis-a-vis potential opponents,
and must candidly evaluate the performance and readiness of the
individual Services and the Unified and Specified Commands.1
The strongest supporters of an independent and high level Net Assessment function
seem to fall into two groups—former Secretaries of Defense and former staffers in
OSD/NA. Unfortunately, the former have said little publicly about the utility and
importance of having this kind of confidential strategic advice; and the over-selling of
the latter have made it sound more like a cult than a critical national security function.
However, when we review the early origins of Net Assessment—the years of path
breaking work by the Net Evaluation Subcommittee, the proposals of the Blue Ribbon
Defense as well as Secretary Laird, the methodological and organizational development
by Andrew Marshall—both the problem and the solution are much clearer. So, when
contemplating the future of the enterprise, the evidence and arguments assembled
for this paper suggest five lessons should be drawn from the early origins of the Net
Assessment concept.
LESSON 1: For over a century, there has been a growing recognition by those who have
made the effort to think about how American military strategy is developed, that an
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
indispensable ingredient is the availability of some type of comparative diagnostic

trend analysis of US and rival forces placed in the context of operational battlespace.
Whether one calls this an “assessment” or “evaluation;” whether the term “net” is used
are not is unimportant. What is critical however, is that the effort include five primal
characteristics:
• Comparative deconstruction of the combatant, supporting and
force generating assets;
• Examined as they have temporally developed over time—with
future vectors not plotted any further in the out years than
historical data traces back;
• Operational analysis in a real theater of potential conflict against
a real, not hypothetical opponent;
• Contrasting not merely like versus like, but juxtaposing strength to
weakness, offense to defense, and opportunities to vulnerabilities;
• Ultimately viewed, not in terms of trying to predict which side
will win a specific engagement, but rather projecting the factors
that will make one side prevail over the long-run.
A special caveat must also be registered, in the “second nuclear age” where nuclear
assets and powers are increasingly distributed throughout potential conflict regions,
the assessments cannot ignore the interrelationship between conventional and nuclear
war.
LESSON 2: There is a coherent and reasonably clear methodological approach that can
be applied in the conduct of Net Assessments. It is not mystical, it is not arcane; it
evolved over a several year period in the early 1970s, and taken as a whole, it can be
teased from the writings of Andrew Marshall in that period. Although never formally
stated as such, that method can be summarized in five sequential steps:
• Measurements: collecting empirical data in a comparable format;
• Estimates: discovering, describing and distinguishing those
elements that are unmeasurable but important;
• Analysis: evaluating competitive strengths, weaknesses,
vulnerabilities and opportunities;
• Balancing: anticipating opportunities for the application of
strength to vulnerability in juxtaposed postures;
• Triumph: identifying and projecting into the future opportunities
for the conversion of favorable balances (i.e. imbalances) into
political outcomes.
The successful implementation of these steps can be as complex in application as they
are simple in articulation but this method is as relevant to today’s emerging challenges
of strategic rivalry as it was 2,500 years ago when so elegantly laid out by Sun Tzu.
The success of this approach has been demonstrated in the productive application of
that methodology over the last thirty-five years by the Net Assessment staff. Its value
is not diminished by the fact that many of the those who successfully applied it, did
LESSONS LEARNED
so as a product of sub-conscious enculturation and the guiding hand of their mentor

in trailblazing new intellectual territory rather than using a cookie cutter formula or
realizing that the approach had high strategic pedigree.
LESSON 3: The Blue Ribbon Defense Panel had it right, the office of Net Assessment
has to be independent and report directly to the Secretary of Defense. Thus, going
back to the need for Net Assessment and the cogent organizational arguments for its
structure as an independent advisory office reporting directly to the SecDef:
The Office of the Secretary of Defense and the armed services of

the United States have many agencies that measure current military
performance against current military goals. That is not the purpose
of net assessments. Each net assessment concludes, not with a
statement about whether we would win or lose a war today or with
recommendations for new programs, but with a discussion of the
issues and problems about which the Secretary of Defense may wish
to think, because they affect the future of American national security.
Net Assessment is a tool for the Secretary of Defense that may better
enable him to do strategic planning for the American military, if that
is desired.2
Not every Secretary may want or value having Net Assessment as a direct report, but
that is a pretty good indication that they are not planning on taking their role as “chief
strategist” seriously.
LESSON 4: The recommendations of Blue Ribbon Defense Panel member Robert C.
Jackson need to be reconsidered—specifically that long-range planning, net assessment
and strategy development should be combined into an Assistant Secretary of Defense
level position. The reason for this has more to do with the effectiveness of OSD than
it does Net Assessment. An independent and intellectually driven Net Assessment
office, with sufficient research resources and reporting directly to the Secretary of
Defense can do its own thing. But, as the BRDP suggested, there is a need, at the
Secretary level for a group also to be conducting Long-Range Planning, Likewise, as
Secretary Laird and later Cap Weinberger found out, there is great value in having
Strategy Development also working in close proximity to the Secretary. These are
three different functions. Net Assessment is diagnostic; Long-Range Planning is
prognostic; and Strategy Development is prescriptive. Nonetheless, they all share
some common attributes, need to work closely together, and could efficiently utilize
some of the same resources. Thus, as Jackson originally recommended, creating a
combined office under an Assistant Secretary addressing these functions could be a
very powerful and effective combination.
LESSON 5: Like all art, the processes and products of Net Assessment, Long-Range
Planning and Competitive Strategy Development, are only of “value” to the extent
that they are appreciated. Like “performance art,” where the observer is not a passive
PHILLIP A. K ARBER
voyeur but interacts and creatively contributes, they take on a dynamic and living
quality when the chief strategist participates in the process—one which requires
direct report and the highest confidentiality. When the helmsman of the Pentagon’s
Queen Mary understands that the art of Net Assessment is important and takes the
time to directly engage the results of that research, he both empowers those methods
and acquires the navigational aids of prognostic anticipation and option diagnostics
that separate great leaders from the mediocre. On the other hand, when he remains
narrowly focused on the FYDP budget and Administration talking points—in the
absence of engaging the reflective tools of Net Assessment—a future Secretary of
Defense may find uncomfortable parallels with captaining the Titanic.
114

Net Assessment For The Secretary of Defense

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Net Assessment

Dr. Phillip A. Karber

The Secretary of Defense shall transmit to Congress each year a

Journal of Military and Strategic Studies

Step 4: “Evaluation of possible Courses of Action.” 11

well as debating alternative courses of action based on the comparative assessment.21

• Inhibited serious contingency planning for real threats.28

Military Planning in the Twentieth Century

the leading planners of the era, Vannevar Bush admitted:

We have done military planning of actual campaigns in time of war

they are violated.

3. That multilateral Arms Control—the strategic Naval Arms Limitations on

… for the purpose of more effectively coordinating the policies

enterprise;”69 civilian participation in competitive strategy and oversight of contingency

with the Interdepartmental Committee on Internal Security (ICIS),

We lack knowledge of Soviet plans and intentions and our knowledge

dealing with our own capabilities.13

With the Presidential election and imminent change of Administrations, it would

… ‘the problem of the total decision’ … . ‘no executive can undertake

He wanted to get, as we came later to express it, all of the responsible

As Commander-in-Chief, he ultimately drew on this own “net” appreciation of the

interplay may be forecast as accurately as possible. This need is not

observers recorded a number of “lessons learned:”

Personnel and Facilities. If it is accepted that a tightly-knit operating

enough picture of either Soviet or US capabilities, in order to do the

Importance of the Net Evaluation … In view of the usefulness of the

new capabilities in manpower, weapons, organization, training,

done” directive for a retitled “Net Evaluation Subcommittee” (NES):

Pursuant to the recommendations of the National Security Council

Government for relevant information, evaluations, and estimates,

• Lt. General Thomas F. Hickey, (US Army retired): 1958-1961;56 and

Strategic and tactical planning must be completely unified, combat

discussion of the military, political, economic elements to support

However, because there was continued disagreement within the Administration

demanding. And, in the American tradition, he tended to assume that

With respect to the “coordinative” versus “command” style, President Kennedy

Kennedy’s SecDef aggressively pursued what he believed to be a new, but necessarily

The Secretary of Defense—and I am talking about any Secretary

of Defense—must make certain kinds of decisions, not because he

Much to the dismay of critics of “defense intellectuals,”13 a corollary of this positional

Figure 1. DoD Planning Systems Relationships

This dialectical 24 interface is normally called “strategy development” and, if asked,

Figure 2. Hierarchy of Assessment Perspectives

Charles Sanders Peirce

“With a December 22 memorandum to McNamara, Charles J. Hitch,

The NESC will develop studies of a series of general wars initiated

… there was a feeling, particularly among the top people in the

developed by an interagency panel headed by Walt W. Rostow, Counselor and

• Creation of a National Command Center;19

General Taylor presented the Net Evaluation Subcommittee report 2

A “period of nuclear stalemate” was in direct contradiction with NATO’s declaratory

One of the first major policy changes ought by the Kennedy

Figure 3. M-Day Land Forces in the European Central Regiona

major feature of the forces as well as future contingency plans; and,

There are some findings of the report on which I should like to

factors will be important, and in some situations may be determining,

and strategic concepts.30

… there we also ran into a disagreement with the top people in

The Joint Chiefs of Staff … were composed primarily of men little

Strategy for Tomorrow

Joint Chiefs of Staff in developing basic short-range (JSCP), mid-

In the course of the Board’s continuing appraisal of the adequacy of

agencies, along the lines suggested above.”