The Pentagon May Retire "Yoda," Its 92-Year-Old Futurist 254
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Of all the weapons the Pentagon relies on to defend the United States, one of the strangest and most secretive is Andrew Marshall, a 92-year-old man who's spent the last 40 years staring into the future trying to predict the next big threat to America. Known fondly as "Yoda" to his many fans in Washington, Marshall heads up the Office of Net Assessment—the Defense Department's think tank tasked with taking a long view, out-of-the-box approach to defense strategy. In his role as the Pentagon's visionary sage, Marshall is credited with predicting the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of China's global prominence, the role of autonomous weapons and robots in warfare, and even helping end the Cold War. Now, facing budget cuts, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel is considering reorganizing or possibly even shuttering the futurist think tank, Defense News recently reported."
Interesting (Score:5, Funny)
He never saw it coming
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Funny)
Let me re-word that for you: Saw it coming, he never did.
Saw it coming, he did not.
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Do, or do not. There is no spoon.
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Re:Interesting (Score:5, Funny)
Do, or do not. There is no spoon.
I am a banana!
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There's a radio in my fingernail!
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Re:Interesting (Score:4, Funny)
Dyslectic I am, insensitive clods you are!
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Funny)
If you're a zillion years old, short, live in a swamp, and can raise starfighters with your mind, nobody gives a damn if you're dyslexic.
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Re:Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
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Maybe he recently predicted what might be about to come of the US, and stopped talking...
off from left field with a tin foil hat (Score:4, Funny)
Re:off from left field with a tin foil hat (Score:5, Funny)
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To be fair, when the pentagon retires a ship, it ends up at the bottom of the ocean.
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Usually not. Normally, it's broken up for scrap, although occassionally it's used for testing or target practice and then it does. The Pentagon is eco-aware. They recycle!
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Found out just the other day that I missed a golden opportunity. They were scrapping an old aircraft carrier. Sold it for $1!
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Found out just the other day that I missed a golden opportunity. They were scrapping an old aircraft carrier. Sold it for $1!
Yep - now you just have to pay shipping on it...
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It's a ship. It ships itself.
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Good luck getting its nuclear reactors going.
Re:off from left field with a tin foil hat (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a ship. It ships itself.
Here is a photo of a ship shipping ships [imgur.com].
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Yo dawg!
Re:off from left field with a tin foil hat (Score:4, Funny)
Usually not. Normally, it's broken up for scrap, although occassionally it's used for testing or target practice and then it does. The Pentagon is eco-aware. They recycle!
Soylent Green is Yoda!!!
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Horseshit. People dont know how to use quote's right.
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The Star War's influence (Score:3)
So, now we know who Yoda is, as well as the Jedi Knights [wikipedia.org].
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It appears that he lied about his age by about a factor of 10â¦.
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It depends, are they people years, dog years, dog star years, star wars years, or puppet years?
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Well... (Score:5, Interesting)
How did it go?
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It's not that great. He's credited with foreseeing the demise of the soviet union in the blurb, I have no idea how accurate that is, but it's no great feat as the libertarian/austrian thinkers did as well, but that would still be somewhat to his credit if he escaped the beltway groupthink enough to anticipate that. Otherwise he seems mostly to be focused on selling a much larger and more expensive military as necessary to win the future war he fantasizes about with China. Considering the size of the relativ
Re:Well... (Score:4, Funny)
I suspect he predicted his own demise, and to uphold his record, he has to go.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
I would be more curious as to WHEN he predicted this stuff. There is a BIG difference between sitting in 1970 and saying "The Soviet Union will collapse at some point in the future" and saying "The Soviet Union will collapse in the late 1980's or early 1990's." The former is pretty much useless information. The latter could be very useful.
I would also want to know how much he got wrong. If the signal of what little he got right was drowned out by the noise of much more stuff that he got wrong, his information would also basically be useless.
As I've never met a "futurist" yet whose predictions were worth much of a damn at the end of the day, I would be very skeptical of the usefulness of his office.
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You're saying you married your mom cause she was hot?
Yeah, this really is Slashdot...
Re:Well... (Score:5, Interesting)
He came up with the concept of Air-Sea Battle, which is a new method to coordinate the Air Force and the Navy in a future maritime war.
Likely with China, as he predicted their rise to challenge US dominance back in the 80's when they were still weak.
He predicted in the 70's that the Soviet Union's economy was in terrible shape despite them seeming robust and strong at the time.
He predicted the need for precision weapons in the 60's, back when carpet bombing in Vietnam was still the norm.
In 2003 during an interview he discussed the use of predator drones moving from surveillance to a strike platform, which really began in earnest in 2009-10.
Not a bad track record.
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Re:Well... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not that impressive.
Air-Sea had been a Navy concept since before world war 2. They believed it so much they built carriers, and coordinated land based planes with carrier based planes very effectively, even when the land based planes belonged to the army. Read about Midway.
China was not weak back in the 80s. China was not weak in the 60s. They were an economic powerhouse even then.
Douglas MacArther warned Never fight a land war in Asia".
Everyone but weapons system planners knew that the Soviet Union was going down as early as the 70s, because economists had predicted it even earlier, just by looking at empty shelves in soviet super markets and the drastic cut back in Soviet aid to its over-extended empire. They hung Castro out to dry, in the late 60s.
The need for precision weapons was noted in WW2. Some were even developed and uses back then. Dam buster bombs. The AGM-62 Walleye TV Guided bomb was in use in the 60s, conceived in 1958, and developed by the Navy, it was used in Viet Nam.. Carpet bombing works in Jungles, precision doesn't.
In short, he seems to have convinced people to use what was already available rather than sticking with old school methods.
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Douglas MacArther warned Never fight a land war in Asia
Wait, I thought the Sicilian guy from Princess Bride said that.
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In short, he seems to have convinced people to use what was already available rather than sticking with old school methods.
That sounds like the most impressive accomplishment of all!
Re:Well... (Score:5, Informative)
Coordination within a single branch of the military is trivial. Coordination between the different branches is a nightmare. Each branch likes to do their own thing, and doesn't want to bother with or be bothered by the needs and wants of the other branches. e.g. The Air Force has been trying to kill off the A-10 ground attack aircraft [wikipedia.org] for almost 20 years even though it's the best ground support asset in their arsenal. The Army would love to take over operating the A-10, but federal law limits them to rotary winged aircraft in combat roles. (Ironic considering the Air Force began as the Army Air Corps.)
The divide and interservice rivalry is so deep and entrenched that when I was working on a project for the Army, the higher-ups had mandated that an Air Force officer ride along with them in the Humvee to force the two branches to coordinate.
China was an economic footnote in the 1960s and 1970s [wikipedia.org]. They were in the midst of the Cultural Revolution [wikipedia.org] and were busy lynching anyone who could potentially have contributed to the country's economic development. Their economy took 30 years to double from 1950-1980. From 1980 to 2000 it doubled every 10 years. They didn't become notable on the world stage until (1) Deng Xiaoping began adopting capitalism [wikipedia.org] in the 1980s, and (2) the Soviet Union fell allowing China to emerge from its shadow.
And MacArthur wanted to nuke several Chinese cities to discourage China from entering the Korean War.
As someone who grew up during that time, nobody believed the Iron Curtain was going to come down during our lifetime. It was like the stars in the night sky - always there, always had been there, and always would be there. The Soviets were so secretive that even if they hung Castro out to dry, you couldn't be sure if it was because they were having economic problems, or if it was because Castro had insulted the Soviet Premier's wife about her cooking at a state dinner. The events of 1989 remain one of the most shocking and indelible in my memory - right up there with Challenger and 9/11. Like the millions of people who now claim to have attended Woodstock, plenty of people now claim to have predicted the fall of the Soviet Union in hindsight. But believe me, even in the early 1980s if you had predicted on TV that the Soviet Union would crumble within a decade, you would've been laughed out of the studio.
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As someone who grew up during that time, nobody believed the Iron Curtain was going to come down during our lifetime. It was like the stars in the night sky - always there, always had been there, and always would be there.
As someone who grew up in that time, I am calling bullshit on you. I was there, It was expected. Most educated people marveled it lasted as long as it did.
Oh, and that "economic footnote" almost pushed the UN entirely off the Korean Peninsula.
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I've noticed that writers and films feast on the apocalypse concept, more so in times of economic turmoil (now that they are pretty much done feasting on vampire genera).
I rather suspect that meeting intelligent alien life will be almost as anti-climatic as Gorbachev's dissolution of USSR.
Instead of invading hordes looking for a planet to conqueror it will probably end up being more like "Hey, we just stopped by to say Hi".
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Many of Jesus' contemporaries believed the second coming would be within their lifetimes.
To be fair, that's the most direct interpretation of this passage [biblehub.com]. Fundies don't like that one very much, because you have to go through gyrations to explain it away.
Legends like the Wandering Jew don't play well in modern churches, and only Elijah and Enoch (both OT) are cited as having been taken directly to heaven without dying (so that's out too).
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First, what country are you from?
I'll give you that if you were in the USSR itself, you may well have seen enough of the problems that you thought that. (We had people here who were convinced the US and the industrialized West were collapsing during that same period. But, that's always the case. Some Romans were convinced Rome was on the brink of collapse during the time of Augustus. Maybe they were right, but it took another 500 years or more.)
I was seeing it from the US, and I certainly recall that on bot
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You're correct - nobody believed the Iron Curtain was going to come down, not cleanly at least. More nuanced thinkers however recognized the difference between the Iron Curtain and the USSR as then constituted. The former could easily stand even as the latter convulsed and changed - witness China during both the Cultural Revolution and the economic revolution of the 1980's.
Don't forget the drones... (Score:2)
Which were used by the US at least since 1959 [wikipedia.org] and various other examples in use or in development since then. [wikipedia.org]
Oh, and as for the AirSea Battle Office, some apparently believe that it is redundant and superfluous [thediplomat.com] as other parts of the US military already got that covered.
Since the ASB Office was first announced in August 2011, the Pentagon has faced charges that it is redundant with missions performed by other parts of the defense bureaucracy. It has often struggled to define how the ASB Office differs from other areas of the Pentagon, and to explain the value it adds to the services.
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Not a bad track record.
Oh brother. Tell us the thousand things he predicted that didn't come true. Anyone can guess right 1% of the time.
Re:Well... (Score:4, Insightful)
Translation:
He did what any dimwit with a brain could do: he realized that importing everything from somewhere else (e.g. China) would significantly increase the economic power of that somewhere else, and with economic power comes available funding for military power.
This was obvious back in the 1980s when China was just beginning to crawl out of the dark ages of the cultural revolution? ... [citation needed]
He predicted what lots of others predicted about U.S.S.R.
Back in the 70s? ... [citation needed]
He observed that snipers and assassins were around centuries before he was even born, and were useful, and would therefore probably continue to be useful.
WTF does that have to do with predicting the fact that Laser and GPS guided PGMs would become a dominant weapons system when most others were howling about how expensive they were? And AFAIK snipers are still not the dominant form of infantry after all these centuries.
He mentioned a plan for drones to be weaponized that took six years to complete.
How many others mentioned that in 2003? I happen to know for a fact that the weaponization of drones was done in great haste by a few people in the post 9/11 period leading up to the invasion of Afghanistan. It was not a cleverly thought out plan that took several years to carefully execute, it was hacked together by a handful of air force personnel and a civilian armorer. Very few people were predicting the explosion in drone operations we have seen in the last six to seven years back in 2003.
That's not a prediction.
Let's call him "Captain Obvious".
That's not criticism it's whining let's call you "Spoiled Brat Boy"
Safe bet (Score:4, Insightful)
Back in the 70s?
Sure - it's a very safe prediction to make if you had his job. There were basically three possible outcomes: the USSR lost, the US lost or there was a nuclear war and we all lost. In two of these outcomes he's probably out of a job or dead regardless of whether he was right or wrong but predicting that the USSR will lose is the one scenario where he gets to keep his job and so the only scenario where he has to worry about being correct. So what would you predict?
Cynicism aside what we would really need to know to see whether he is good at predictions is how many other "yodas" the Pentagon had making predictions and getting it wrong. If you toss enough coins you are likely to find one which comes up heads 10 times in a row.
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How many others mentioned that in 2003? I happen to know for a fact that the weaponization of drones was done in great haste by a few people in the post 9/11 period leading up to the invasion of Afghanistan. It was not a cleverly thought out plan that took several years to carefully execute, it was hacked together by a handful of air force personnel and a civilian armorer. Very few people were predicting the explosion in drone operations we have seen in the last six to seven years back in 2003.
In 2004 the weaponised drones were publicly known and deployed already. I remember the little experiment back then too (in Iraq) of putting a machine gun on a "Packbot" little robot. So I guess I assumed there would be some drone warfare, which conceptually isn't that much different from using missiles and smartbombs anyway. You order a strike somewhere and it quickly happens through screens and buttons, without people hiking or driving all the way to the destination.
What you mostly need for patrolling kill
tesla (Score:2)
the weaponization of drones was predicted nearly 100 yrs ago by tesla.
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And nearly 30 years ago by James Cameron.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
They didn't say he was a fucking psychic. Why do people get so stupid over the idea of "futurists"? No one says he magically foresaw things that no one in the world could. Just that he was consistent enough for them to rely on.
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Yes, but there were no other dimwits with a brain in any position in the defense department that were allowed to counter the prevailing group think or who were listened to by those who needed to listen.
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No, the USA would rather choose to mine and process their own rare earths. China has a monopoly on it because it's dirty and messy, not because rare earth metals are actually rare. They're rare in the sense you need to crush millions tons of rocks and do whatever nasty things to retrieve a trickle of them, then deal with the garbage (i.e. let it poison the region's water supply, or whatever)
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It didn't seem "robust and strong" in the case of beating out the West economically. It however was seen to be reasonably stable for the near term due to the internal apparatus for keeping the dissent in check. There were two Soviet economies. The military one seemed to be sufficient to maintain itself and the control the Party kept over the state. The civilian side of the economy was a joke by comparison, but seemed to be good enough to keep outright rebellion in check.
Many had said that the Soviet Army wo
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Octopi can predict world cup game winners; not the winner of the world cup. Ask any German or Dutch person about that.
Got things right (Score:2)
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The proposed move also has caught the attention of some in the think tank and consulting worlds. Dan Goure of the Lexington Institute, is as unimpressed with the idea as Forbes.
âoeThe decision to eliminate [Net Assessment] might make sense were it an expensive endeavor, employing a large staff that might be better deployed elsewhere,â he wrote.
The Net Assessment office is less than a dozen people, tiny when compared with the rest of the Pentagon sweeping bureaucracy, Goure noted.
âoeIts budget is a few million dollars annually, much of that devoted to outside studies and analyses, he wrote. âoeYou wouldnâ(TM)t save enough from this action buy even one tactical fighter. Furthermore, the loss of the intellectual energy NA provides at a critical time for the Pentagonâ(TM)s future could have negative effects far outweighing the utility of the few dollars that would be saved.â
Sounds ass backwards to me. I think the military need to do more thinking, and less invading.
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You just heard of his successful predictions. How many of his predictions didn't come true?
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Re:Got things right (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Got things right (Score:4, Insightful)
What effect do you think that would have on the US?
Perhaps you think that dumping the bonds would harm the dollar and raise US Treasury rates (the cost of borrowing)? Then the dollar would fall in value against the Euro and GBP, and maybe against the Renminbi itself. That makes US manufactured good cheaper compared to other nations. That reduces imports into the US, while increasing both exports and import-replacement. That slashes US spending on Chinese goods, which would be compounded by an aggressive boycott of Chinese goods by angry US consumers. It would also reduce the effective value of existing bonds (since they are paid only in USD at a fixed yield) to foreign investors, while the higher yields of new bonds would make them more desirable to domestic institutional investors (about 70% of Treasury bond buyers).
These effects would reduce the value of China's one-shot mass sell-off, both in absolute dollar terms and in those dollars' buying power against other currencies, effectively reducing China's real wealth. And that would reduce the size of the effect on the markets.
Frankly I doubt the Chinese leadership is anywhere near that stupid.
They are trying to displace the USD as a reserve currency, while building themselves up. It's a slow long term plan, not a pointless idiotic one-shot spasm.
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I'm not thinking in business terms. I'm thinking in terms of how effective it would be at destabilising the US economy. The answer is, not very. It's a bad strategy.
It would have no real negative effect on the US, probably break the US out of its economic downturn; while it would reduce the value of China's wealth, reduce exports, and pretty much be a one-shot deal with no follow-up beyond a shooting war. And this kind of attempt at economic warfare wouldn't just piss off the US, it would unite the whole de
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I seriously doubt he has a decent concept of what can be done in "cyber warfare"
Make everybody run out and buy postage stamps, so they can pay their bills the same way they did 10 or 15 years ago?
Buy more newspapers and magazines?
Go to a bookstore instead of Amazon?
Stop wasting time on Slashdot?
I'd dump all of my Treasury bonds on the market all at once, use my US currency to buy Euros, Pounds Sterling, Yen and various other currencies
Why would they do the enemy a favor? An overvalued dollar has been our bane for years. Let it fall and the trade deficit disappears, and more industry comes back to the US. Worried about the dollar falling too far? Do you have any idea how much in securities the Federal Reserve holds, especially
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That's silly.
It kills one of their main consumers, and causes umpteen Chinese citizens to riot when their jobs suddenly disappear and they no longer have a promised way to attain that middle class life they've been promised.
What we have currently is Economic MAD. Either side drops the economic bomb all at once, and kablooey!
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Your date is off a little. He predicted it in 1916.
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What did he say about Iraq and Afghanistan? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm truly interested. He either called it and they ignored him, in which case he's not useful, or he didn't call it, in which case he's not useful.
I'm sure he costs less than a redundant engine for the F-35, but everybody who says that each of the thousands of useless programs don't need to be cut because they don't cost too much is ignoring the rest of those other thousands.
If he's as smart as the ethos contends, many think tanks would be glad to hire him on. I only hope I'm fortunate enough to be in such a position when I'm 92. Also cool that he was already 60 before he picked up his nickname - most career military are outta-there at that point.
Re:What did he say about Iraq and Afghanistan? (Score:4, Insightful)
He either called it and they ignored him, in which case he's not useful
No. In that case he'd be useful, it's just that they didn't use him. If you go out without an umbrella and it rains, that doesn't mean the umbrella is useless and should be discarded, it means the umbrella is potentially useful and you should consider using it.
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Stupid Move (Score:5, Insightful)
Ugh, this is so stupid. This is the only long view think tank in the Pentagon, the only one who looks at the entirety of a nation and tries to predict what will happen and more or less gets it correct. One of the big complaints about the military is they're "always fighting the last war"; this group was specifically designed to try to predict what a conflict 20 years from now will be and start preparing for it. Marshall needs to retire; he's damned old, but the group's purpose is still relevant.
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Indeed. Spending some money to have people sit down and think for a change seems like money well spent.
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Being old isn't a reason to retire. Not wanting to work anymore is a reason to retire. Not being good at your job is a reason to retire.
If this guy's still good at his job, still wants to do it, and we still need the work done, making him quit is nothing more than rote obedience to an antiquated rule.
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Marshall needs to retire; he's damned old, but the group's purpose is still relevant.
Like more things in Washington, this is probably just more BS. We'll find out that the only reason he was on the payroll was because he's a 33rd degree freemason and no one had to heart to fire him. Seriously, do you the Pentagon would ever admit to their projects or people involved in them? It sounds like he was more a mascot than anything else.
Just one anachronism... (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Louis Riel (Score:2)
Nobody ever listens, also predicted (Score:2)
"I also predicted this due to ever-growing social spending leading to increasing cost-cutting pressures on everything else. I'd like to claim authorship of this repeatedly successful prediction method, but I cannot [wikipedia.org]."
Only things 92 years old can see is death coming (Score:2, Troll)
and apparently he's been senile for the last 15 years...
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When 92 years old you are, less senile you will be not.
He might need to retire but... (Score:2)
The think tank should remain. Defense Department has to be ready for the next thing. Nations lose wars because they fight the next war the same way they fought the last one. A think tank like that might keep you ready.
recent predictions (Score:3)
Of all the weapons the Pentagon relies on to defend the United States, one of the strangest and most secretive is Andrew Marshall, a 92-year-old man who's spent the last 40 years staring into the future trying to predict the next big threat to America. In his role as the Pentagon's visionary sage, Marshall is credited with predicting the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of China's global prominence, the role of autonomous weapons and robots in warfare, and even helping end the Cold War.
His most recent predictions included "damn kids on the lawn", the loss of a his pants, and "there are 4 monkeys in the attic - I'm sure of it"!
Mr Marshall will be missed.
Possibly shuttering the futurist think tank? (Score:2)
The primary role of the Pentagon is to envision what warfare of the future looks like. They take a 20 year view and ask the following questions (and run the following scenarios):
1) Who is/could be the enemy?
2) What does the battlefield look like (jungle, desert, urban, etc).
3) What kind of weapons/tactics will be used against us.
4) Most importantly, what type of military hardware would we need to have in order to counter that threat 20 years out.
They then take this 'long view' and use that as a road-map to
Re:Predicting The Probable (Score:5, Insightful)
Envisioning the implosion of a corrupt, bankrupt police state? Brilliant! Most populous country on Earth is in the ascent? Wizard!
The difference between someoldguy and "Yoda" appears to be that someoldguy is really good at predicting the exact same things in hindsight.
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Envisioning the implosion of a corrupt, bankrupt police state? Brilliant! Most populous country on Earth is in the ascent? Wizard!
The difference between someoldguy and "Yoda" appears to be that someoldguy is really good at predicting the exact same things in hindsight.
but the US hasn't (completely) imploded yet. (ZING!)
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I grew up in the 70s and 80s. I never thought we would see a Communist state abandon the Planned Economy and embrace the Free Market. If you brought the idea to me when I was 18 or 25, I'd have thought you were nuts. What Communist wanted to give up that much power over the individual? How could a nation, so accustomed to marching in lockstep with it's leadership handle economic freedom? Russia wasn't doing so well after Communism and China was reportedly employing one third of this population to spy o
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In actuality, the predictions attributed to him were widely predicted by many people
and found in Science Fiction long before his predictions. Even Popular Science
back issues tend to look prescient with hind signt.
Anyone who reads slashdot can predict global trends and be right some of the time.
I'd be more interested in some of the predictions which never came about.
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Of course, that may be the SciFi spurring inventors.
Kid reads a book about flying cars. Dreams of becoming an engineer, works hard through school, gets to MIT or Stanford or some other high end engineering college, happens to take private pilot license as a hobby, and eventually is able to design a working flying car.
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How's that working out for them?
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Wonderfully - they really like being one of the vanishingly few people to have a flying car, and the profit from the few they sold is keeping the bills paid.
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They used to play cards together.
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While the USN has been slow to adapt, relying on more conventional aircraft carrier refit packages to add complements of drones, in reality the paradigm shift means that drone frigates make a lot more sense, in terms of force projection and our actual enemies faced.
Here is more info on a drone frigate: http://voices.yahoo.com/eve-online-fitting-guide-imicus-6350588.html [yahoo.com]