The Questions of Andy Marshall

Andrew W. Marshall (1921 – 2019) developed methods to analyze long-term geopolitical and military competitions at the RAND Corporation (1949-1973) and then as founding director of the U.S. Department of Defense's Office of Net Assessment (ONA) from 1973 to 2015.  Many now forget that RAND abbreviated Research ANd Development and, according to Guy Stever (Chief Scientist of the U.S. Air Force 1955-1956),  Research Applied to National Defense. Delphi and other forecasting techniques, and Monte Carlo statistical modeling, and applied these together with historical knowledge and common sense to advance defense economics and largely invent nuclear strategy and deterrence. As the Pentagon’s internal think tank, the ONA has profoundly shaped USA Cold War strategy through unconventional economic and military analyses, red-teaming perceived risks and resilience, and anticipation of ways that information technology would transform militaries. This essay is based on one of a series of interviews conducted by Melissa Flagg and Smiljana Antonijević of the Andrew W. Marshall Foundation to help build a picture of Marshall’s work and influence.

I've spent a career working on the cluster of subjects that one associates with resources and environment - oceans, atmosphere, forests, land use, water, energy, materials, population.  It began in graduate school when I had a part-time job as an assistant researching excessive, careless, and competing uses of the oceans. I was working more from an operations research and statistics or systems point of view than from an ecological one.  I was learning about petroleum in the marine environment and applied for a fellowship in the spring of 1977 to spend a year at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington because I was using their reports and wanted to meet the people firsthand.  The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation funded the fellowship, good for one year, renewable for a second.

When I got there, I was assigned mentors, one a meteorologist and another an oceanographer.  They said to me, "Many people are working on oil spills.  Why don't you do something different?  There are other big problems in environment that the Academy is very involved in."  One was acid rain and forest death, associated with coal-burning power plants and their sulfur and nitrogen emissions. The second was depletion of the ozone layer associated with gases from spray cans but also at that time with the then-fading idea that there would soon be fleets of supersonic transports, large, very fast, high-altitude planes. The third issue they mentioned was global warming and climate change.

I took a bunch of Academy reports, spent five or six weeks reading them, and went back to my mentors and said, "The climate question looks especially interesting.  Nobody's working on it. There's very little literature.”  The ozone layer had been an issue for 10 years or so by that time. Acid rain didn't look as intellectually interesting or complex to me, though it obviously was a salient national and international issue.

Anyway, I came back and said “climate’ and they said, "Yes."  In late 1977 I became one of the first handful of people in the world to be paid to work on global warming and climate change. There were people working on it, but they were spending a day or two of their week on it.  Almost nobody worked on it full-time.

I spent the next six years completely engaged in climate variability and change. The Academy formed its first Climate Research Board. I became responsible for organization of the first United Nations World Climate Conference, which took place in February of 1979 in Geneva. I, together with an Iranian, did most of the legwork for that meeting.

The conference was co-chaired by a distinguished American scientist and manager named Robert M. White, my primary Academy mentor.  White had begun his career as a meteorologist for the Air Force and become head of the National Weather Service and then founder of the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration.  His co-chair was a Soviet polar expert named Evgeny Fedorov, a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet for whom an Arctic ice island was named.

I had had a cosmopolitan upbringing. My father was a professor of European history at Columbia. I had ducked and covered during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but I hadn't had any direct involvement with the Cold War, the Soviet Union. I'd spent time in England and France and Italy, but I hadn't been even to Budapest and I didn't know the world further East. Suddenly, I found myself in this Cold War world within the world of science, and working in a very positive way with the Soviet and Hungarian and Polish and other East Bloc scientists.

I was twenty-six when I started the fellowship. I stayed two academic years in residence at the Academy.  “Big history” of course turns out to matter in the lives of individuals.  As a result of the Glassboro Summit in 1967 between President Johnson and Premier Kosygin on limiting anti-ballistic missile systems, the US and USSR had agreed to establish an institute for the study of common problems of industrialized societies, problems like air pollution and urban planning. The governments handed over to the US Academy and the Soviet Academy of Sciences the responsibility to create it. Former National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy played a big role for the US. He then had moved to lead the Ford Foundation. The head of the Soviet Ministry of Science and Technology, Dzhermen Gvishiani, led the Soviet side. He was the son-in-law of Kosygin.

The institute, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), opened its doors in 1972 and moved into an abandoned Habsburg Palace in Laxenburg half an hour south of Vienna and half an hour from the Iron Curtain borders with Hungary and Czechoslovakia.  Austria was a neutral country.  IIASA was largely run by the US and the Soviets, but there were Poles and Hungarians and Bulgarians and French and Italians and both West and East Germans. It was amazing that it existed. The US Academy was encouraging its staff members to spend time in Laxenburg. I went in February 1978 for a workshop on Carbon Dioxide, Energy, and Society.

Then in the summer of '79, I returned for three months and ended up staying for almost two and a half years.  I worked first for a Soviet hydrodynamicist, an expert on the flow of the great Siberian rivers. He had been one of the opponents of the plan to water the “new lands” around the Aral Sea by reversing the flow of the Siberian rivers into the Arctic. Then I worked for a Polish civil engineer, an expert on polluted European rivers. Both were outstanding people.

I went in a few years from never having been east of Venice to having a lot of East Bloc contact. I made trips to Moscow and Novosibirsk and had an immersion in Soviet science, from a civilian point of view, in terms of concern about soil and weather, but also with exposure to strategic roles of natural resources.  I became interested in scientific cooperation between nations in conflict.

I had exciting years at IIASA.  I led the Climate Task and learned huge amounts about energy, food, water, population, risk analysis, operational gaming, and other subjects and methods. I wrote a paper on “Climate Change and the Carbon Wealth of Nations” for a 1980 book I edited on “Climatic Constraints and Human Activities.”  Robert Maxwell published the book in his Pergamon imprint. In the fall of 1981, I returned to the Academy and served as the main professional staff member for the first soup-to-nuts Academy study of global warming, which came out in 1983, titled “Changing Climate.”

The “Carbon Dioxide Assessment Committee” which prepared the report looked not only at the physics of the atmosphere but at many other aspects of the problem. What caused greenhouse gas emissions, could unfreezing Arctic methane hydrates abruptly lift emissions, when might the fingerprint of human-induced climate change become distinct from natural variability, what would contribute to sea level rise, could America meet future demands for food and water, would national and international migrations take place, could carbon taxes prevent emissions?

The committee was chaired by the head of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, a voluble, competitive physicist named William Nierenberg, who had worked in the Manhattan Project and at the time also chaired the JASON advisory group. Another member of the committee was Harvard Kennedy School of Government professor Thomas Schelling, who had been a RAND Corporation nuclear strategy analyst and would go on to win a Nobel Memorial Prize in economics for game theory.  Another member of the committee was a young Yale economist named William Nordhaus, who would also win a Nobel Prize, for economics of climate change.

The members of the group did original work, unusual for an NAS committee, which typically only reviews and synthesizes what is already known. Schelling and Nierenberg were very interested in national security aspects of resources and environment. The fact that I had been to Siberia, so to say, helped me to be at ease with them, which not all young Americans coming out of an ecological or environmental background might have been.

I would mention that people, including close friends and colleagues, made fun of my incipient career.  Everybody understood oil spills, which you could smell and touch.  But for climate, we were making very long-range predictions. This is relevant to the Office of Net Assessment, which also considers the long term and which Andy founded in 1973, perhaps a child of the same cultural pulse as IIASA.  Our climate predictions at that time went out to 2030, fifty years into the future but now today.

Some of my more academic peers would denigrate me and say, "Oh, Jesse, your work takes place entirely in the realm of hypotheticality."  “It’s not science,” and “It's all globaloney."  Some people used to call me “ozone head.”  There were lots of critiques.  This was only a few years after the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report.  I came to know some of the members of the Club of Rome, which included Gvishiani.  Andy’s close friend Herman Kahn was of course one of the most famous “futurologists.”  There was a burst of “futurology,” and most of it was not respected for various reasons, many of which were valid.

For me, there were mixed sensations of doing something odd, novel, exciting but with weak foundations.  A positive way of looking at the endeavors is that we were exploring limits of predictability.  Later I would come to see this as the exploration of the limits to knowledge and the important distinction between the unknown and the unknowable, a very important borderline also for net assessment.

As for the security aspect, in my social group most people were surprised by it. I came from the Vietnam generation, people who, for the most part, were hostile to war fighting and related engagements. Not hostile to the Soviet Union, and some of them had Mao's Little Red Book. The Academy members I worked with were older, not my own age group, who were mainly the Vietnam-Watergate generation of people trying to look past the Cold War.

By the mid to late '70s, after Vietnam, there was a feeling among many in my generation that all this security stuff was going to go away somehow.   And that environment and climate would help make it go away.  After I returned to Washington, the so-called TTAPS report (for authors Turco, Toon, Ackerman, Pollack, and [Carl] Sagan) on how nuclear war would cause a catastrophic nuclear winter came out, and I was present for that controversy. I was friendly with the people who built the numerical models, the atmospheric models used to calculate “the day after” and to help look at ecological aspects of war.

There was a feeling among a lot of my cohort that we had to move toward global development, there had to be more cooperation. The Cold War was still going on, but for young people, it didn't have the impetus that it would have had for Andy in the '50s and ‘60s. I was initially surprised to be involved in discussions about these issues.

But I was immersed in systems analysis, much of which had developed in the RAND Corporation and as a legacy of World War II. IIASA was intellectually a child of RAND. It was established by people like Schelling, applied mathematicians George Dantzig and Howard Raiffa and some of their counterparts elsewhere.

The Soviets felt extreme envy for American systems analysis. They believed in that intellectual program, which also embraced input-output modeling, the Leontief view of the economy.  If you had enough information, you had all these knobs and dials and levers, and you could turn everything, and you could use control theory to control systems and succeed at achieving all kinds of goals. There was a strong intellectual program in the US along the same lines, which only recently finally weakened.

I spent many hours during the 1980s searching in enormous reference books for long time series of data for models of cities, energy, and agriculture. I conceived and built board and computer simulation games about carbon and climate.  I was a generation younger than Andy and Tom Schelling, but I was brought up in their world of systems analysis, applied systems analysis, promulgated by RAND and then by some other institutions. In the US, Harvard was important in it, including Harvard Business School, MIT and Stanford.

That was the first decade or so of my career.  I was given this big problem of global warming to work on, and encouragement to use various tools.  Through involvement with the engineering side of the house (I had become director of studies for the National Academy of Engineering), I also learned to think about the competitiveness of US industries. The industrial competition at that time was neither the USSR nor China but Japan and Germany – in autos, machine tools, textiles, steel, pharmaceuticals, aviation.  It was clear that visions of free trade and global development, whether left or right, omitted key considerations of who has power and wealth and security.

In 1989, I left the Academy and moved to The Rockefeller University, where I've now worked for 37 years. First, I came as a fellow. Then in 1993, the University created the Program for the Human Environment and made me the director of it. I've had a small group, five, six, seven people, never a big group. We've worked a lot on what I call the environmental trinity -- land-sparing, decarbonization, dematerialization – but also added wet lab capability and do real biology, genetics and genomics, for example using loose DNA in sea water to identify and count fish.

IIASA was only digital, so to say, or in silico.  Researchers there took data mainly collected by countries and assembled by the UN or other aggregators and performed analyses. Then I moved into a more traditional academic setting in which you collect primary data yourself, write papers, teach a little bit, and fund it with grants from government agencies, foundations, and industry.

I continued some involvement with the policy side from '89 to '93. I was concurrently director of studies for a temporary organization called the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology and Government.  The Commission, whose purpose was to assess and improve the process by which all branches of the U.S. government incorporate scientific and technical knowledge into their policymaking and decision-making, included Bill Perry and Ash Carter.  Both would go on to serve as secretaries of defense. I got to know them and others involved in the security world. It wasn't till '92 or '93 that I heard mention of Andy Marshall's name.

For context, in ’85 I did a debriefing in Washington for some people after a trip to Siberia for a meeting about Kondratieff Waves, 50-year economic cycles. Also, I'd been in Leningrad and visited the Kirov works of Elektrosila, the General Electric of Russia at the time. I said, "It's going to collapse."

Some of the American experts I met with were extremely unhappy to hear me say this.  I felt critical of our Sovietologists based on my own experience.  It turned out that many of them had never been there.

Talk about hypotheticality. There's a good reason I hadn't been to the year 2025, but there were few good reasons that most of these experts had traveled so little to Moscow or even Budapest or Warsaw. A lot of people, I think, just didn't look for themselves-- more firsthand observation might have helped.

A few people said to me, "there was someone who got it right," referring to the Office of Net Assessment and Andy Marshall.  The president emeritus of The Rockefeller University, who had recruited me to Rockefeller, Joshua Lederberg, Nobel Prize-winning geneticist, was friendly with Andy. Josh and I were close. There's correspondence in the Lederberg papers at the National Library of Medicine, several exchanges between Andy and Josh about various questions. Josh was the first person who specifically said to me, "You should meet Andy Marshall."

Then in 1999, I was invited to speak at an ONA summer study in Newport, Rhode Island, at the Naval War College, not to be a full member of the study group, which involves staying for 5 to 10 days, but just to come for a day and give a talk, meet some people. I went and gave a talk about population and resources to a study group. I never saw the report that came out of the group. I'm not sure what it said, even what the subject was.

After I gave my talk, Andy said, "Come chat with me."  We talked in his office, which was just one of the meeting rooms there, and then we had dinner, and we hit it off. For the next almost 20 years - Andy died in 2019 - this was 1999, we had a lot of contact. He would visit New York occasionally and more often I would visit Washington. He started to give me projects to work on. I chaired several summer studies.

What clinched the relationship was a workshop I organized at Rockefeller in 2003 with Andy's encouragement on “The Next Thousand Years.”  Afterwards, Andy told his deputy Andrew May and others that it was among the best meetings he had ever attended. [The agenda and list participants are here.]

It was a group of people, including biologists, engineers, some social scientists, some businessmen, several of whom were truly in the midst of doing something big. I co-authored a scene-setting paper for it with an Italian physicist, Cesare Marchetti, who had worked at IIASA and was one of the main mentors of my career, about The Next Thousand Years. Andy really liked it.  We capped the workshop with an essay on “Science, Conquering Child of the Church” that argued that science is basically the successor to Christianity and still very young. It was one of those meetings where the dynamics of the people and subjects really worked.

After The Next Thousand Years our relationship broadened. I sometimes think of the 1935 Alfred Hitchcock movie, The 39 Steps, a black-and-white Hitchcock classic.  Part of the plot revolves around a man called Mr. Memory, whom you can buy a ticket to meet in a theater in London—most of it takes place in London—and ask all kinds of questions. I won't say to what The 39 Steps refer because that gives away part of the thrill of the film, but he's an idiot savant, with an incredible memory, which I don't have. Anyway, the audience could shout out questions like “What was the name of Napoleon’s horse?” or “How far is Winnipeg from Montreal?” or “What causes pip disease in chickens?”  Mr. Memory always feels compelled to answer.

Andy liked asking questions.  I'm a person with many interests, and he liked asking me questions. I sometimes felt a little like Mr. Memory. I don't always have the answers, but he would ask questions, some of which related to resources and environment where I really know something. I think the late Josh Lederberg would have said the same, that Andy would just ask questions.

An example, probably one of the most successful pieces that we did for the ONA, is something in the open literature. One day, we were talking about the rise and fall of empires. I was saying, "It could be this, could be that." He said, "Well, why don't you write something about the rise and fall of empires?"  Together with Marchetti, I started exploring this question for the Next Thousand Years workshop and eventually, a decade later, we produced a report called “Quantitative Dynamics of Human Empires” from Persia and Carthage to the European Union. The version published in an anthropology journal is black and white, but we published a glossy, colorful version also that has been, I think, popular within the Pentagon.

Empires had nothing to do with global warming or with sniffing submarines or some of the kinds of things that, more logically, Andy might ask about.  It was just, "Why don't you devote time to thinking about why empires rise and fall?"

Many subjects could spark Andy’s curiosity.  One has to think about the kinds of people with whom he was friendly and associated. He was very interested in history, world history, economic history, geography and economic geography. Within the Office, of course, a lot of the focus was military, for example, on the Revolution in Military Affairs, and there's no question he was interested in precision and accuracy and capabilities and more generally in the origins and fate of power at many levels.

Andy’s final apartment looked like a used bookstore, and his large Pentagon office was always piled high with books, academic books.  It could be a 1,000-page history of something narrow or epic. He always had a group of friends, people like Lederberg or Lionel Tiger, myself, and I know there were others with wide-ranging interests, including his great friend Jim Schlesinger. I worked a little with Jim in the 1980s on energy issues, without any connection to Andy. Schlesinger was also very curious -- he could easily have spent his career as a professor, too. He had enormous curiosity about the world.

I was 30 years younger than Andy, but I think he always had a group of friends who were people he liked to ask questions.  I think of people like Tom Schelling, the original RAND people.  Andy often mentioned Nathan Leites and some of the others as people you could just talk with about anything. Andy was 77 or 78 when I met him. Leites and others had already passed away.  I fit into that basket of people you can talk to about lots of things. The Last Warrior biography and the book that Andrew May put together of remembrances capture some of the curiosity in Andy’s life.

We were in regular conversation and correspondence. When I say correspondence, his letters or emails were usually short, a sentence or two. He was not as sphinx-like in person as some people would lead you to believe. He was a very good listener, liked to listen, was retentive, and courteous. If you were with him in a small group of two, three, four people, he might speak at some length. Some of that comes across in the one-on-one interviews that the AWM Foundation is archiving.

From the first time we met, we had good conversations, and those continued until the last time we spoke, which was maybe six weeks before he died. I visited several times to the Alexandria apartment, and there were never long silences.  He was interested in energy and agriculture and transportation, the oceans, and Leonardo Da Vinci. It wasn't just that he was interested in transportation in a military sense. He was broadly interested.  Look at the topics of the Next 1000 Years workshop.

I would not have become friends with Andy and I would not have had the research contracts that we had unless he were genuinely interested in these other things. He was certainly interested in sources of national strength, especially for the US, China, a few other countries. He liked to bring environment and resources around to this question, similarly with cultural attributes, the world of Lionel, or with religion, which Anna Simons studies, and questions like why do people enlist and serve. He asked persistently about possible effects of the one child family on military service and lethality of warfare.  He would bring a subject such as family size around to its implications for national strength or attitude, but he didn't shut you off after 30 seconds and say, well, "How does that relate--"  He had a general curiosity, the RAND systems analysis program that one had to look at the whole in order to understand the parts.

Andy asked me to work on questions that I would not otherwise have worked on, including the rise and fall of empires. Also, he did engage me much more with security aspects of observing the oceans, which is something I had a little prior involvement in.  If you're asked questions about ocean observing by the National Marine Fisheries Service, it's a little different from the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He certainly engaged me more with the interactions of resources and national security.  I think it was useful that we looked in an integrated way at water, energy, land, materials, labor, AND information.  We explored the question of whether humanity is approaching “peak human”?

Andy also introduced me to a network of people, most of whom I otherwise would not have met, not only scholars. I learned a great deal from the officers, the uniformed people, who've worked in ONA and participated in the summer studies. I chaired four summer studies.  For each of those studies, an officer from each service serves on the team. In some of the other projects, someone from the Coast Guard or the Navy would get interested in what we were doing. I had had interaction with the research labs of, or supported by, the Navy but little or no contact with people in operations for the Navy, Coast Guard, and Marines, and the Air Force and the Army, people who are actually trying to operate or implement strategy.  Over the last 26 years, I learned a lot from the interaction with the real operations people, some of whom I've stayed in touch with. That's a big issue for America in general and American science and technology. This goes back to Vietnam, and its fallout; academia tended to separate from military issues.

An important point that I wrote for Andrew May's book is that Andy wanted the office to operate at a high intellectual level. His reference points were the golden age of RAND, or Carnegie-Mellon University with Jim March and his colleagues.  Near the end of their lives (2015), Andy and March together with Mie Augier authored a great perspective on The Flaring of Intellectual Outliers: An Organizational Interpretation of the Generation of Novelty in the RAND Corporation.

Andy wanted to make serious, lasting contributions in an intellectual sense and to understand sources of novelty and creativity. Obviously, the Office produced a variety of reports, some of which would have different functions, some of which are practical things about acquisition or whatever.  But, even here, I think he aimed to influence people's thinking in a big way, in paradigmatic ways.

There are active thinkers like Tyler Cowen and Nick Eberstadt about whom Andy was very enthusiastic. Within his cohort, there are people like March or Schlesinger. But I think he was, in the way that I tried to suggest in the little essay "Andrew Marshall and Classics,” in conversation with the classics – Herodotus and Hegel, Macaulay and Prescott, Gibbon and The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, Toynbee. I think he had a -- I'd say Chinese - view of the ancestors being present, including Lao Tzu.  The conversation that was going on was a 3,500-year-old conversation that was going on about sources of national strength or about strategy and fate.

It could be Machiavelli or classics from the early American republic. The authors were present for Andy in an unusual way, as it is for the best scholars in a university.  Part of being a good teacher is helping people realize that a lot of life is conversation with the dead.  In a conversation with Andy, he could be holding a new book that had just come out that he liked, then he might refer to something from the 1930s and then to something from 100 years before that, as if time is telescoped.

Andy didn't esteem committee reports. He was handed a lot of them. He had little interest in commissioning consensus reports from bodies such as the National Academies, and this was part of the critique of the later RAND.  At the early RAND, the sponsor gave RAND some money, and Tom Schelling went off for six months or a year and wrote something. Now the process tends to be that 12 different people bill between 12 and 60 hours, and you get something like an AI product.

Andy had little interest in most of what came out of the think tanks in Washington.  The key shortcoming wasn't the individuals; he had little respect for the typical process of group work.  A single military officer working hard for a couple of years would produce more value than a committee. An important feature of ONA summer studies is that the only person responsible or accountable for the report is the chair. Ten, twelve, or eighteen people might be involved, but no one has to sign off on it.  They're not committee reports, and he didn't want committee reports.

I think Andy’s view of a lot of what had happened in the Washington think tank world over the last few decades was that it was the weaker part of what we today call AI.  Most prompts make a large language model work as if a dozen people all had to put their names on the title page, and a virtual professional editor smooths it and probably drafts the executive summary. Andy thought this process rarely produces much of lasting value. He wanted views of outliers and people who did not fit into hierarchies. He liked singular views and also plural perspectives.

Net assessments are supposed to be comprehensive, integrative, but they're not consensus documents. They are finally the product of one or two authors, though a lot of people may be acknowledged or cited.  If one goes back to the mid-1980s and foresight about the Soviet Union, I doubt you ever could have gotten a report out on imminent collapse if many different individuals or organizations had all had to sign off on it.  It was in the interest of Sovietologists as well as acquisitions people and vendors to say, "The threat has never been greater."  One might have gotten a report approved which said, "One of the dozen scenarios to consider is an abrupt decline.” That would probably reach the limit of what survives a group process.

As for criticism, Andy usually would just say, "I think this needs more work." Sometimes he'd put a question mark in the margin of a document, but he was not a copy editor. I think he didn't much like to write, even as much as he liked to read.  He liked conversation.  Sometimes I would receive more detailed written comments from one of the analysts in the Office, especially David Epstein, a very sharp guy.  Andy was happy with slide-free briefings, though I very much like visual communication. He did like maps. Otherwise, he was not a very visual person. He liked text, he liked things to be well written.  Sometimes to encourage the reading of work that Andy was distributing, he wrote a short cover note saying something was important or worth your time.  I've heard stories where people felt deflated, when they presented large bodies of work and got little encouragement or affirmation. I'm sure that happened.

If one asks about Andy Marshall’s role in U.S. history, the phrase Yoda of the Pentagon is good and has stuck. When I met Andy; he was 77 or 78. If I'd met him when he was 35 or 40, I might have a different view. By the time I came along, he already had an unusually long temporal perspective. The longevity of his strong performance, as everybody has said, was remarkable.  He surely got some big things right before ONA, and then his insights about the USSR turned out to be sound.  I saw first-hand how his views about Islam and about terror turned out correct.

When I met Andy in 1999, many security experts were obsessed with Islam and not with China.  We had conversations where he said, "People are too occupied with Islam and Counterterror, and China should be the central concern.'   I think the sum of the net assessment work gave him a deep appreciation of differences between competitors and adversaries and between adversaries and irritants or taxes.

Within the military side, there are issues of classification, and most of it I never saw.  Much of it few people may ever have seen. Certainly, ONA got right most aspects of the 1990s Revolution in Military Affairs, with emphasis on stealth and precision strike and associated organizational and operational requirements.  If you get four or five big things right in your career, that's a lot.  A big reason is that he persistently asked good questions, sometimes the same question for many decades.

Before concluding, I would repeat that Andy, as I wrote in “The Classics”, liked and made time for people who don't fit.  He was interested also in ideas that don't fit. There may have been big things that he wasn't interested in, but he didn't care if somebody wore different colored socks.  I generally had the feeling that he listened for things that don't fit. That's unusual in the Washington setting and in large organizations, which emphasize commitment to structures of authority. Everybody is supposed to look the same. As a man, you're supposed to wear the same suit and the same ties and say the same things. The pressure for conformity is high in large bureaucratic organizations.  Andy was one of few people in my Washington experience who was genuinely interested in people or ideas that don't fit. This was true with regard to geology as well as geopolitics.  For example, he was interested in the idea that some hydrocarbons might not be “fossil” fuels but rather have abiotic origins, which could lead to greater abundance and wider distribution of oil and natural gas than traditionalists believe.

A dangerous limit on net assessment is the blinders that we put on ourselves.  Lack of curiosity and prejudice about sources of ideas are among the greatest limits to knowledge.  In the end, I think Andy’s success came from balancing and appreciating both classic and novel questions.

Jesse H. Ausubel is director of the Program for the Human Environment, The Rockefeller University.