U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has instructed the closure of a specialized unit often referred to as the Pentagon’s “internal think tank,” a group that focuses on evaluating the future of American military capabilities relative to potential rivals like China.
Hegseth has directed the “disestablishment” of the Office of Net Assessment (ONA) and ordered the development of a plan to rebuild the office in alignment with the department’s strategic priorities, chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said in a statement Thursday night.
All ONA personnel will be reassigned to “mission-critical” roles within the department, the statement said.
The Pentagon remains committed to conducting “rigorous, forward-looking strategic assessments that directly inform defense planning and decision-making,” Parnell said.
The ONA has had only two directors since its establishment in 1973. For four decades, the office was led by legendary strategist Andrew Marshall, who served eight presidents from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama. Since 2015, the office has been led by James Baker, a retired Air Force colonel who holds four graduate degrees.
Marshall was known for his analysis of military capability advancements known as a revolution in military affairs (RMA). One such RMA he studied was precision strike, which he predicted would change the conduct of war in the following decades.
Marshall was credited for accurately assessing the vulnerability of the Soviet Union. At a time when the Central Intelligence Agency overrated Soviet economic power, Marshall had come to the conclusion, through observing economic statistics, that the adversary was on its ropes.
“ONA was one of the first organizations in the Department of Defense to recognize the looming military challenge from China, at a time when most of the U.S. military’s attention was focused on counterterrorism,” Tom Shugart, a retired naval officer who served as military adviser to the ONA in 2019-20, told Nikkei Asia. “In the years since, its efforts have been crucial in determining the scale and scope of the China challenge, as well as how best to grapple with it.”
Rush Doshi, a former deputy senior director for China and Taiwan on the National Security Council during the Biden administration, called Hegseth’s move an enormous mistake.
“When I was at the NSC, ONA produced some of the best analysis anywhere in the [U.S. government] and had enormous and even historic policy impact,” he wrote on X. “No other institution presently can do what it did.”
China was “obsessed” with it, he wrote, noting that the People’s Liberation Army studied Marshall’s RMA theories exhaustively.
Japanese diplomats in Washington have visited the Office of Net Assessment regularly since the early 2000s, discussing the future rise of China and how Japan should respond.
Kunihiko Miyake, a former Japanese diplomat and research director at The Canon Institute for Global Studies in Tokyo, told Nikkei Asia that March 13 will be remembered as the “funeral day” for the U.S. long-term strategic analysis community.
“While Andy Marshall’s disciples may continue their work in consultancies, the opportunity for them to directly impact U.S. military strategy will be significantly reduced.” he said. “Ten years, 20 years down the road, U.S. strategies will have much less long-term thinking. If the ONA is not reinstalled, I fear the U.S. will shift from being a superpower to a mediocre power.”
Meanwhile, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, released a statement welcoming the move, saying he was “thrilled” that President Donald Trump is “abolishing this wasteful and ineffective office.”
On Feb. 7, Grassley had sent a letter to Hegseth asking for the disclosure of all contracts ONA had issued over the past 10 years, the title of each funded project, the recipient of taxpayer money and the total cost of each contract to the taxpayer.
One contract Grassley took issue with was a paper titled, “A Technical Report on the Nature of Movement Patterning, the Brain and Decision-Making,” which focused on Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s neurological development and potential Asperger’s syndrome.
“These have nothing to do with ONA’s core mission, which is to produce a net assessment that measures our military capabilities against our foreign adversaries,” Grassley said.
But many in the strategic community defend ONA for conducting out-of-the-box thinking.
One topic the office has continued to study is whether China under President Xi Jinping is more likely or less likely to engage in kinetic war — a euphemism for combat, as opposed to cyber warfare or information warfare. Though Xi is widely considered more “hawkish” than his predecessor, Hu Jintao, he has taken no kinetic military action during his 12 years in office.
While China has narrowed the gap with the U.S. in terms of gross domestic product and defense spending in past years, it is highly questionable that Beijing can sustain its current 7% growth in defense spending for decades to come, analysts say.
Drawing on input from outside analysts, ONA analyzes China’s national power five years, 10 years and 20 years down the road and offers reports to the defense secretary.
