‘In recent years, the [US] national security state has been distorted by partisan politics and flawed strategic judgments.’ Such was the pitch of a panel discussion organized by the Danube Institute on 28 March 2025.
The latest victim of this sordid state of affairs was the Office of Net Assessments (ONA), which was established in 1973 by Richard Nixon as the Pentagon’s internal research and analysis hub, then disestablished earlier this month by Secretary of Defence Pete Brian Hegseth.
Adam Lovinger, Vice President for Strategic Affairs at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, knew the deceased very well, having frequented it closely from 2004 to 2017. But he likely does not blame the people who pulled the plug on its decaying body. This article explores what the ONA was, the tale of its demise, and who the real culprits behind it could have been.
Medical History
The patient was of a robust constitution for all but the last ten years of its life. This is largely owed to the lifelong supervision since its birth of its legal guardian, Andrew W Marshall, who never left its side until 2015, four years before his own passing at the age of 93.
Grégory Boutherin, a French Air Force officer who has a PhD in public law, described the life and times of Marshall at the Department of Defense in a 2017 article for the French journal Politique étrangère.
According to Boutherin, Marshall’s career at the Pentagon was marked by his unparalleled longevity: ‘Marshall had been appointed under Richard Nixon and directed the ONA since its creation in 1973. His unique career led him to serve continuously under eight presidents and thirteen secretaries of defense.’
Boutherin also notes that Marshall was known for his original and sometimes iconoclastic ideas, which earned him recognition as one of the most influential thinkers by Foreign Policy in 2012: ‘It is precisely for his original and sometimes iconoclastic ideas (“thinking way, way outside the Pentagon box”) that he was listed in 2012 among the 100 most influential thinkers by Foreign Policy.’
O, to have a fun dad.
‘The purpose of strategic analysis was not to offer ready-made solutions, but to frame the right problems and explore potential scenarios’
Marshall had developed a comprehensive methodological approach for understanding strategic competition. As Boutherin explains: ‘a major characteristic of Net Assessment is to pose questions rather than provide answers. It aims to establish a diagnosis rather than a prescription.’ Marshall believed that the purpose of strategic analysis was not to offer ready-made solutions, but to frame the right problems and explore potential scenarios.
Marshall’s intellectual journey had begun at the RAND Corporation in the 1950s, where he examined Soviet military and political systems, especially concerning nuclear questions. This early work laid the foundation for the Net Assessment: ‘his reflections, led in light of theories of organizational behavior, commercial strategies, and ethology, gradually led him to study the functioning of Soviet bureaucratic organizations and to develop a method to understand and evaluate their influence in decision-making processes.’
One of Marshall’s most significant contributions was the concept of ‘competitive strategies’, which aimed to identify an adversary’s weaknesses and develop asymmetric responses. Boutherin emphasizes that Marshall’s focus was always on long-term strategic competition with the Soviet Union, but also with emerging challenges in the last decades of the Cold War: ‘the other major axis of Marshall’s thought since the 1980s has been military competition with China.’
After Marshall’s retirement, his successor, James H Baker, faced the challenge of maintaining the office’s relevance and influence. As Boutherin notes: ‘the departure of Marshall inevitably raises the question of the future of the ONA. If it could be redirected in the short term towards more immediate issues, it is difficult to know what will happen in the longer term.’
An orphan at 42, the ONA would survive another ten years in foster care.
Obituaries and Elegies
The decision to end the ONA was communicated through a memorandum dated 13 March 2025.
As reported in a Breaking Defense article published on the same day, the memo in question ‘order[ed] all employees of the Office of Net Assessment reassigned to different roles and cancel[ed] related contracts.’ They were scattered, façon puzzle, like one does to all the soldiers under the command of higher-ranking conspirators, in order that, guilty or not, they would be denied the very material possibility of organizing again and fomenting another plot.
According to the same Breaking Defense article, Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell justified the move by emphasizing the department’s commitment to strategic assessments while aiming to focus resources on pressing national security challenges. Parnell stated that the disestablishment sought to ‘maintain accountability and efficiency’ within the Pentagon. He further assured that all ONA personnel would be reassigned appropriately and that statutory requirements would continue to be met without disruption.
In a New York Times article published the following day, national reporter Greg Jaffe noted that although the ONA’s cost of ‘about $10 million to $20 million a year’ was but ‘a fraction of the Pentagon’s $850 billion annual budget,’ it ‘often had an outsize impact on how the Pentagon prepares for possible conflicts.’
Other critics of the disestablishment of the ONA were quoted in the article. They included Thomas G Mahnken, a former top Pentagon strategist, who deemed that ‘we’re in a period that looks a lot like the Cold War, and we’re doing away with an office that for decades helped senior leaders navigate that conflict,’ and Senator Jack Reed (D-RI), who called it ‘shortsighted’. Jaffe emphasizes this shortsightedness by recognizing that the ONA ‘often focused on high-risk research that others in the Pentagon were unlikely to undertake. As a result, its work sometimes did not produce tangible or immediate results for the military.’
‘We’re in a period that looks a lot like the Cold War, and we’re doing away with an office that for decades helped senior leaders navigate that conflict’
Reflecting on the legacy of the ONA, which he refers to as ‘OSD Net Assessment’, Christopher A Lawrence, a professional historian and military analyst, as well as the Executive Director of the Dupuy Institute, shared his thoughts in a 17 March 2025 publication. The Dupuy Institute had engaged in several contracts with the ONA, including one entitled ‘Soviet/Russian Influence on Chinese Military Doctrine’ in July 2003. Worth noting is that, after the Cold War, China would not become the only major focus of the ONA. According to Lawrence, the ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ (RMA) became its other major focus.
When the ONA changed hands in 2015 ‘and an Air Force colonel that [Lawrence] did not know took over,’ the Dupuy Institute bid on ‘a giant omnibus contract’ issued by the new management but was not chosen. This was the last time it saw the victim.
Deeper Causes of Death
The picture painted by the New York Times’ Jaffe is simple and convenient for detractors of the current US administration: it shut down the ONA because it is incompetent, and its incompetence is proven by its shutting down of the ONA. This is the part where Adam Lovinger, whom we had left to lurk in the shadows since our introduction, reappears in this story to ask a crucial question: what happened in those mysterious and tumultuous ten years between 2015 and 2025?
In the March 2025 panel discussion mentioned at the beginning of this article, Lovinger explained the weaponization of the federal investigative process, describing how the ONA and other US state bodies had been captured by lawless, self-serving individuals to whom blackmail and corruption were beyond business as usual—they were a method and a system.
Lovinger’s story became public long before the final days of the ONA. In an article published by The Washington Times in August 2019, Rowan Scarborough reported that Lovinger had been cleared after a two-year Pentagon investigation into whether he had mishandled classified information.
He had not.
Yet according to Lovinger’s lawyer, Sean Bigley, Pentagon lawyers ‘failed to make any mention of the NCIS findings in their case, failed to turn over the NCIS investigative report, and failed to even alert this attorney that a report existed which effectively exonerated Mr. Lovinger of the most serious allegation against him.’
‘The ONA and other US state bodies had been captured by lawless, self-serving individuals to whom blackmail and corruption were beyond business as usual—they were a method and a system’
In a June 2020 article, the Washington Examiner’s Kerry Picket described how Lovinger’s strange troubles had begun in October 2016 when he raised concerns about ONA’s contracts with FBI informant Stefan Halper, whose research Lovinger believed was unrelated to ONA’s mission. In January 2017 National Security Adviser Michael Flynn sought information on the ‘sub sources’ of the Steele/Trump–Russia dossier. Shortly thereafter, Flynn appointed Lovinger as senior director for strategic assessments at the National Security Council (NSC). A few months later ONA’s new Director James H Baker, reported by Picket to have ‘admitted ONA had not produced one net assessment since 2007,’ revoked Lovinger’s security clearance and suspended his NSC detail.
The controversy around Lovinger’s case was part of a broader effort to hamper the freshly elected first Trump government. Quoted in a June 2023 article in Texas Border Business, Tom Fitton, President of Judicial Watch, described the aforementioned Steele/Trump–Russia dossier as ‘a thirty-five-page report filled with ludicrous, salacious and completely unfounded allegations.’ Lovinger was also quoted in the article as clarifying that as the first Trump administration was moving in, ‘opponents within government “[would] start targeting those who pose[d] the greatest threat,” including the development of “blackmail files”.’
One recognizes in the both botched Lovinger investigation and Trump–Russia dossier instances of such ‘blackmail files’. Judicial Watch itself recently took an active role in spreading Lovinger’s findings through a January 2025 publication their website. The most notable ‘key nodes’ of the federal bureaucracies identified by Lovinger as having been ‘captured by the Deep State’ are as follows:
- The ONA, accused of being ‘a “dirty tricks” unit’;
- the Office of General Counsel, accused of ‘covering up weaponized investigations’;
- the Office of Inspector General, accused of ‘abuse of whistleblowers’ and of ‘undermining Congressional oversight’;
- the Washington Headquarters Services, accused of protecting ‘Deep State players’ and of ‘launching secret criminal investigations’;
- and the Office of Hearings and Appeals, accused of ‘covering up misconduct’.
The ONA was born with a mission to think strategically, beyond immediate threats, in service of long-term US defence interests. For four decades, under the guidance of Andrew W Marshall, it thrived on unorthodox analysis and rigorous foresight. Yet the last decade saw a shift from strategic introspection to internal strife and bureaucratic skirmishes. Adam Lovinger’s fate, intertwined with that of the office’s demise, epitomizes how the ONA’s purpose was subverted by political manoeuvring and institutional decay.
The ONA’s disestablishment was not the sudden destruction by an erratic administration of one of its best assets. It was the cold acknowledgement by a rational administration that what once was one of its best assets had become a festering husk, unworthy of the name.
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