On March 13 of this year, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth signed a memo, directing the Pentagon’s Performance Improvement Officer to reassign all civilian employees of the Office Of Net Assessment. Fifty two years since it opened, the Office is now closed.
In one sense, Hegseth’s memo is just one more demolition job, in a blizzard of executive orders that have marked the early days of the Trump restoration.
In another, it’s a lot of history to tie up one idle Tuesday.
Few outsiders understood the acronym ONA. But it helped forge the strategy that ended the Cold War, reset the Pentagon’s Chinese strategy, and coined the influential concept of the Revolution In Military Affairs.
This was the Pentagon’s brain. Its cerebral cortex, in fact, concerned with ultra-long-term thinking. Puzzling out real possibilities from the infinite string of potential futures.
And one brain within that brain was Adam Lovinger, whose two decade career at the Office saw him shadow its inspirational founder, Andrew Marshall.
In this episode of Danube Politics, he speaks with DI Visiting Fellow Gavin Haynes about the long timeline of ‘net assessment’ – and its potential revival.
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