Early next month, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's Adviser on Net Assessment will produce a report that will be the working blueprint for the Pentagon's future. Given that the Adviser -- Andrew Marshall -- is a futurist fascinated with the most advanced technologies, observers expect the report to be chock full of recommendations emphasizing an expansive embrace of "information age" technologies, and a shift away from more conventional procurements.

Indeed, if you read last Friday's Washington Post, you'd be inclined to think that Andrew Marshall is an island of ingenuity, intellect, and integrity floating amidst the vast archipelago of corrupt and conniving Defense bureaucracies. He is, wrote the Post's Thomas Ricks, "one of the Pentagon's most unconventional thinkers," a man who's "controversial" in part due to his prescient, visionary views that are "hardly conservative." Because he's scrapped with the military brass over a handful of doctrinal and procurement issues, he's a "radical reformer." Not that the average person would know any of this, of course, as Marshall is "all but unknown outside national security circles" and is legendary for being "publicity-shy."

Indeed, for a guy who's been ensconced at the Pentagon since 1973, the 79-year old Marshall has done a remarkable job of flying below the radar. Put his name and office into the news database Nexis and you'll find less than 50 hits. Among them is a reprinted piece in The Palm Beach Post Ricks did for his former employer, the Wall Street Journal, which could hardly have been more effusive in depicting Marshall as the quiet, Oz-like genius of the Pentagon. Far from being probing, this article puts Ricks in the company of a bevy of defense contracting executives and their cut-out advocacy groups, like Frank Gaffney's Center for Security Policy, who adore Marshall for his dire prognostications about an inevitably bellicose and hegemonic China and his advocacy of "Revolution in Military Affairs" -- something critics charge is an intellectual cover for spending largess on "precision" Buck Rogers-type weaponry that has been less than 100 percent effective. But it's his subtle role as a national missile defense booster that has many concerned about his new tasking as uber-Pentagon program reviewer.

"Putting Andy Marshall in charge of this is a ploy to make sure national missile defense gets funded," holds Mel Goodman, a veteran Central Intelligence Agency analyst now at the National Defense University. "If he can justify making cuts in conventional procurement, they can then justify taking $60 billion to throw at [missile defense]. [Rumsfeld] is the first secretary of defense to turn over a key problem to his Net Assessment Adviser, which is a strange way to do business. If they were serious about this, they would not be looking for answers in several weeks."

According to those who have worked with Marshall or kept an eye on him, Marshall's forward vision of defense revolves around the notion that in the near future, the U.S. will not have access it currently enjoys to forward bases around the world, so force projection must necessarily become an action that revolves not around aircraft carrier sorties and armor and infantry deployment, but long-range arsenal ships and planes, networked sensor arrays and precision-weapons. As such, Marshall's been particularly critical of the Air Force's F-22 fighter program -- the plane, he says, has too short a range to be useful to the American military of the future.

Some have touted Marshall's opposition to the F-22 as an example of his "iconoclastic" thinking. But according to investigative author Ken Silverstein -- perhaps the only journalist who's written critically of Marshall -- this is bunk. "So he's been a critic of the F-22. Fine and dandy, " says Silverstein. "But you can find case after case where he's come out in support of other systems that are just as worthy of skewering. Saying he's a tough critic is like saying Jack Valenti is a tough critic of the movie industry."

While Marshall gave rare interviews to Ricks in 1994 and right-wing historian Jay Winik for an admiring April 1999 Washingtonian piece, Marshall declined to answer any of Silverstein's queries when Silverstein was working on a series of defense-related investigations for The Nation that he later expanded for his book, last year's Private Warriors.

Noting that only a handful of sycophantic articles were responsible for Marshall's public image, Silverstein expressed great skepticism about some of Marshall's claims, including one that Office of Net Assessment had been the first to sound the national security alarm about AIDS in the 1980s, going so far as to alert the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to take the problem seriously. (The Centers did not respond to queries from The American Prospect about any contact between the Office of Net Assessment and the CDC, but according to interviews with Pentagon sources who remember early 1980's briefings on AIDS from the Armed Forces Medical Intelligence Center, no one can recall any involvement -- or advocacy role -- from Marshall's office.)

Another claim Silverstein found a bit difficult to swallow was a riff from Ricks' Wall Street Journal piece, in which he asserted, "Well ahead of most Sovietologists, Mr. Marshall noticed the weakness of Soviet society in 1977, he focused on the environmental and demographic crisis that were undermining the Soviet system." In fact, Silverstein wrote, Marshall's "associates have no recollection of Marshall ever having expressed such views," quoting a former staffer as saying, "until the very end he was a major promoter of the line that 'The Russians are coming and they're 10 feet tall.'"

Indeed, in 1977, Marshall was one of the quietly forceful hands behind the infamous Team B episode, the Central Intelligence Agency gave members of the far-right Committee on the Present Danger access to CIA data and allowed to histrionically rewrite the National Intelligence Estimate on Soviet Military Intentions. Though Winik wrote that he later rebuked the intelligence community for overestimating Soviet strengths in the '80s, Silverstein noted in his book that Marshall's aid in authoring a secret Reagan Administration-era study on winning a nuclear war with the Soviets (the U.S. should "be able to force the Soviet Union to seek earliest termination of hostilities on terms favorable to the United States," it held) didn't exactly smack of prognostic optimism about the USSR's military capabilities.

National Defense University's Goodman -- one of the Agency's top Sovietologists who testified against Robert Gates for the latter's exaggerating the Soviet threat -- adds the assertions about Marshall's Sovieticus prescience strains credulity. "I don't recall where he was out in front of the whole Soviet issue -- if anything, he may have said it was time to throw more money into taking out the Soviets at a time when we were spending too much already," Goodman says, adding that this again brings us back to the current issue of missile defense. "We were spending in peacetime what we would normally do in wartime budget allocations. Now, instead of spending 6 percent of the GNP on defense, we're spending three. National Missile Defense puts that at risk, and if you're talking about a radical tax cut at the same time, that likely puts us back in the deficit spending arena."

Though Silverstein holds that Marshall, "has been an enthusiastic supporter of Star Wars schemes," Marshall's boosterism is more oblique; unlike the hawks on the Hill and elsewhere, he's not visibly jumping up and down, shaking his pom-poms in support of National Missile Defense. Indeed, few of his associates, from the past or present, are willing to ascribe any particular view to him, and not just because of his legendary bent towards the taciturn. ("He's as Delphic as they come -- days may go by before he utters a word," says a former Office of Net Assessment staffer, adding that this proclivity for reticence has earned him the nickname "Yoda.") "He's hard to draw a bead on," says one analyst who worked with him, "because he spends his time coming up with every conceivable future scenario that could threaten the U.S."

"He is not very interested in the here and now, but is primarily interested in hypothesizing futures that cut against the grain, and you can argue that we really do need someone like that," says Jonathan Pollack, a professor at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, and one of the leading analysts of the Chinese military. "His interest is to take events as they are understood and find a way to turn them on their head, to conflate understanding, and look for patterns or possibilities that could be studied. And he often comes up with quirk results. It's like he thinks of the world as a bell curve and is only interested in the tails of distribution." Or to put it more succinctly, he is, Pollack affectionately says, "a worrywart."

And this makes him worth having around, at the very least as an unconventional sounding board for a Secretary of Defense, or as a grand vision canary-in-the-coal-mine. But according to a longtime analyst, the product from Marshall's office often seems to be, "thinking outside of the box for the sake of thinking outside the box," fused with a touch of the paranoid. "His views are very much animated by the belief that most of those at the Pentagon are asleep at the switch, too wedded to the status quo and weapons systems he believes will be vulnerable in the future," says the analyst, who concedes, "the fact that he doesn't share the conceit about an unchallenged United States may have a utility at a certain level.

"But how much serious policy judgments and spending and procurement decisions should be based on this approach is another question," he adds. "Because the reality is a lot of the things he's postulating aren't provable. His escape clause is that what he's talking about is not reality today, but is using the equation of, 'based on this variable, let's extrapolate and postulate that x could happen which could lead to y which could lead to z, and how do we prepare for that?' There are times it's great to know you have someone around who runs those scenarios, especially if they do come to pass. But Andy is not the Pentagon's indispensable man, nor is he an omniscient seer."

Indeed, according to Silverstein, if there's a good description of Marshall it's that he's, "one of the most effective pork-seeking missiles ever deployed by the military brass." While this may be overstating matters a bit, given Marshall's desire to gut a slew of conventional weapons programs, it seems to ring true if you're interested in national missile defense. As a key witness before Donald Rumsfeld's Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, Marshall played no small role in convincing the commission -- whose findings have been cogently criticized by numerous analysts -- that a real threat is imminent.

"Though Rumsfeld's commission made no recommendation whatsoever on National Missile Defense, it dealt with the issue very artfully," says Pollack. "In fact, if that commission had a methodology, it was a very Marshallian methodology -- you can posit these circumstances, and if you posit the following it's feasible this next thing could happen." National Missile Defense deployment should, Pollack adds, be looked at under the larger rubric on the -- currently in vogue -- doctrine of "homeland defense," which focuses on protection from ballistic missiles and terrorism, and offers a lot of moneymaking potential to defense contractors. "This is going to be a gravy train," he says.