By Michael Tanji
July 21, 2010 | * 8:00 am
Courtesy Of "Wired's Danger Room"
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) Promo
Despite what might you may read in the Washington Post this week, it ain’t exactly breaking news that contractors are performing more and more of America’s intelligence work. What’s interesting is how this came to be — and what to do about it.
As the first installment of the series points out, there’s also a lot of redundancy in the system. But that’s not due to a flood of post-9/11 money, at least not directly. The root cause of redundancy is parochialism. You find me the agency in the U.S. intelligence community that is entirely unique and duplicates the work of no one else: I’ll be over here holding my breath. Consider:
* The whole point of creating the Defense Intelligence Agency was to take certain responsibilities out of the hands of armed services’ intelligence activities, which would assess foreign military intelligence problems in a way that would guarantee them resources and authorities. Of course they didn’t simply stop doing what they were doing, they gave their work a new name, alleged some level of uniqueness that a big-bad national-level agency couldn’t do properly, and kept doing what they always did.
* Speaking of DIA, it is supposed to be the nation’s premiere source of military intelligence; so then why are there people at CIA doing the same thing? Why are there offices at National Security Administration trying to perform “fusion analysis,” which is simply bureaucracy-code for “all source” analysis, which is what CIA and DIA do?
Former Director of National Intelligence Blair (as interviewed by the Post) doesn’t call this sort of nonsense “redundancy,” he calls it “tailoring.” That’s another bit of bureaucratic code often used to protect bureaucratic fiefdoms. As Dana Priest of the Post effectively points out, the people who need intelligence the most don’t have a redundancy problem: they have a volume and value problem. This has always been an issue to some extent, but the problem was exacerbated post-Iraqi Freedom when repackaging the work of others became the norm since it made you look busy but minimized the risk that you would do something foolish like, say, think that country X had weapons of mass destruction, or country Y was going to test a nuclear weapon. Far better to do the minimum and get caught by surprise and then argue for more resources, than to actually go out on a limb to try to do a better job. So easy to dismiss shortcomings when you trump card is “we can’t talk about our successes.”
The blame for this situation cannot be placed solely on the shoulders of intelligence management: they are simply working the system they’ve been given as effectively as they can. Congress — which won’t pass a real intelligence authorization bill, won’t stand firm on Government Accountability Office involvement in oversight affairs, and will use intelligence as a political football when it’s convenient — may be the real evil mastermind here. You see, contracting companies can do a lot of things federal agencies and their heads cannot; lobby lawmakers (MZM-Foggo-Wilkes-Cunningham style, not simply schmoozing in Hill hearing rooms), fund and operate PACs, build facilities and hire legions of people in strategic legislative districts. I know, I know, you’re shocked, shocked to find gambling going on here . . .
Off the top of my head there are a couple of things that could be done to stop the madness:
* Extend and strengthen revolving-door policies so that intelligence executives cannot simply retire on a Friday and be back lobbying their old offices for work the next Monday. A year isn’t nearly long enough to negatively impact this common practice. Besides, if you were all that and a bag of chips, wouldn’t you have had better luck improving things when you had budget and signature authority? We shouldn’t expect change if we just keep recycling the same old people and their same old thinking.
* While we’re on the topic of contractors, make sure they’re used for the right reasons. The IC should be using contractors for research and development, for deep expertise, for niche skills, to support efforts to solve the hardest problems; not as a way to get around size limitations or hiring freezes. If you really need that many employees, you should be fighting for that many employees. Use intelligence-as-football to your advantage.
* Stop deluding yourselves with bureaucratic reindeer games. Most “intentional redundancy” exists because people are afraid to say “no” to clearly wasteful practices and “yes” to a 90% solution to their problem because it wasn’t invented here. Competitive analysis is only an argument if you believe that analysts don’t care about the work and are simply mouthpieces for their agencies. This actually leads us down a path to a reform strategy of narrowing down agency expertise to realize efficiencies and reduce redundancy, which will have to wait for another time.
* Stop pretending having a policy means practices have changed. There are indeed policies that address most if not all of the issues this series will bring up, but if they’re not acted upon at the functional level, what is the point? No one ever got in trouble toeing the agency-line in the face of someone else’s policy. In fact, such behavior is more likely to result in promotion and other rewards. And we wonder why great ideas, bright minds and fresh blood flee so quickly.
* Stop doing things simply for the sake of doing them. The Post points out that there are dozens of military and intelligence organizations performing terrorism follow-the-money analysis. Why? Only a handful of those organizations can actually do something about that particular problem; everyone else is tracking it because it is tangentially helpful to their primary missions, or it’s just something you are expected to do if you have a counterterrorism shop. If you don’t need to do it: stop. If it’s a tertiary concern and someone does it better than you do, work out a deal and use their information so you can repurpose your people to work on something that matters to you.
* Measure intelligence program success with new metrics. It shouldn’t be about the size of the budget or office head-count. How many new consumers of your work did you pick up in the last year? How large and active is your intel-social network? How substantive is your sharing and positive is your feedback from the field? How did you enhance collection or analysis without requiring an infusion of cash? What efficiencies did you realize? These are all indicative of strong, forward-thinking, smart-risk-taking intelligence management that is looking out for intel consumers.
* If you’re a citizen who cares about these issues, read the entire series and act accordingly. That means reaching out to your elected representatives – especially if they’re in intel or defense committees or represent districts or states with an intel-industrial presence – and sounding off. The biggest service the Post provides is making these issues accessible to those who don’t have the requisite backgrounds to opine intelligently. Intelligence isn’t free. That money comes from somewhere. That’s money that – if being spent wastefully – could go to fund something else like healthcare or improved critical infrastructure or – just sayin’ – could not be appropriated in the first place and simply left in your pocket.
The idea that this is going to be the spark that lights a fire under the back-sides of intelligence agencies or what passes for intelligence oversight entities, is fanciful. These are not new or misunderstood issues: everyone knows exactly what everyone else is doing. None of this is a problem until Congress wants to make it a problem. As long as there are incentives to maintain the status quo, or at least slow-roll changes, don’t think this report is going to have any impact on the business of intelligence.
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