Two great pieces on intelligence in the Washington Post over the weekend. RJ Hillhouse is worried that the US’s national security is being outsourced:
Over the past five years (some say almost a decade), there has been a revolution in the intelligence community toward wide-scale outsourcing. Private companies now perform key intelligence-agency functions, to the tune, I’m told, of more than $42 billion a year. Intelligence professionals tell me that more than 50 percent of the National Clandestine Service (NCS) — the heart, brains and soul of the CIA — has been outsourced to private firms such as Abraxas, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon …
As the Los Angeles Times first reported last October, more than half the workforce in two key CIA stations in the fight against terrorism — Baghdad and Islamabad, Pakistan — is made up of industrial contractors, or “green badgers,” in CIA parlance.
Meanwhile, Amy Zegart is furious with America’s “clueless intelligence system”. She argues that books like Bob Woodward’s that discuss the “personal drama” of decisionmaking are beside the point: “The human story is irrelevant. Those who want to learn what went wrong and how to fix it need to understand something far less intriguing: bureaucracy — the organizational weaknesses that cause smart people to make dumb decisions.” She continues:
Public government documents reveal that the CIA and the FBI missed 23 potential opportunities to disrupt the 9/11 attacks. In each case, failure stemmed from the same causes: 1. agency cultures that led officials to resist new ideas, technologies and missions; 2. promotion incentives that rewarded all the wrong things; and 3. structural weaknesses that hampered the CIA and the FBI and prevented all 15 U.S intelligence agencies from working as a unified team.
And here’s the key point. Engrave it in stone and hang it on your wall:
“Meaningful reform will take years, requiring bottom-up cultural transformation as well as top-down policy changes.”
