Is It Intelligent To Outsource Intelligence?

Author：Richard A. Clarke Source：none Hits：32 UpdateTime：2008-7-10 22:43:25


Another reality in the post-9/11 growth of intelligence analysis capability is outsourcing. We have outsourced the management of billlion-dollar technical collection programs, and we have contracted intelligence analysts.

The National Reconnaissance Office is a lot more than an office; may have the largest budget of all the U.S. intelligence agencies. It may also be the best example of how U.S. government contractors, i.e., private industry, are taking over the government and costing us needless billions of dollars. The NRO buys spy satellites. Over the course of the last ten years, much of its government employee expertise has largely been eliminated by swapping career experts out for military personnel rotated in for a few years. Instead of having an Air Force officer who worked on satellites for ten or fifteen years making decisions, the NRO began bringing in officers on two- and three-year assignments. Someone who was procuring tires last year would be procuring satellite component systems this year. The result was that the big aerospace contractors gained greater influence in the decision making, not only because they were the only ones left with expertise, but also because the NRO decided to transfer much of its own program management responsibility to a single, big contractor.

Simultaneously with handing off management responsibility to the contractor, in the late 1990s and the first five years of this decade, the NRO and the aerospace industry were planning to spend scores of billions of dollars on a new generation of spy satellites with even more marvelous capabilities. The winning contractor was Boeing, which set about to build billions of dollars' worth of new spy satellites with incremental capabilities under the project named Future Imagery Architecture, or FlA. The costs escalated, the delivery dates slipped by years, but the NRO kept going. Eventually, presented with ever bigger bills and ever later schedules, the NRO canceled FIA under congressional pressure. Billions of dollars had been wasted.38

These costly new spacecraft were to be built not so much because we needed to use their capabilities, but rather because if we spent the money, we would keep the industrial base alive by ordering newer and better satellites. It became a perpetual motion machine: constantly building slightly more capable satellites at ever-increasing cost, spending more on research to develop more capabilities, even though those capabilities did not address important intelligence collection needs. I was part of that cycle thirty years ago when, during my one year as an employee at a defense contractor, I was told by the NRO that it had developed a new capability that could lead to a new satellite. My job, at the NRO's request, was to come up with some problem on which we could use the new technology. In other words, I was to figure out the need that the new satellite would meet, the requirement. This same backwards process (first developing the technology and then figuring out why we need it) has been going on for decades.