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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.
After you can see really small objects, after you have a synthetic aperture radar satellite that can take pictures at night, after you can pick up any signal released in the radio spectrum, what more do you really need? When most of the world's communication is moving from electrons passing through the air to photons in fiber-optic cables, when commercial imaging satellites allow private companies to sell reconnaissance imagery, should we perhaps consider spending less on satellites, rather than more? Maybe what we do need is more numerous, less expensive spy satellites, capable of being quickly launched in a crisis to augment existing satellites or to replace satellites that may fail or be destroyed. Although the nation's spy satellite agency is not planning to do that, another part of the Defense Department is. In addition to the costly satellites of NRO, the Air Force is planning to build the cheaper, more quickly launched birds as part of an additional program.
We do need to maintain an industrial base with the expertise to innovate intelligence platforms in space, but what we have done is destroy career government expertise and hand the keys to an agency over to giant contractors. These companies have so much congressional influence that feeding the beast becomes the requirement, rather than collecting intelligence we need at a reasonable cost, so that available funds can also be spent on other needs.
In the area of analysis, the number of contractors also grew. Not satisfied with doubling the number of analysts at the CIA, the intelligence community wanted access to even more staff. The intelligence community turned to the private sector, or at least privately owned companies. Many of the companies involved, such as Lockheed Martin, earn almost all of their money by selling to governments. Others, such as Booz Allen Hamilton, also have a commercial line of business. The companies are consultancies, weapons manufacturers, software developers, and IT support firms. What they now have in common is that they have established intelligence analysis staffs that are on contract to support various intelligence agencies.
A drive around northern Virginia reveals the many newly constructed high-rises in which private companies employ intelligence analysts to do the work that was formerly done only by government employees. Inside the buildings, in highly secured suites, analysts with top secret clearances write intelligence analyses for the CIA, DIA, and other agencies. Often the analyses are only slightly edited by government employees before being sent off to policy makers. A former government official told me that the initial draft of one National Intelligence Estimate was reportedly written by an analyst who was not a government employee; it was allegedly revised only slightly by the government. When an analysis is done by a contractor, the corporate logo is usually replaced by CIA letterhead and the policy maker is often unaware that the CIA did not really produce the analysis; a for-profit corporation did.
The private intelligence officers are not just in the corporate high-rises. Many work "on site," meaning they go to the intelligence agencies and work alongside government counterparts doing similar work. As Sebastian Abbot, a former student of mine at Harvard and now with the Associated Press, reported, "That has led to a phenomenon known as 'butss in seats' -- contractors literally sit beside their public sector counterparts and perform equivalent tasks. According to [former CIA official John] Gannon, 'Butts in seats within the analytic community . . . is really a post-9/11 phenomenon, for the most part.' John Brennan, former acting Director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) and currently President and CEO of TAC, says more than half of the 200 analysts at the NCTC were from the private sector while he was there . . . the vast majority of Booz Allen's intelligence work is not classic management consulting, but simply providing. 'butts in seats' to the intelligence community."39
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