Is The Intelligence Community Out of Control?

Is there anything new here? Contractors have been a major component of our national security mix since the Clinton administration, when Vice President Al Gore started to reinvent government. Since bureaucracies always bear fruit if you fertilize them, it was inevitable that the Sept. 11 shock and the American reflex to throw money at problems would cause an explosion in the growth of the intelligence bureaucracies and their contractors.

Americans, of course, have a penchant for “bigger is better,” and that's just as true of the intelligence community. When the 1947 National Security Act created the Central Intelligence Agency, the organization's theme song became “bigger than State by '48.” Long ago the intelligence community lost control of the classification process — the routine “secret” classification would be better labeled “toss.” Bang-vs.-buck calculations in the intelligence community have been surreal for years.

But money really isn't the issue; even in the age of Barack Obama we can afford billions for satellites, electronic eavesdropping and contracted security firms that often do much better work than their government counterparts. The principal problem is learning how to discriminate between the good, the bad and the hopelessly mediocre. That means avoiding the pernicious bureaucratic rule: First-class people choose first class, second choose third, and down we go. That's difficult in open bureaucracies; it's a nightmare in really big, closed ones.