US intelligence spending – value for money?
America’s spy agencies are spending more money on obtaining intelligence than the rest of the world put together. Considerably more. To what extent they are providing value for money is an open question.
“Sometimes we are getting our money’s worth,” says John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington think tank. “Sometimes I think it would be better to truck the money we spend to a large parking lot and set fire to it.”
The biggest post-Cold War miss of the sprawling intelligence community was its failure to connect the dots of separate warnings about the impending attack on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. It also laid bare a persistent flaw in a system swamped by a tsunami of data collected through high-tech electronic means: not enough linguists to analyse information.
That problem was thrown into sharp focus by the government’s disclosure, long after September 11, that it had a 123,000-hour backlog of pre-attack taped message traffic in Middle Eastern languages, clear evidence of a system drowning in its own information.
The overall amount of money spent on the collection and analysis of intelligence as well as on covert actions and counter-intelligence by civilian agencies and the military was long shrouded in secrecy. It was disclosed last September by Dennis Blair, then President Barack Obama’s director of national intelligence: $75 billion a year.
No other country comes even close and no other country has as many people working in the intelligence industry — at least 200,000, counting private contractors. Russia and China lag behind.
“Nobody is quite as ambitious as the United States because nobody is trying to project global power as much as the U.S.,” said Steven Aftergood, an expert on intelligence spending who heads the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy.
In terms of terrorist threats I think it is fair to say that intelligence is our only front line hope to success, it is quite clear from Afghanistan, Hamas, Yemen, Pakistan, etc. that armed confrontations cannot remove these threats. Really we are better off spending the money we do on intelligence than on the regular military.
As far as whether or not the money spent yields the results it should we must recognize a couple things, first the difficulty of dealing with the sheer amount of information our services need to deal with, and secondly how daunting it is to really reform entrenched bureaucratic interests. The first issue makes it clear how important the second issue is. By creating the Department of Homeland Security we had hoped to solve a lot of the problems we have in duplication of efforts and sharing of information between departments. It is clear that effort at reform fell short and that we need to revisit that.
It isn’t the money we spend, it is what we get in return for it.