The Spy Gap

Govexec cover story on the looming retention crisis in the intelligence community.

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The intelligence community is divided by a generation gap, one that threatens to undermine its ability to perform its missions, including keeping the country safe from terrorists. The intelligence workforce is out of balance. It can be plotted as two humps on a graph. At the beginning of the experience spectrum are the millennials, green, just learning the ropes, no more than a half-decade of experience under their belts. They make up more than 35 percent of the total intelligence workforce. At the far end is a large number of highly skilled, longtime employees, moving closer to retirement by the day. In between those two humps, where there should be a stockpile of experienced middle managers, the future leaders of the community, there is instead a deep, unsettling valley.

The agencies' top leaders are laboring furiously to fill it. In the nearly six years since Sept. 11, the CIA and other agencies haven't wanted for applicants; there are more people who want jobs than there are billets. But training employees takes years. To fill the gap in the meantime, during wartime, the agencies have hired contractors in record numbers. The agencies have outsourced some of the most sensitive functions, including analysis, spying on foreign adversaries, prisoner interrogation and translation services ...

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Tequila, thanks for the interesting post !

Damn, I'm glad it's Friday :D

What happened with Tom Waters IMO reflects the entire system since 1981. That's where my experiences started, and my regrets subsequently followed.

My 'Tom' said it best (every day for at least a year) regarding their hard core circa 1960's mentality towards 'all things new' when it comes to handling situations (not that they handled anything other than a keyboard).

Our situations resulted in more deaths, total lack of information, and just plain 'dead' information. When they did finally show, they were just a pain in the Alpha.

It seems the system is still broken but now contractually costs even more :mad:

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Over time, employees developed narrower, agency-specific expertise about emerging threats. There was no spirit of collaboration, because the workforce wasn't designed for it. This is the institutional reason so many dots about terrorism remained unconnected before Sept. 11.

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I believe that certain agencies put this in the water and food for their trainees and it only gets worse over time. Note that I said agencies because I see the same tendency inside the military when it comes to what I call the "corporate warriors" who see anything new or innovative as a threat to the the corporation, ego as a threat to them.

I am reading John Nagl's book--I got it when I bought Tenet's 500 page sleeping pill--and it is truly a joy to read. John examines the culture of non-learning in the US military and makes truly applicable comparisons to the Brits. I have long been a fan of reading about Queen Victoria's quirky army and how it adapted to the fight. John even brings up Duffer's Drift as an adaptive learning tool; I used Duffer's Drift as an example of COIN learning in a history lesson in 2003. The point being that the Brits might and often did get it wrong at first. But they adapted and then got it right without some doctrine ghuru turning red-faced because it was not in a manual.

We have had a similar experience; no more TF Smiths was the training battle cry in the 80's and 90's, meaning we would have it right from the beginning. I believe we succeeded in doing that on a conventional battlefield, be it in the rainy forests and plains of Germany or the sands of Kuwait, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. Where I think we went astray is where John Nagl's book is truly useful; we seem to believe that doctrine and training according to that doctrine is the answer to all. That does not work on the unconventional battlefield. Adaptive leadership does.

The same applies to intelligence. Rigidity in thinking applied as "trade craft" just means you are offering a template for everything you do. From there it is a quick slide into a "cover your ass" mentality that seethes the paranoia and backstabbing that Stan and I encountered together. It was so bad that it continued across international borders.

Like Stan said, great post and an interesting read.

Tom

Tequila; great post. Here are some additional notes of interest I pulled from a DIA Discussion Paper by a Major Glenn J Voelz, USA.

The bottom line up front is that the intelligence gaps we have now are really nothing new. Instead, it turns out to be a constant issue that every generation falls short in mitigating. The shortfalls we have in HUMINT, CI, Language, Recon, etc have been part of our history since the founding of this nation...sad, but true.

Although outsourcing has gone out to some that would cause concern, I would venture to say a good portion of those parties partaking in these activities are former govt intel types. There is no doubt that monitoring needs to occur, but the reality of solving these constant gaps will likely continue to go unfilled.


-General George Washington used ~ 10% of his budget to help constitute his intelligence staff during the Revolutionary War. source: http://www.cia.gov/csi/books/940299/art-1.html

-During the Mexican-American War, the "Mexican Spy Company" consisted of personnel hired by the U.S. Govt to fill in HUMINT, CI, Linguistic and Reconnaissance and Surveillance gaps. Brook A. Caruso, The Mexican Spy Company: United Staes Covert Operations in Mexico.1991

-Similar elements were hired in the Civil War to fill the same gaps for the almost all of the same reasons. The Secret War for the Union: The Untold Story of Military Intelligence in the Civil War by Edwin Fishel.

events go on and on til today.


V/r and Cheers, Bob

19 August Washington Post - Defense Agency Proposes Outsourcing More Spying by Walter Pincus.

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The Defense Intelligence Agency is preparing to pay private contractors up to $1 billion to conduct core intelligence tasks of analysis and collection over the next five years, an amount that would set a record in the outsourcing of such functions by the Pentagon's top spying agency.

The proposed contracts, outlined in a recent early notice of the DIA's plans, reflect a continuing expansion of the Defense Department's intelligence-related work and fit a well-established pattern of Bush administration transfers of government work to private contractors...

The DIA did not specify exactly what it wants the contractors to do but said it is seeking teams to fulfill "operational and mission requirements" that include intelligence "Gathering and Collection, Analysis, Utilization, and Strategy and Support." It holds out the possibility that five or more contractors may be hired and promised more details on Aug. 27...

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Nothing too surprising here since the armed forces can't recruit and retain enough intelligence personnel, DIA does the smart thing and asks for more money in hiring those who exit the services plus try to hire those straight out of college who are not interested in military service. I've spent a lot of time around DIA analysts, and the various lot of CIA, NSA, and FBI types. The one thing that makes DIA appealing is the amount of money they're willing to pay versus the other agencies. This doesn't always equate to more quality but it does mean more appeal for those who are looking at either NSA or CIA. I've seen a number of young, smart, and talented people leave NSA and CIA for the money offered at DIA. It comes down to putting food on the table and supporting your family, especially if you live in the Beltway area.

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Originally Posted by Pragmatic Thinker

Nothing too surprising here since the armed forces can't recruit and retain enough intelligence personnel, DIA does the smart thing and asks for more money in hiring those who exit the services plus try to hire those straight out of college who are not interested in military service. I've spent a lot of time around DIA analysts, and the various lot of CIA, NSA, and FBI types. The one thing that makes DIA appealing is the amount of money they're willing to pay versus the other agencies. This doesn't always equate to more quality but it does mean more appeal for those who are looking at either NSA or CIA. I've seen a number of young, smart, and talented people leave NSA and CIA for the money offered at DIA. It comes down to putting food on the table and supporting your family, especially if you live in the Beltway area.

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I must've retired too early with Tom :mad:
Money you say ? In my five tours I've experienced a lifetime of surprises with Clarendon and Bowling, but money was never one of them.

Jokes aside, DIA can and will fair better, her military assests are the best, bar none.

I'd like to follow this through a little further. I have been promised funds to start a "Center" at my University. I was thinking about something along the lines of cyber-warfare but maybe I should take it to electronic intelligence gathering (either is along our core competencies). I wonder if DIA would be interested?

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Originally Posted by Stan

I must've retired too early with Tom :mad:
Money you say ? In my five tours I've experienced a lifetime of surprises with Clarendon and Bowling, but money was never one of them.

Jokes aside, DIA can and will fair better, her military assests are the best, bar none.

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Perhaps I came off a little too optimistic, but my experience tells me a former SSG/E-6 Intelligence Analyst with limited military experience and a high school diploma can walk in the door as a GG-12 maybe even a GG-13, where as I have seen brainiacs with Masters Degrees in Computer Engineering (and similar degrees) be hired on as a mere GG-9 with a certain agency that specializes in that kind of work. The disparity in what they pay for what you bring to the table seems to be in favor of those who hire on with DIA... I have also seen young men and women walk out one for the other to follow the money $$... Of course, the really smart ones take the contract dollars but sacrifice the "security" of Federal Civil Service employment. Then there are those like me who just can't seem to hang-up the uniform and keep on well after 20 for the real "big bucks" :rolleyes:

DIA won an award at the end of the Cold War for down-sizing to fit the new reality.

It retrained a lot of its Cold Warriors into new specialties, etc., and let many more retire. It "right-sized" for peacetime steady-state.

By the time Bosnia rolled around, DIA ops was stretched to the max, and Bosnia, as it turns out, was an easy case.

Well, multiply that by Afghanistan and Iraq, and you get a pretty decent idea of how pressed the organization is.

Now -- figure out the appropriate solution.
COA 1. This is an aberration, so best to contract for the short (even 10+ years) term. Nation can't afford a longterm plus-up.
COA 2. Admit that this is the new reality. Hire permanently a workforce needed to last well into the future. Suck up the permanent costs of training, retirement, health care, etc. Change personnel laws so that civilians can be retained past retirement, sent to combat zones, etc. We are the government. We can cover future costs with future taxation.

The issues cannot be reduced to a sound bite.