The Dreyfuss Report
Guest Blog: The Insanity of U.S. Intelligence Expansion
The following letter to the editor appeared in the Washington Post, and it says it all about the obscenely bloated U.S. intelligence community and its expansion to combat Al Qaeda:
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Robert Dreyfuss
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"I retired as a senior intelligence officer from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in 1995 (when, incidentally, Gen. James R. Clapper Jr. was the agency's director). Since then, I have not kept up very much with intelligence community issues or programs. Thus I was truly shocked to read of the out-of-control sprawl described in Dana Priest and William Arkin's series, Top Secret America.
"This was not the intelligence community that I remember, which during my career was focused on the Cold War. While no model of efficiency or coordination, the community seemed to handle Cold War problems without anything like the sprawl and redundancy that the articles described. During my career, the DIA workforce, in particular, varied from 4,000 to 5,000 people. You can imagine my consternation when I read that the agency had ballooned to 16,500 people. That figure is virtually beyond the realm of imagination.
"It is hard to imagine why the struggle against al-Qaeda requires three times as many people in one major intelligence agency as were engaged against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It seems to me that Republicans and Democrats have a shared interest in bringing this monster under control, particularly when the issue of soaring government deficits is on so many people's minds."
William K. Schultz, Silver Spring
My own comments on the Post series appeared in this blog on Monday, under the headline: "Huge Fly Swatter, No Flies."
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Comments
It doesn't matter how bloated the intelligence community is, so far a couple of bad guys have prove how inefficient they are. It seems like a bunch al-Qs are wining the war on "terror".
Well William K Schultz, perhaps it's because you fail to consider the myriad Al Qaeda like organization and splinter cells which likely number in the hundreds of thousands of followers if not more.
And they are global. They are here in the US, in Europe, the Philippines, Pakistan, and surrounding countries, Iran who is the largest sponsor of terrorism, South East Asia in general including Indonesia, Africa, and of course most of the Middle East.
That is a daunting task for our intelligence organizations and those of other nations. Wake up and learn something-the world has changed since you retired.
