It's not just the cuts to the Army and Marine Corps' size or the building of new bombers or the purchasing of new drones. Defense Secretary Robert Gates' "efficiencies initiative" squeezed cash out of the bloated intelligence bureaucracy that's grown up around the Pentagon. He just didn't say how much.
A review Gates completed in consultation with James Clapper, his former top Pentagon intelligence official and now the director of national intelligence, targeted the "sprawling" world of defense intelligence. As Dana Priest and William Arkin have found, the intelligence world, much of it housed in the Pentagon-controlled agencies, has ballooned to over 854,000 employees in the post-9/11 era, supplemented by thousands upon thousands of contractors. Unsurprisingly, Gates found unspecified "redundant programs" tracking terrorists and their cash, and announced that he's combining them.
The big winner will be the Defense Intelligence Agency, which will soon house two task forces to provide a "surge " capacity to the military's regional commands when additional intel support is required. In recent years, spy-watchers have lamented the DIA's shrinkage in prestige as the regional commands have bulked up their own intelligence staffs -- something Gates called a "large, permanent organic apparatus staffed on a wartime level." The new idea is for DIA to provide analysts and support staff (including, presumably, some operatives) when the brass calls for it.
We're still learning how the task forces will be constituted and other details and will report them when they're confirmed. But don't expect the shift to be much of a rollback for the intel world. Gates portrayed it as falling within a host of program cuts and consolidations inside the department that add up to $54 billion over five years. The U.S. spent $80 billion in intelligence last year alone.
However modest, though, it's the first declaration from a senior national-security official that the huge spy apparatus built after 9/11 doesn't have to be permanent. That meshes with Gates' trimming of the Army and the Marine Corps: it'll still be (much) larger than in recent years, but Gates is at least challenging the assumption that endless intelligence-sector growth is just the way we live now.
If there are details that await ironing out, Michael Vickers finally looks like he'll be in a position to smooth them over. Vickers has been in bureaucratic limbo for months as the Senate dragged its feet on reviewing his nomination to replace Clapper as Pentagon intelligence chief. Yesterday, President Obama gave word that he finally sent Vickers' nomination to the Senate, a sign that he'll be approved.
Something else to keep an eye on: Gates said to expect a streamlining of the Pentagon's information-technology infrastructure, consolidating "hundreds of data centers" and switching over to what he called "a more secure enterprise system." Next month, he said, he'll announce "a specific plan of action" for securing department-wide data -- the policy effects of WikiLeaks' acquisition of tens of thousands of military reports from Iraq and Afghanistan.
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