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Too much?

By Herald Standard Staff 2 min read

Over the past two years, Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin have succeeded in putting together a credible estimate of something that seems to have eluded even the U.S. government – the size, scope, cost and complexity of the national security apparatus that has metastasized post-9/11. Our national security and intelligence system, they write, “has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.”

The sheer size of these programs is breathtaking – 1,271 government agencies and 854,000 people with top-secret clearances. Just to house the ones in the Washington area requires buildings that total the size of three Pentagons, all of them shielded behind massive layers of security. The new $1.8 billion headquarters of the relatively obscure National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency will be the fourth-largest federal building in the capital area.

The annual cost of all this – at least, what the government admits to – is $75 billion, two and half times what was being spent in 2001.And despite reform efforts like creating the office of Director of National Intelligence, no single agency, let alone individual, is charged with coordinating all these agencies.

The result is duplication of effort, thanks to over-compartmentalizing and bureaucratic turf wars and sometimes a lack of clearly defined missions. The security apparatus vacuums up vastly more intelligence than it has the ability to analyze. All of the pieces were there to head off the Christmas Day underwear bomber, but they were buried in a deluge of other intelligence, and it was only after suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s seatmate thwarted the bombing that they came together.

Even what intelligence can be analyzed produces more reports than the decision-makers have time to read. Clearly, this great apparatus cries out for rationalization, efficiency and clear-cut lines of authority, but the inevitable intelligence reformers may find themselves confounded by the old Madison Avenue maxim: 50 percent of your advertising dollar is wasted; problem is, no one can tell you which half.

Scripps Howard News Service

Is national security apparatus too big?

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