TWS: Privatize the CIA -- Our intelligence community could use more -competition.

The Weekly Standard ^ | 02/05/2007 | Michael Rubin

[B4Ranch]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1784130/posts

[TheKidster]

Private corps. already produce all of our weapons systems and defense systems, Naval assets, aircraft. They already run the IT backbone of many of our bases, CENTCOM and the FAA so why not intelligence analysis?

[OESY]

I think aspects of our intelligence services could be outsourced or privately supplemented to improve their quality and provide alternative perspectives. (I also believe we should get over our opposition to using mercenaries in fighting our battles. In the past Gurkhas and Ethiopians have performed with great courage.)

However, our intelligence effort must remain under Executive Branch command with oversight by Congress. Unfortunately, this prescription does not deal effectively with what is wrong with our intelligence, as highlighted by Rubin's essay, and the many attempts to fix it--from combining all intelligence functions under an NID or prohibiting certain relationships (courtesy of Sens. Church and Torricelli)--have had crippling dysfunctional results. My conclusion is that we should favor maximum flexibility to adapt to challenges.

[Popocatapetl]

For serious, concrete steps to clean up our intelligence agencies, one of the first things I would do would be to ban new hires from the Ivy League schools, then re-evaluate the existing middle management with Ivy League degrees.

This in a way is parallel to what the Pentagon did years ago by elevating ROTC over the service academies as a way to get most of their officers. It was based in the realization that the academies were producing cookie-cutter officers devoid of initiative or creativity. In 30 years, the quality and quantity of ROTC officers was so great in comparison to academy graduates, that the smarter ring wearers hid their rings, as they would be discriminated against otherwise.

That is, if you are an academy graduate, especially in the army, today you must doubly prove yourself to be a good officer to be accepted by both your superiors, peers and subordinates, unlike ROTC graduates.

By recruiting from the "red States", our intelligence agencies would finally evolve beyond the "honorable schoolboy" headache, and get new blood not connected to "legacy intelligence" and the "don't make waves" school of policy. The last thing we need are analysts being told what conclusions they will reach before they see the data.