Managing the Private Spies - Use of Commercial Augmentation for Intelligence Operations

The end of the Cold War presented a paradoxical dilemma for the Intelligence Community (IC). The demise of the Soviet Union brought about a significant downsizing of the nation's intelligence apparatus while concurrently necessitating a major reallocation of intelligence resources to cover a more complex array of trans-national threats such as counter-proliferation, terrorism, organized crime, drug trafficking, and ethnopolitical conflict. The combination of shrinking budgets and expanding analytical requirements placed enormous demands on the Community. Among the most pressing challenges was the need for an on-demand, surged intelligence capability for coverage over a diverse range of operational requirements. A key recommendation of a 1996 House Permanent Select Committee investigation of the nation's intelligence capabilities called for the creation of a dynamic surge capacity for crisis response. The Committee concluded that such resources "need not be self-contained within the IC," but must be quickly marshaled "without undue concerns about who owns the assets." Several other independent reform studies at the time proposed initiatives to satisfy surged collection demands by leveraging nongovernmental resources. Despite these recommendations, during the 1990s there was little effort to create such a surge capacity. Bureaucratic inertia and lack of clear consensus on an intelligence reform agenda made major initiatives impossible. With the enormous intelligence demands of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) the issue of surge capacity has reemerged as a critical issue for community leaders. Collection management, remote sensing, linguistic support, document exploitation, interrogation, and technical analysis are just some intelligence support functions currently being performed by private contractors. This ad hoc response to meet the intelligence requirements of GWOT operations has produced mixed results. One report strongly recommended the permanent integration of commercial imagery products into the conventional collection management cycle for operational commanders. Conversely, a key fi nding of the Army Inspector General's report on OIF detainee operations in Iraq clearly identifi ed poor training and misuse of contract interrogators as a contributing factor in detainee abuse. These examples speak to both the promise and the liability of utilizing commercial augmentation for intelligence surge capacity. Given the current mismatch between operational requirements and intelligence force structure, there will be continuing reliance on commercial augmentation. As critical intelligence requirements are increasingly resourced through commercial augmentation, IC leaders must determine the appropriate roles for private sector firms and provide effective plans for legal oversight, operational integration, and management of contracted support. To date, few studies have adequately considered the policy implications of integrating non-governmental providers into the operational intelligence cycle. GWOT operations have required significant reliance on private sector resources for intelligence collection and analysis but have done so without sufficient measures for effective acquisition, management and accountability over commercial providers. This study assesses the value of current commercial activities used within DoD elements of the Intelligence Community, particularly dealing with operational functions such as analysis, collection management, document exploitation, interrogation, production, and linguistic support. These functions were selected due to the extensive use of commercial augmentation in these areas during recent GWOT operations.