Intelligence_ From Secrets to Policy - Mark M. Lowenthal [187]
This interregnum lasted for a decade, ending decisively with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. (As discussed later, there had already been a series of terrorist attacks, beginning with the first attack on the World Trade Center in New York in February 1993.) During this intervening decade the intelligence community’s responsibilities neither changed nor receded, but the leadership of the community found it more difficult to focus or to prioritize. They also received little help from the Clinton administration, which did not get actively involved in setting intelligence priorities other than one time in the middle of its eight years in office. The priority tier system introduced in the mid-1990s showed some initial promise but broke down as the priorities were never updated and revised and as policy makers and intelligence officers figured out how to manipulate the system to claim higher priorities for their favored issues.
The post-cold war interregnum created several strains for the intelligence community. The main one was budgetary. On a percentage basis, the intelligence community, rather than the much larger defense budget, bore the brunt of calls for a peace dividend. This had costs not only in real terms but also as an impediment to making a transition away from a cold war-based work force, work force skills, and the unexpected advent of the computer revolution. For example, some agencies found themselves with too many Soviet experts or Russian speakers, many of whom were rather senior. Was it worthwhile to invest in retraining them, knowing that their ongoing service would be short? It might seem wiser to let them go and invest in younger people with new skills and longer career prospects. But the more senior staff could not be fired and many did not want to retire, thus creating a situation where there was insufficient funding for new slots to bring on new people. DCI George Tenet has stated that during the 1990s the intelligence community lost the equivalent of 23,000 positions—meaning either people never hired or positions actually lost.
The cost of this was twofold. First, there was a draining away of veteran talent and a resultant smaller workforce to handle a more complex and diverse set of policy issues. Second, as the intelligence workforce began to increase dramatically after 2001, it meant that the number of experienced analysts dropped steadily as a percentage of the workforce, until by 2008 more than one third of the analysts had no more than three years of experience.
Therefore, in the first decade of the twenty-first century we find an intelligence community that is in the midst of a period of rebuilding, with a workforce that is perhaps less experienced than at any time in its history, and facing a series of issues that are much more difficult, more interconnected, and among which there is no clear priority.
INTELLIGENCE AND THE NEW PRIORITIES
An examination of several issues that have risen in priority in the post-cold war period reveals some of the difficulties that the intelligence community faces. A major problem is the fact that many of these issues are closely related to one another. Terrorism, for example. has a direct connection to weapons of mass destruction (WMD) as it is widely assumed that terrorist groups would like to have access to these weapons. Terrorism is also related to narcotics, which serves to fund many terrorist activities, as do some other international criminal transactions. For example, the Taliban, which suppressed