Dana Priest and William Arkin’s reporting on Top Secret America in the Washington Post was an important media event. Its various graphs and installments nicely illustrate the sheer magnitude of US intelligence privatization. Mind you, the size and the compartmentalization of the US intelligence community is difficult to grasp and a cause for many problems of its own. Add to that the even more elusive layers of contracting and sub-contracting (an estimated 265’000 contractors have top-secret clearances) and one gets a security state that has grown beyond that what anyone can call reasonable by a long stretch of imagination. (If only McNulty had a fraction of that cash for the fight against drugs in Baltimore…)

Here are a few more thoughts on both the content and the style of the WaPo story.

First off, the sprawling privatization of US intelligence is, of course, hardly news to the engaged reader. The WaPo must be criticized for not even referring to Tim Shorrock, the real authority on this subject. He was the first author to have studied post 9/11 intelligence contracting, and he did it in a much more systematic and problem-centered fashion (albeit with less colorful graphs and less floury language on Washington suburbia). His book, Spies for Hire, is a compelling read that tells us why, where and how the US arrived at a situation where an incredible 70 percent of its enormous intelligence budget ends up in the hands of private companies. One can also find his data set, here. Shorrock obtained an unclassified document from the office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) that corroborates his basic estimate. After his book release, the CIA and the main stream media (MSM) simply ignored Shorrock’s research. The former called his figures ‘way off the mark’ and the latter shunned an awfully gripping story. Why? Surely, it would be too simplistic to associate big advertising companies of MSM, such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman with this. Fact is, though, it took MSM a long time to pick it up. [...]

Interagency cooperation is a fancy word. The goal is legitimate: be more efficient, share information, and optimize human, financial, technical resources. Get more results, especially when war, COIN, or intelligence failures prove how necessary it is to work together. However cooperation is a serious job, not to be undertaken lightly. Indeed competition remains strong between individuals and institutions afraid of losing their influence, usefulness, resources, independence, efficiency, etc. Here are some reasons to be cautious about cooperation and some options to build stronger foundations for collaboration.

1. Cooperation means losing vision. While cooperating, making sense of an action is more difficult because working together means consensus. Consensus requires to give up something, which often means losing the strategic vision in order to make everybody agree with the result. Partners will for example agree on words without checking their exact translations in each other’s languages. Building a common strategic vision is not always necessary (see the different visions of the EU of the UK, France and Germany; or NATO in Afghanistan) but it is always difficult, takes time, resources, and political will.

2. Cooperation may imply loosing expertise. Indeed specific expertise gets lost when institutions are “fused”.. Each bureaucratic culture implies specific savoir-faire which are difficult to preserve, especially as they are not easy to detect and value. In civil-military relations, militaries may be afraid of civilians having the expertise (the power) needed to really lead and control them or on the contrary fear those who are lacking that exact expertise to take the right decisions.

3. Cooperation is a dubious instrument of political control. Cooperation is not an efficient tool to ensure political control over an institution. National policy makers may believe that too strong closeness between institutions could mean that they will lose control of their actions if they cannot exert strong control over them (divide to rule, used to be the French tradition for the police system). At the international level, one may see some alliances of national bureaucracies trying to promote global agreements that will then be imposed on national leaders (the CAD of the OECD can play at times this role, but it is not the only one). Or political leaders may consider that the only way to control institutions is to force them to cooperate (British example). Anyways, both are illusions, since a leader’s capacity to control the bureaucracy will also depend on many other factors.

Furthermore, it’s not only about deciding to cooperate, it’s also about how one goes about cooperating. Options matter. [...]