Case Study on "Outsourcing U.S. Intelligence Assessing"

Case Study 4 pages (1163 words) Sources: 2

[EXCERPT] . . . .

This creates a void between the strict quality standards that are often complaint to Department of Defense (DOD) requirements within U.S. intelligence agencies and the much more agile yet less accountable approaches of government contractors engaging in U.S. intelligence operations. Fourth, and most troubling is how the pervasive practice of outsourcing is gradually leading to expertise edging away from the U.S. intelligence community to outsourcing firms who could easily sell the same e3xpertise to other nations as well.

Privatized Special Operations and Its Implications on U.S. Foreign Policy

At the center of the dilemma regarding the continual outsourcing of U.S. intelligence is the lack of consistency and management of security, controls and access levels to highly confidential data, governance and oversight, and most of all, accountability over how the data is being used. These factors taken together lead to the politicization of intelligence research and show the impact the pervasive practice of outsourcing can potential have on foreign policy. From the U.S. President's Daily Brief which is generated by contractors (Krishnan, 2011) to the reconnaissance reports in Afghanistan, Pakistan and throughout Iraq that influence foreign policy and decision-making in these regions, contractors are primarily driving these data capture efforts. The definition of potential targets and objectives for special operations throughout these regions are also defined by government contractors and all preliminary target definition is completed up to the point of the strategy being implemented. Supporters of this level of support by contractors point to the need for situational awareness on the ground in these nations at a scale simply not attainable by the U.S. agencies whose employees are often given multiple roles to fulfill already (Krishnan, 2011). With special operations missions being advocated across the world's most volatile regions by contractors, clearly there is a need for greater governance than exists today.

The Urgent Need for Greater Outsourcing Accountability, Ethics & Transparency

Given the complexities of how many contractors are participating in the U.S. intelligence community today and the fact that one in four members of the U.S. intelligence network are contractors (Krishnan, 2011) there is an urgent need for context-specific ethical guidelines that are situational in scope. With the need for greater situational awareness in specific regions and not enough intelligence analysts to complete tasks, the intelligence communities' information needs are too vast to manage purely from a static set of guidelines. There needs to be more of a focus on contextual intelligence and the definition of guidelines to ensure overall performance to ethical guidelines. This can be accomplished by engraining ethical standards and guidelines throughout the U.S. intelligence community and auditing performance over time.

The need for these situationally-defined guidelines is critically important and urgently needed in the context of national security, as billions of dollars in spending and the need to account for just what the U.S. intelligence community is getting for their investment hang in the balance. When the National Reconnaissance Office loses $2B in a slush fund for contractors (Krishnan, 2011) the time to take action is now. Clearly greater situational ethics driven by accountability and transparency are needed today.

Bibliography

Bean, H. (2013). Outsourcing U.S. intelligence. In S. May (Ed.), Case studies in organizational communication: Ethical perspectives and practices. (2nd ed., pp. 247-261). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.

Krishnan, A. (2011). The future of U.S. intelligence outsourcing. The Brown Journal of World Affairs, 18(1), 195-211. READ MORE

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