Tuesday, January 14, 2014

What The U.S. Intelligence Community Faces In 2014



Intelligence in 2014: Shrinking Budget Cuts, Snowden-Driven ‘Reforms’ -- Colin Clark, Breaking Defense

WASHINGTON: Positing the future of intelligence — even for one year – poses unique challenges. First, there’s so much those of on the outside don’t know. Then there’s the simple truth that our enemies and competitors drive so much of intelligence. Since we can’t know with certainty what will happen, it’s difficult to predict what the intelligence community will react to and thus spend money on.

With all those caveats, our predictions for 2014 are:

* The double digit budget cuts that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper outlined in late 2011 are unlikely to stick. With Iran, Syria, North Korea, Iraq and, of course, China playing such large and uncertain roles in the world, policymakers will be loathe to give up access to information and analysis.

* Smaller and hosted payloads, still the subject of vibrant discussion in the national security space world after almost a decade, are unlikely to gain much traction. Physics are at work here. Small may be beautiful, but it just can’t do what big can.

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My Comment: I concur with this analysis .... for the U.S. intelligence community it will be operations as usual.

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