Spy for Hire?

The La Times today has an article on how the US intelligence operations are now largely dependent upon private contractors. Not just for operational support, or technology, but intelligence gathering. It would appear that it has gotten to the point where the agencies can't even control the situation.

The proliferation of contractors has outstripped the intelligence community's ability to keep track of them.

Former intelligence officials said most U.S. spy agencies did not have even approximate counts of the numbers of contractors they were employing — although several officials said the number at the CIA had nearly doubled in the last five years and now surpassed the full-time workforce of about 17,500.

"So What" you say?

"We have to come to some conclusion about what our core intelligence mission is and how many [full-time employees] it's going to take to accomplish that mission," Sanders said, adding that the growth in contracting over the last five years had been driven by necessity and was extremely haphazard.

"I wish I could tell you it's by design," he said. "But I think it's been by default."

Senior U.S. intelligence officials said that the reliance on contractors was so deep that agencies couldn't function without them.
"If you took away the contractor support, they'd have to put yellow tape around the building and close it down," said a former senior CIA official who was responsible for overseeing contracts before leaving the agency earlier this year.

Do we really want to create an environment where its pay for play on national security? If the administration is doing everything it can to make the nation more secure, then why has it allowed the intelligence agencies to wither on the vine to the point that they need this much outside help?