The Intelligence Sequestration Blues: Rogers, Clapper & Flynn

[unhappycamper]

http://breakingdefense.com/2013/09/13/the-intelligence-sequestration-blues-rogers-clapper-flynn/

The Intelligence Sequestration Blues: Rogers, Clapper & Flynn
By Colin Clark on September 13, 2013 at 7:00 PM

~snip~

Flynn sang a spare and straight line. In his world, “demand is skyrocketing but resources are constrained” and he’s just “making sure we can manage sequestration.”

But Clapper introduced a powerful downbeat. There’s a much bigger problem for the intelligence community as it manages its major acquisition programs like the next-generation spy satellites being built by Lockheed Martin. Traditionally, the National Reconnaissance Office, builder and operator of the nation’s spy satellites, as well as the NSA and its sister agency, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, have relied on 50 percent program reserves. Reserves like that — unthinkable in the traditional world of defense acquisition — allow the IC to pursue enormously complex and technically advanced systems and not stumble, slow and end up costing even more over time when they hit an unanticipated technical challenge or someone screws up.

That money, wailed Clapper (OK, he didn’t wail, but I’m trying to keep the whole “blues thing” going here), may be in peril. ”One year you can do that,” he said, “but after that it gets very problematic. We don’t have any way to manage that problem.” And, as we keep hearing about sequestration, that is the problem. No one can manage well around it because it’s so rigid.

Yeah, those intel sequestration blues, baby!