How do you spend $40 billion dollars on "intelligence"?

[kentuck]

Of course, it's taxpayer dollars. But, doesn't that just off the top seem like an awful lot of money? I see where the House just passed an Intelligence Bill for $40 billion. What else could $40 billion buy?

I understand there are satelites, spies, and people that have to be bought and paid for, but it seems like an almost incredible amount. We must really be a bunch of dumbasses to permit such a robbery of our taxpayer dollars? We really have no concept. They could say they were spending $80 billion per year on "intelligence"? Or they could say they were going to spend $900 million dollars? The Congress or the people have no concept of what their money is being spent upon. But, you might say, we are in a war on terrorism. We need all that money?

[politicaholic]

1. I think you're confused by what they mean by intelligence...

you see, they're building a massive organic brain the size of the dome on the White House and connecting Karl Rove to it. Then he will read the minds of all of the American population and thusly know how to manipulate us all.

It takes a lot of money to do that sort of thing.

:tinfoilhat:

[punpirate]

2. A fairly large amount of that money...

... goes to the NSA, and the NSA has some exceptionally expensive programs--for example, I believe Ft. Meade now has its own low-volume specialty chip manufacturing facility--because they don't trust anyone else to do it for them. Some of that money pays for the equipment in hundreds of listening posts around the world, and spy ships, etc.

Knowing what the rest of the world's governments, militaries and businesses are doing is expensive these days....

[kentuck]

3. 40,000 millions of dollars?

That's a lot of spyships!

[punpirate]

4. It's a lot of contractors, contracts which...

... don't get much oversight because they're all in the black world. But, the money adds up. I read that when SR-71 Blackbirds were still flying (one or two might still be), each mission cost, on average, $4 million. There's speculation that the SR-71's replacement is much more expensive, and is powered by liquid methane--that means everything from special facilities at all its locations to a fleet of specially-modified tankers.

Because of changes in rules, some of the intelligence budgets have been devoted to privatization, so career analysts and agents have been lured out of the CIA, for example, only to return to their exact same jobs at twice the salary--and then one gets to add the company's profits to that. I've read that there's so much money available for this that headhunters wait in the CIA parking lot to recruit people.

I would guess that part of the increases in the budget is due to black-world paramilitary teams who are out in the world raising hell at a greatly increased level. Some of it may be due to a new round of so-called low-cost spy satellites (Boeing won a contract for this a couple of years ago), although I'm not sure where those are showing up in the budget. If it's in the NRO, that might be in the DoD budget somewhere. There's new technology that was never in the budget until recent years, such as pilotless surveillance aircraft (of several different types), and I would guess the cost of those is exorbitant.

And there are probably many, many things none of us know about, and won't for decades.

Cheers.