America’s spy agencies are spending more money on obtaining intelligence than the rest of the world put together. Considerably more. To what extent they are providing value for money is an open question.

“Sometimes we are getting our money’s worth,” says John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington think tank. “Sometimes I think it would be better to truck the money we spend to a large parking lot and set fire to it.”

The biggest post-Cold War miss of the sprawling intelligence community was its failure to connect the dots of separate warnings about the impending attack on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. It also laid bare a persistent flaw in a system swamped by a tsunami of data collected through high-tech electronic means: not enough linguists to analyse information.

The overall amount of money spent on the collection and analysis of intelligence as well as on covert actions and counter-intelligence by civilian agencies and the military was long shrouded in secrecy. It was disclosed last September by Dennis Blair, then President Barack Obama’s director of national intelligence: $75 billion a year.

No other country comes even close and no other country has as many people working in the intelligence industry — at least 200,000, counting private contractors. Russia and China lag behind.

Put into context: The United States, with around five percent of the world’s population and 23 percent of its economic output accounts for almost two thirds of global spending on intelligence. This is more than at the height of the Cold War, when annual spending, a closely held secret at the time, was estimated at around $15 billion a year in today’s dollars.

Should one expect improved performance as a consequence of more money? In an analysis of the reform five years after it was enacted, the Congressional Research Service, the research arm of Congress, cautioned against high expectations: “It should be remembered that intelligence analysis is an intellectual exercise; it is not possible to increase budgets by 50 percent and receive 50 percent better analysis in the next fiscal year.”

Source: Reuters
I personally think the intelligence and military spending in the US is too high indeed; that something needs to be done. Some may say that it'd be jeopardizing national security, the future, and so on; but then again— those same neo-cons tend to reverse their position on budget reform when it comes to other big portions, like Medicare/Medicaid, social security, or education.

Reform, accountability, and a more market-based approach where success is rewarded and fall-throughs are punished; the system now says that mistakes are a sign that more funding is needed and the successes warrant even more money.

Thoughts?