The head of the Defense Department’s intelligence efforts said Wednesday the Defense Intelligence Agency could eliminate whole programs as budgets tighten.
“We’re going to be looking at every single thing that we do, especially in the times of fiscal austerity that we face,” DIA director Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn told an audience at the GEOINT 2012 conference in Orlando, Fla. “We are going to have to make decisions, we’re going to eliminate whole programs, potentially.”
Flynn said in response to a question as how he’d improve speed and effectiveness of DoD’s information technology (IT) acquisition ecosystem, he’d look at every single program.
Flynn said he’s very involved with the business side of DIA, which he described as people, finances and acquisition. Early in his speech on a briefing slide, Flynn laid out DIA priorities: Being a defense clandestine service; reshaping defense analysis and recruiting and recruiting, retention and professional development.
“Those priorities are meant to drive decisions about investment,” Flynn said. “If I look at an investment and the return on investment isn’t what we believed we needed, or what we need to achieve some mission or some outcome, then we will stop investing.”
As part of an IT overhaul, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper said Tuesday DIA is partnering with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) to develop the common desktop service for an intelligence community-wide cloud computing and storage architecture called Intelligence Community Information Technology Enterprise (ICITE). Clapper said the CIA and NSA are leading the cloud development portion of the effort (Defense Daily, Oct. 11).