November 1, 2007: After years
of debate in Congress, the U.S. has agreed to regularly announce the total
amount spent on strategic intelligence. Last year it was $43.5 billion. In past
years, similar figures were released (after litigation) revealing that the
intel budgets in the late 1990s was (adjusted for inflation) about $33 billion.
So the war on terror has increased intelligence spending by about 34 percent.
This only covers the "civilian" intelligence agencies (CIA, NSA and so on).
Military intelligence, primarily DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) and the
individual services, could be costing another ten billion dollars a year.
That's over fifty billion bucks, and is easily about a third of what is spent
on intelligence collecting and analysis worldwide. Most of it is spent on
expensive hardware, particularly space satellites and computer networks. Few
people really know what all this intelligence effort is capable of, because so
much of it is so highly classified. There is believed to be a lot of waste
involved.