Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and its Primary Contractors

The Defense Intelligence Agency was organized in 1961 to create a unified voice for the intelligence branches within the armed forces, and is the nation’s primary producer of foreign military intelligence. The DIA has a budget of about $1 billion and employs more than 11,000 military and civilian personnel, many of whom work overseas as defense attachés at US embassies. Its current director, Army Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, previously served as director of management of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Historically, the DIA director has answered directly to the military brass and then to the secretary of defense.

The DIA describes its primary mission as providing “timely, objective, all-source military intelligence to policy makers, war fighters, and force planners to meet a variety of challenges across the spectrum of conflict.” One of its most significant assignments is to provide centralized management for all national and defense activities related to MASINT, or measures and signatures intelligence – the “sniffing” by sensors that measures, detects, identifies, and tracks what the DIA calls “unique characteristics of fixed and dynamic targets.” MASINT and its related disciplines is one of the most highly classified projects within the intelligence community. It is “particularly important for detecting ballistic missiles, directed energy weapons, and weapons of mass destruction,” Maples told a defense publication in 2006. “We’ve got to have the right kinds of signature databases that we can compare against, and the right kinds of collection capabilities to look into those three areas.”

The DIA’s requirements for information technology and skilled analysts have made the agency a major employer of contractors. According to DIA officials who spoke to a May 2007 Defense Intelligence Acquisition Conference in Colorado, DIA contractors are filling a “workforce gap” that exists at DIA and most of the other agencies. During the 1990s, as intelligence budgets contracted, hundreds of career DIA officers retired and left the intelligence community. When the DIA began hiring new people after 9/11, the veteran officers who should have been around to train and mentor them were gone. But because it takes five to seven years to train a new officer, there was a “generational hole” that could only be filled by former intelligence officers with security clearances; and most of them were working in the private sector. Contractors were the only solution, officials said, to carry the agency through. “Although we continuously review our mix of government and contractor personnel to ensure we have the right resources to accomplish our missions, contractors are an integral part of our DIA team,” DIA Director Maples, told the Washington Post in an August 2007 letter to the editor.

Previous DIA contracting: BPAs

The DIA’s latest “Solutions for Intelligence Analysis” (SIA) contract is the successor to a series of Blanket Purchase Agreements (BPAs) through which the DIA has historically done most of its contracting.

A blanket purchase agreement is a simplified acquisition method that allows government agencies to fill anticipated repetitive needs for analytical services and other supplies. According to FedMarket.com, an Internet site for government contractors, “BPAs are like ‘charge accounts’ set up with trusted suppliers. Both agencies and vendors like BPAs because they help trim the red tape associated with repetitive purchasing. Once set up, repeat purchases are easy for both sides.”

Under the BPA system that it established in 2003, DIA selected seven teams of vendors to compete against each other for outsourced work with the agency. Each agreement was worth about $300 million to the individual vendor teams, which were led by BAE Systems North America; Booz Allen Hamilton; Computer Sciences Corporation; Lockheed Martin; Northrop Grumman; SRA International; and Titan Corporation, now a subsidiary of L-3 Communications Inc. Contrary to Maples’ assertion to the Post, the agreements do incorporate analysis: A 2005 DIA report says the BPAs “provide the full spectrum of Information Technology (IT) planning, design, implementation, Intelligence Analysis support services.” A similar system of BPAs was established by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) after Michael McConnell was sworn in as DNI in February 2007.

The DIA’s blanket purchase agreements are known collectively as DIESCON 3, and are also open for bidding to other agencies in the intelligence community. (If the NSA is looking for IT expertise in a certain area, for example, it can ask for bids from the DIA’s bidding consortiums.) Each team in the DIESCON 3 system has a specific focus.

The Booz Allen team, for example, includes 10,000 analysts with top secret, sensitive, compartmentalized information (TS/SCI) security clearances, and its consortium includes Accenture, a major outsourcing consultant to government agencies and private corporations, as well as Attensity Inc., a data analysis company initially funded by In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm. The Booz Allen team works closely on issues related to MASINT for the DIA; another important line of work, according to the Booz Allen BPA website, is data mining and link analysis for the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI.

BAE Systems, which captured 41 orders worth $105 million during the first year of its agreement with the DIA, leads an industry team that specializes in analyzing enemy military forces, providing mapping and 3-D imagery to Pentagon intelligence teams, and preparing finished intelligence on paramilitary forces and insurgent and terrorist organizations operating in Iraq and other countries of interest. BAE’s BPA team includes SAIC, Booz Allen, Intellibridge Corporation, General Dynamics, Advanced Concepts Inc., SpecTal, and 41 other companies (the last two were acquired in 2007 by L-1 Identity solutions, the intelligence conglomerate where George Tenet is a director).

The Lockheed Martin BPA team claims to have the largest cleared workforce in the nation and, according to its DIESCON 3 website, provides “exceptional depth to respond to both surge requirements and planned customers tasks.” Its forte seems to be providing large, agency-wide IT systems for the DIA and other agencies. The team includes three of the top U.S. IT firms, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems, as well as the consulting firm BearingPoint, which helped plan the U.S. occupation of Iraq for the Department of Defense. Another member of the team is The Analysis Corporation, the intelligence contractor run by CIA veteran John Brennan.

Northrop Grumman, meanwhile, has put together a powerful combination of companies that have made their way up the federal contracting chain by managing the oversight of other contractors. They manage the DIA’s system for processing bids and awarding contracts. It includes CACI International, AT&T, Mantech International, and four small, high-tech companies that provide contract analysts to the CIA.

A fifth consortium is managed by Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), one of the NSA’s most important contractors. It manages global information networks, and produces and disseminates intelligence products, including specialized expertise in the area of imagery processing and archiving. The CSC team includes CACI International and L-3 MPRI. This last company is one of the largest private armies in the world, and would have at its disposal hundreds of paramilitary officers who would fit in exceedingly well with the DIA’s secret intelligence teams in the Middle East and North Africa.