Boy are you late on this one. This bid came out last summer, and was awarded a few months back. Also, it is essentially a roll-up of many smaller contracts, so that the work is being performed under one contract vehicle, not many. The amount of spending isn't really changing, just the contract vehicle under which the work is ordered. I am increasingly disappointed in the lack of journalistic review you do. Do you do any of your own research??

Shhhhh, don't tell anyone that New York's Ethics Scandal has been tied to an International Espionage Scheme involving a government contractor.

http://exposecorruptcourts.blogspot.com/2008/04/ny-ethics-scandal-tied-to-international.html

Pros and cons to contracted services, to be sure. Roll-up or not, we should avoid outsourcing volumes of core analytic work. Over the long term, the approach does not build government capabilty or capacity. It's expensive; the quality of bulk, routine services delivered by contractors is mixed; and OJT skills-building is far too prevelant.

holy jesus! now we have to pay billions of dollars for private contractor intelligence support. apparently the NSA,CIA,DEA,HLS,DOS,DOD,FBI, and all the rest of the secret spooks organizations that we have no need; require further assistance. For God sakes, what in the world is out there????
JMA

Let us not be naive. Every contract brings in votes!

Never mind JMA's accurate point above about all the other intelligence agencies and THEIR analysts (many thousands, perhaps tens of thousands intelligence analysts cumulatively).
The DIA's core mission, place of pride, and primary (ostensibly) raison d'etre is intelligence analysis, specifically it's three or four thousand analysts in DIA's Directorate of Intelligence. Why is the U.S. Congress, and the Defense Department, funding an extra BILLION dollars for DIA to hire thousands more, contracted private sector analysts?
The dynamics of DoD and the "intelligence-industrial" complex contracting arrangements, exposed some in recent years - but not nearly enough - in cogent probes by the Post's William Arkin and Walter Pincus, dictate that the various contracting firms mentioned here, not having the requisite qualified staff (graduate degrees, intelligence analyst experience, TOP SECRET security clearances) to fulfill the contract mission demands, go straight to the DIA rank'n file, and that of the rest of the Intelligence Community, to lure & recruit federal workers (to leave), and military members (to retire or separate) with fantastic increases in salary and benefits - all U.S. taxpayer funded. Those new intelligence contractor employees often return to work, sometimes literally the next day in the same or a similar office, as private sector employees making several multiples the salary they had, or could expect on the General Service (GS) pay tables until they obtained GS-15 or Senior Executive Service (SES) rank. For this reason of course, it is a highly attractive option for young DIA or other U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) employees, analysts in this case, with say 10 years or less in service. Although more senior government employees-military officers, to be sure, often fall prey to the allure of DoD contractor paychecks beyond their wildest fantasies (indeed, quite impossible) in Federal Government work, to do essentially or even literally the same job.
The single most dramatic and worrisome illustration of this (widespread) phenomenon, stories broke separately by Pincus and Arkin in recent years, was that of the Defense Department's new (2002) Counter-Intelligence Field Activity (CIFA), arguably the most corrupt and constitutionally dangerous US government organ in the post-9/11 era. It was built by founder David Burtt (forced retirement under federal task force investigation, August 2006) almost entirely by criminal federal contracting practices that were funded by CIFA's monopoly over the budget for Defense Department counter-intelligence activities. This, in combination with its intimately symbiotic partnership with Mitchell Wade, his MZM Corp., and the convicted ex-Congressman, Randy "Duke" Cunningham of San Diego, CA, (among others) then serving on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI).
As of this month, April 2008, in publicly available, UNCLASSIFIED directives signed by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and the DoD Intelligence under secretary, LTG (Ret.) James R. Clapper, CIFA was abolished (good news, overdue but nonetheless welcome). However, CIFA is to be merged, subsumed within the Defense Intelligence Agency, ostensibly as a damage-limiting (for DoD) reform measure. DIA's new billion dollar contracting baby, unrelated per se to CIFA and, in any event, at an eight-figure order of magnitude far beyond anything CIFA and it's self-aggrandizing wielding of FCIP (the Foreign Counter-Intelligence Program: DoD's budget for CI) management could have aspired to financially, invites deep skepticism of self-regulating and administered, closed-door intelligence "reform" in the U.S. Government. Not enough U.S. citizens yet ponder how many financially ruinous and ethically dubious Intelligence & Defense Communities' contracting practices badly need the vigorous airing and open scrutiny of public reform.

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