It cannot afford to carry disgruntled men and women in its ranks. Promotions throughout will have to be performance based not linked to seniority. There has to be a fast track for those who excel. Since everybody cannot climb the ladder and there has to be some sidelining of even the bright ones, it is best for the government to consider the system of flexible pay bands so that officers can at least hope to end up with a better pay packet at the end of the day.
Intelligence is not just by the IB or R&AW or DIA; in case of terrorism it is the local state units in the district and the sub-division that have to perform.
This means having to break out of the iron cage of the bureaucracy. It also means recruiting in the open market from colleges and universities as all the well known agencies of the world like the CIA, the SIS and Mossad do. Catch them young and then mould them is the motto. In the present system, the man joins an organisation when he may be in his mid-twenties or if he is seconded, even much later. Most have got accustomed to the frills of bureaucracy, are married and have children. They are just too rigid to learn anything new and too old to take any risks or gamble, so essential for an intelligence operative.
It is of course unrealistic to expect any banker or finance wizard to give up his fancy job and work for a still lowly paid government assignment. The CIA faced with budget cuts in the Clinton era got over this problem by outsourcing which has now become an Intelligence-Industrial Complex rather like the Military-Industrial Complex that has typified US capitalism. It is estimated that today outsourcing is a 50 billion dollar business annually and consumes about 70 percent of the budget of the US intelligence community and this includes those working on covert operations.
The CIA, the National Security Agency and the Pentagon now have partnership arrangements with giants like Lockheed Martin, IBM, CACI and Booz Allen Hamilton. This may not be the model for India to follow but there is no way that there can be any effective functioning of intelligence agencies in the future without some involvement and reliance on the private sector. This involvement is going to be inevitable and necessary chiefly because it could be in the interest of the private sector to be participatory in the security of the country and it has the means and the resources to do so. The private sector could provide the technological inputs in battling terror.
In a fast changing world with a rapidly changing threat perception, intelligence agencies have not been nor allowed to be flexible to meet the evolving threat. There is hardly any surge capability where the agency can, on its own, shift manpower and resources to meet the new threat.
In a fast changing world with a rapidly changing threat perception, intelligence agencies have not been nor allowed to be flexible to meet the evolving threat. There is hardly any surge capability where the agency can, on its own, shift manpower and resources to meet the new threat. The present system is far too cumbersome and slow to allow any rapid redeployment and by the time the new system is put into place the quarry has moved on, either morphed into something different or has just become too big so that the changes originally proposed become inadequate. The head of an intelligence organisation must have the flexibility and authority to move men and material around.
None of these freedoms would be available without checks and balances and accountability or oversight. We are perhaps not yet ready, as a people, to have the US system but the British system is better for us where accountability is to the Cabinet. A great deal would depend on the Prime Minister who needs to choose his chiefs of intelligence with great care. Past experience, career performance and integrity should be the main guiding factors and not seniority.
All this is meaningless unless there is a systemic overhaul. Both Mumbai and Kargil were as much systemic failures, yet the target always is the intelligence systems. Mumbai occurred because the lessons of Kargil were not adequately learnt. Intelligence reforms without police reforms are pointless because the local policeman develops the strategic intelligence given by the central agencies. Police reforms without civil service reform are equally meaningless. And civil service reform without political reform is similarly meaningless.
Given the needs of the hour, the threats that we face and will continue to face in the future, the country can no longer afford to have nothing but the best.
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