COMMENTARY: 5 moves to make a more agile and efficient intelligence community

Gettyimages.com/ Busakorn Pongparnit

Find opportunities — and win them.

Arcfield CEO Kevin Kelly writes that the IC needs to embrace innovation to optimize efficiency and improve mission outcomes.

Today’s near-peer competition is underpinned by a race for technological superiority. This means the global intelligence advantage won’t come down to who has the largest arsenal—it will come down to who can deliver the right solutions fastest.

The intelligence community continues to face lingering challenges that could undermine its ability to stay ahead. After two decades of post-9/11 operations, inefficiencies in mission execution and resource allocation have slowed progress and hindered the IC’s agility.

To maintain a strategic edge, the U.S. needs to eliminate these redundancies and operationalize innovation at a new level of speed and scale. Here are five ways the IC can optimize efficiency, resource allocations and mission outcomes:

Minimize Mission Overlap

During the war on terror, Congress allocated significant funding to various national security agencies, each with specific missions and charters. While this response was appropriate then, over time it created a culture of siloed operations and mission creep.

Today, multiple agencies deploy like-solutions that solve similar challenges. But if we eliminate that redundancy, agencies would be able to focus their resources more effectively, and in turn, industry could dedicate their best and brightest to a single agency versus having to allocate portions of time across multiple agencies.

By thinking more broadly about how the IC buys and implements new capabilities, we can usher in a new era of integrated collaboration while doing more with less.

Policymakers and IC leaders should ask themselves: Is it better to spend $1,000 on 15 good solutions or $1,000 on eight exquisite ones? By consolidating efforts, national security agencies can channel resources toward achieving groundbreaking outcomes rather than duplicative programs.

Stop Overclassification: Innovate Without the Red Tape

Overclassification is choking innovation in the IC.

Right now, many technology development programs are classified from the start, even if the sensitive nature of the project is about how and where it will be deployed.

Innovation doesn’t originate in Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities (SCIFs)—it needs funding and open market involvement to iterate. Classifying innovation too early in the development lifecycle hinders the IC’s access to game-changing innovation that comes from the private sector.

Additionally, our industry suffers from a continual shortage of cleared personnel and over-classification exacerbates that problem. Making the whole project a classified effort is logistically easier, but arguably less effective. Let’s do the hard thing and innovate better!

Buying Outcomes, Not Hours

In the current IC contracting environment, industry partners compete on cost, headcount and narrow personnel requirements instead of creativity and effectiveness. This “pay-for-hours” model drives up costs, stifles innovation and leaves little room to develop the bold, transformative solutions needed in today’s threat environment.

Moving to performance-based contracts and cutting outdated regulations like Cost Accounting Standards (CAS) would unlock new levels of speed and innovation. Eliminating CAS, as industry leaders like L3Harris CEO Christopher E. Kubasik advocated recently, would cut through red tape, speed up timelines and let agencies and contractors focus on delivering impactful solutions.

It is believed that Henry Ford once said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Similarly, the national security apparatus must empower the private sector to think bigger—beyond incremental improvements—to deliver transformative solutions measured by outcomes, not hours.

Go All In On Strategic Outsourcing

The government’s tendency to design, build and maintain its own systems is a relic of the past. As today's secure cloud platforms have demonstrated, outsourcing and as-a-service models provide a more agile and cost-effective approach. Exemplified through partnerships with Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle, the IC has transformed its approach to cloud infrastructure, eliminating costly data centers while improving scalability and efficiency. There is a great opportunity to apply this same approach across the board.

Consider the example of radio systems: instead of maintaining siloed teams for engineering, production and maintenance, the government could define performance requirements and partner with industry to manage the entire lifecycle and have it delivered as-a-service. This approach has proven effective in other areas, fostering innovation, increasing efficiency and reducing costs—offering a model worth exploring more broadly within the IC.

For instance, instead of building and maintaining weather satellites, the government should subscribe to weather data from private providers—a proven efficiency in commercial space operations.

Similarly, encrypted Starlink or Kuiper terminals should be utilized to quickly satisfy critical tactical communications needs that scale with the missions. By partnering with private companies, the government gains access to cutting-edge technologies and practices while retaining the flexibility to transition to new solutions as needs evolve.

This shift would empower the national security apparatus to respond quickly and effectively to emerging threats.

Harness AI and Digital Engineering as Force-Multipliers

Within the IC, artificial intelligence has the potential to revolutionize data acquisition, analysis and risk assessment—predicting supply chain vulnerabilities, detecting fraudulent activities across complex networks and freeing up analysts to focus on the most pressing threats.

Adversaries like China outnumber us 5 to 1 in terms of manpower which is why it is imperative that we beat them, and others, in the AI technology race. Recent AI initiatives, including the recently-announced $500 billion “Stargate” program, can potentially accelerate the U.S.’s AI dominance, but bold leadership is needed to fully integrate AI into defense and intelligence operations.

Similarly, digital engineering and its subset, model-based systems engineering, represent a transformative approach to systems development, reducing development timelines and enhancing collaboration among solution providers.

For the IC, this means being able to analyze data faster, create more accurate threat models and scenarios and expedite decision-making using advanced simulation tools to visualize potential outcomes.

Fully engaging AI and DE solutions can empower human analysts and leaders with more comprehensive insights that drive better, faster decisions.

The Way Forward

To maintain its position as a global leader in national security, the IC can work with industry to modernize its operational practices. By taking advantage of these opportunities, national security agencies can transition from reactive spending to strategic investment—delivering not just better, faster outcomes, but also better value for the American taxpayer.

The stakes are too high to settle for incremental improvements; it’s time to unlock operations built for today’s global threat landscape.


Kevin Kelly is the CEO of Arcfield.