National security overload.

• Author: DiNovella, Elizabeth
• Position: Comment

We re no longer living in Ike's "military-indusrial complex." Bomb and missile production have been replaced by information production. Private companies run satellites, build computer systems, craft war plans, and use social network sites and Google Earth to track the movements of people in conflict zones. Half of the companies involved in national security are essentially IT companies. Call it Military-Industrial Complex 2.0.

Major corporations, such as General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman, have gone from providing bullets to providing staffing. General Dynamics' income from its intelligence and information divisions accounted for more than one-third of its overall revenue last year.

These are just a few of the insights gleaned from The Washington Post 's investigative series "Top Secret America," written by Dana Priest and William Arkin. These enterprising reporters examined the national security industry that has mushroomed during the last nine years.

"The top secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy, and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it, or exactly how many agencies do the same work," Priest and Arkin write. "After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine."

Priest and Arkin delved into data (available on the Post 's website) and conducted interview after interview to explore the confidential Washington that lies beyond public scrutiny. Their conclusions are shocking. They found duplications of efforts, turf rivalry, a lack of transparency, and a huge bureaucracy staffed more and more by private contractors who actually cost more than federal employees.

A lack of focus, not a lack of resources, is the takeaway.

The investigation's findings include:

* "Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top secret security clearances.

* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, fifty-one federal organizations and military...