In the Intelligence Community,
the Kids Are Running the Candy Store
…but is that such a bad thing?

I live in Washington, DC so pretty much every third person I know is a spy. Intelligence runs like a leitmotif through every policy discussion in this town on Iraq, Iran, North Korea, China and terrorism. The talking heads on the all news channels and think tank policy wonks who focus on this issue are almost exclusively former intelligence officials now outside the tent pissing back in.

Their bottom line assessment usually goes something like this: “The CIA [or insert three-letter agency of your choice] is so broken it can’t possibly be fixed. The biggest problem is personnel, everyone who ever knew anything has left and now the kids are running the candy store! You have supervisors with less than five years of experience!” There they stop their tirade. The fact that most analysts are under thirty is all that is needed before declaring victory and going home. QED.

Not so fast. Here I must run to the defense of my fellow millennials. The people making this case are all retiring baby-boomers who finished up their thirty years of government service at 55 or 56 and then made a b-line for the private sector. Over their three decades of service they missed the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Collapse of the Soviet Union, and if experience is so valuable, should have been at their peak performance when they oversaw the two greatest intelligence failures of this century: 9/11 and Iraqi WMD. Maybe getting a whole lot of new, fresh analysts isn’t such a bad idea.

In the creative economy we live in today, 5 years doing anything is a lifetime. Nobody does anything for five years other than go to medical school. And certainly the best and the brightest (a dangerous phrase to use in Washington, I know) can barely sit still for 5 minutes.

A top graduate from a top law school will have likely worked at two different clerkships and three different firms and then made a move to the justice department or a political campaign before reaching thirty. In the investment world, where baby-boomer ageism is trumped by greed, a new generation of 20-something analysts are raking in billions for hedge funds and private equity firms. As the New York Times reported recently, many have decided that two years in business school would be a waste of time when they are making money now.

The intelligence community specifically and the rest of the government in general could learn from this. Smart people will no longer spend 15 years clawing their way to the top, particularly when there are relatively few experienced people who know much about the issue of the day, terrorism, which was barely on the radar a decade ago.

Much of the rest of the world seems to have figured this out. When foreign government officials come to town, you can pretty much bet that the average age of an entourage for countries with stagnant economies and declining power will be 50 plus (Japan and France come to mind) and under forty for emerging powers (China and India). To maintain our super power status, which group do you think the US government should look like?

There are many things wrong with the intelligence community, but the relative age of its analysts and case officers is not one of them. Before being so quick to declare that a bunch of people with little experience can’t possibly keep us safe from terrorism, the greybeards of the intelligence world would do well to remember the words of the satirist Tom Lehrer who pointed out at the ripe old age of 34 that “When Mozart was my age… he had been dead for two years.”