Dalla testimonianza di Mark Lowenthal, già dirigente della CIA nonchè autore di un famoso libro:
"The demographics of the analytic community are interesting if not disturbing. As I noted above, in the 1990s, the intelligence budget was flat. What post-Cold war “peace dividend” there was came primarily from holding down intelligence spending, not from defense, which made little sense given the 10:1 disparity in favor of defense. The net result, as former DCI George Tenet has stated, was the loss of 23,000 positions across the Intelligence Community – positions that were never budgeted for and filled or positions that were left vacant if the incumbent left. During this same period, however, contractor funds did not suffer as much, for the reasons stated above. Therefore, there was an influx of contractors at the same time that the permanent workforce was decreasing.
In the wake of the terrorist attacks in 2001, President Bush gave orders to increase the size of the analytic and operational cadres in CIA by 50 percent each. The net effect, in analysis, was that the number of new employees was disproportionate to the veteran employees. Other intelligence agencies, such as NSA and DIA also saw increases in the number of employees. We also stood up new entities, such as DHS. This has left us with a skewed analytic demographic: today, some 50 percent of the analysts across the Intelligence Community have five years of experience or less. We have, in effect, the least experienced workforce in U.S. intelligence analysis that we have had since setting up the Intelligence Community in 1947.
At the same time, the Community hired larger numbers of contractors to meet the increased analytic and operational demands. In many cases, these contractors also brought more experience and expertise than the new employees could possibly have."