The classic arms-length, adversarial acquisition model between government and industry misses the totality of the relationship. In the intelligence community, for example, contractor employees work closely alongside government employees in the most sensitive operations.

Dave Marlowe is the vice president and client executive at Amentum and former deputy director for operations at the Central Intelligence Agency. He put it this way: “Some incredibly sensitive activities are undertaken by any of the intelligence community members, in which there’s a there’s a contract industry partner who’s in the middle of the most detailed, difficult, challenging stuff.”

With security clearance, such contractor people have the information they need “in order to do their function,” Marlowe added.

For Federal News Network’s Top Voices series, Marlowe described the IC-industry relationship, and what things look like to him now that he’s moved from the government side. In some ways, he said, where he landed has cultural affinities with his federal employer.

“You know, I came out of a gray world where people didn’t talk about their work too much,” Marlowe said. “I find Amentum appealing. It doesn’t have big palatial corporate offices. You don’t see the name flashing at sports events or signs on the subway or whatever. It just quietly does really good work.”

“Operations” in the intelligence context means something different than it does in other areas. It refers not to procurement or other support functions, but rather to the mission connected functions of the agency.

“Operations at the CIA means collecting intelligence,” Marlowe said.

Elaborating on the contractor dependency, Marlowe said that in overseas intelligence gathering operations, people work in places ranging from national capital cities to austere war zones.

In “any of those sorts of expeditionary situations, you’re side-by-side with contractors or a variety of different contractors,” he said.

Breadth of functions

Fundamentally, he said, “intelligence is collecting information, safeguarding information, storing information, moving information, securing it, sifting it, processing it, cataloging it, sorting through it, analyzing it and making sense of it.” He added, “And every step along that way, there is an industrial partner.” Specific functions include facility or technical support or process support. In other words, nearly everything not inherently governmental.

“Everything [non-governmental] is subject to discussion: Should we have this contracted out?” Marlowe said. “In many cases, it actually makes more sense,” he said, because “the intelligence community is always, always oversaturated with tasks.”

However it conducts operations, Marlowe said the IC’s annually updated threat assessment drives priorities. The current assessment includes phenomena like human migration and climate change, essentially social in nature. It also names direct national security threats, principally “the ambition of the People’s Republic of China.”

He added, “That document fairly nicely prioritizes where the intelligence services need to put their energy.”

“If you look at the DNI threat assessment, if you look at where the intelligence community is turning today,” Marlowe said, “it’s focused on what the military calls the pacing threat.” Namely, the PRC “and its ambition to supplant the United States as the most powerful nation in the world, and in the process, reorder the way business is done around the world and recorder the economy and society.”

He added, “And that is an existential threat.”

With respect to specific information needed by operators and supporting contractors, Marlowe said that both types of employees tend to be equipped similarly. That is, even trusted career members of the IC in general are privy only to what they specifically need.

Moreover, for operations to work the trust must necessarily cover everyone.

“The same calculation is made for somebody who’s got an industry badge or somebody who’s got a US government badge,” Marlowe said. “Does the person have the skills and background and clearance for the job? Are they suitable for the job? And when those things are matched, and they’re on a team, they’re on the team.”

Speed of operations

No inexperienced youngster, Marlowe said that in moving to the industry side, he nevertheless found a few surprising things.

“I have a much better understanding now of how complicated and cumbersome the process is, of applying capability to need,” he said. “I understand it now in a more practical, tangible sense, trying to figure out what is it we can deliver and how we go about delivering it.”

Given the pacing threat of China and the generally fast-changing threat landscape, Marlowe said he now thinks about how back office functions like procurement and establishment of requirements for industry must speed up.

“That’s a fundamental question,” Marlowe said. “How do we engage more effectively with industry, with academia with all the all the horsepower of America that sits outside of the government. The system for procurement is just an outdated paradigm; it moves slowly.” He added that people inside the IC recognize the urgency to change.

Marlow said standard procurement, under the Federal Acquisition Regulation, is one reason for the growth in use of other transaction authority for acquiring new technologies.

Yet even within existing contracts, “there’s no reason not to say, ‘We’d like to introduce this technology that everybody else in the world is using it to make this process that we’re doing for you work faster, smarter and more efficiently,’” Marlowe said. “We have a willing partner in the US government that would like to move beyond the existing paradigm.”

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