rocess. The Intelligence Community (IC) in the United States today is comprised of 15 agencies: the Central Intelligence Agency; the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency; the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency; the National
Reconnaissance Office; the intelligence elements of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps; the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the Department of the Treasury; the Department of Energy; the Coast Guard; the Bureau of Intelligence and Research of the Department of State; and the Department of Homeland Security. In 2001, however, the IC was largely made up of a collection of agencies which were established during the Cold War to help defeat the Soviet Union. The CIA and the Department of Defense were created in 1947. In 1952, the signals intelligence (decryption) agencies which were in the armed services were unified within the National Security Agency (NSA) in 1952; however the NSA remained administratively part of the Defense Department (9/11 Commission2, 1).
The division of labor within the IC was historically divided according to agency function rather than any master plan. The National Security Act forbade the CIA from any domestic activity; thus domestic intelligence collection was the province of the FBI. The CIA focused on intelligence collection abroad, while the NSA and DOD focused on gathering intelligence through the use of technology in order to assist the armed forces in the field (9/11 Commission2, 1). Today, the "United States spends more on intelligence than most nations spend on national security as a whole. Most of this money is spent on intelligence collection, much of it on very expensive hardware, such as systems based in space" (9/11 Commission2, 2). The vast bulk of the intelligence budget is in the Department of Defense (DOD), partly due to the fact that the collection mechanisms (e.g. satellites) are managed by various agencies within DOD, and pa...