Everyone says the 'Washington Post' series on the National Security State is great journalism. It’s not.

In late July the Washington Post published an ambitious report on U.S. national security intelligence that we are told had taken the Post’s staff two years to complete. The project was led by two competent and experienced reporters, Dana Priest and William Arkin, and the report has received an enthusiastic press. Having written about national security intelligence in books like Countering Terrorism: Blurred Focus, Halting Steps (2007), I was looking forward to reading the Post’s report.

The report is, in fact, a disappointment. It is descriptive rather than analytic, and the description is based entirely on two types of data, neither of which contributes to an understanding of the nature and problems of the nation’s intelligence system. The two types are statistics indicating the size and organizational complexity of national security intelligence, and expressions of exasperation at that size and complexity by former or current insiders.

The statistics are not broken down by each of the principal domains of national security intelligence, and so the reader is given no sense of the actual structure of the intelligence system. Five aspects need to be distinguished. The first is routine military intelligence—military intelligence unrelated to ongoing combat. The military has to keep tabs on the capabilities, deployments, intentions, and so forth of the armed forces of foreign countries even when it is not fighting them. Second, there is combat intelligence, which at present is focused on Afghanistan but extends to other areas as well, such as Iraq, Yemen, and the Philippines. This second area of military intelligence overlaps the third and fourth domains of national security intelligence—counterterrorist intelligence conducted abroad and at home, the latter complicated by sensitivities to potential violations of privacy and civil liberties. Last, and overlapping all the others, is the traditional kind of foreign intelligence conducted by the CIA, which includes wide-ranging intelligence analysis, recruitment of foreign agents, counterintelligence, and paramilitary operations in support of U.S. foreign policy.

Merely counting the number of people, parking spaces, square feet of building space, and other countables lovingly recited in the Post‘s report conveys no useful information and will impress only naïve readers who have somehow failed to realize that the U.S. government and its major components are huge. The report conveys the impression of mindless growth in intelligence personnel, contractors, and facilities since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. But that was a watershed event that justified expanding the intelligence system. Before the attacks there was little concern with terrorism, and after there was and there continues to be acute concern, along with virtually continuous warfare in central Asia and enhanced concern with the nuclear threats posed by North Korea and Iran. The report, because it makes no effort at meaningful disaggregation of the statistics of expansion, does not indicate how much of the recent growth in our intelligence facilities and personnel is legitimately responsive to threats to national security that have emerged (or first been recognized) since 9/11 and how much is waste engendered by political, commercial, and bureaucratic exploitation of people’s fears.

Several of the “wow” statistics highlighted in the report are completely meaningless. One is the number of persons—more than 850,000—who have top-secret clearances. A top-secret clearance is required for all sorts of activities that have nothing to do with intelligence, such as advanced weapons research, high-level military command, and the management of the nation’s nuclear arsenal. (A cafeteria worker in a weapons factory might require such a clearance.) It is well known that overclassification is rampant, and so the number of top-secret clearances may well be excessive. But the figure casts no light on overclassification of intelligence.