Workforce Planning in the Intelligence Community

The U.S. intelligence community has a continuing and important role to play in providing the best intelligence and analytic insight possible to aid the nation's leaders in making decisions and taking action. Executing this role will require unprecedented collaboration and information sharing. The personnel throughout the intelligence agencies are essential to accomplishing these tasks. The intelligence community has made significant progress during the past decade in rebuilding its workforce and developing capabilities lost during the 1990s. As decisionmakers look ahead to a future most certainly defined by constrained budgets, it will be important to avoid repeating the post–Cold War drawdown experience and losing capability in a similar way because the consequences of such actions can be long lasting.

This report chronicles intelligence community efforts over more than half a decade to improve community-wide workforce planning and management. It describes workforce planning tools that will help decisionmakers maintain a workforce capable of meeting the challenges that lie ahead, even as budgets decline. In addition, the community's collective efforts to take a more strategic approach to workforce planning point to a number of important considerations that serve as guideposts for the future: (1) rebuilding lost capability takes time, (2) resource flexibility is needed, (3) risk is an essential element in workforce planning, (4) systematic planning shores up requirements, and (5) the supply of military personnel is likely to decline. These lessons learned through an era of workforce rebuilding can inform resource decisions today and in the years to come.