INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY OFF-SITE CONFERENCE 4-5 AUGUST 1983

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88B00443R001404080071-0
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: January 4, 2017
• Document Release Date: April 24, 2008
• Sequence Number: 71
• Publication Date: August 4, 1983
• Content Type: REPORT

Approved For Release 2008/04/24: CIA-RDP88B00443R001404080071-0
Intelligence Community Off-Site Conference
4 - 5 August 1983
I want to thank all of you for taking the time to come down here.
As you are all aware, there are some major pressures of a short term and
long term nature on which we need to react. We have to react almost immediately
to the prospect of a severe reduction in budget levels for fiscal year 1985 and
beyond. The DoD planning level would leave little or no room for new initiatives
and looking at possible further action in the Administration and the Congress,
the worst case could gouge out of the Community budget.
This would require us to dig into our base and to drastically cut back or
stretch out ongoing initiatives.
We need to face up to this for two purposes and in two ways:
First, we need to identify capabilities which would be put at risk at
the proposed Defense level, at the worst case I have just indicated and at
some point midway between the two. We have to do this in specific terms to confront
the policymakers and consumers with what can be lost by a crude across the board
application of what appears to be an inevitable reduction in the Defense budget.
Second, we have to figure out among ourselves how we can mitigate what
appears to be some inevitable damage from the best result we are likely to get.
This difficult problem for us is compounded by another development of which
you are all aware. Just as we're being squeezed for money we're about to suffer
embarrassment of riches. It is clear that over the next three years we are
going to get so much additional information
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STAT
that our ability to
process, evaluate and understand it will be severely tested. We are going
to be able to meet that test by being a lot smarter in setting our require-
ments, selecting what's important and in analyzing its meaning.
The magnitude of this challenge will clearly require concerted effort
and strategy on our part, and I hope we will begin to shape that in from
the conversations we'll be having this evening. What we are engaging in is
like the planning which a large enterprise made up of a variety of divisions
needs to undertake. I would hope to meet again on this, several months hence,
to appraise how what we do after this meeting worked and how we can do it
STAT better in the next budget cycle. With that I'll ask to begin
the discussion of how we can best handle the budgetary challenge which confronts
us right now.
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Approved For Release 2008/04/24: CIA-RDP88B00443R001404080071-0