Cia Estimates Of Soviet Military Expenditures: Errors And Waste
(William T. Lee)
Despite the fact that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency spent four decades and between $5 billion and $10 billion in estimating the size of the Soviet economy, the CIA's research methods persistently underestimated the size of Soviet military expenditures and ignored growing evidence of the economic problems that contributed to the Soviet Union's collapse. This AEI special report on intelligence explains why the CIA was so wrong on such a crucial issue. The author, who began his professional career at the Central Intelligence Agency in 1951, conducted research on Soviet military and economic affairs for a number of government and private research organizations until his retirement in 1992. A summary of the report follows.
To estimate the Soviet Union's military expenditures (ME), the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency used a "building block" methodology that required a vast amount of detailed information on both physical quantities and ruble prices. Known by its acronym SCAM, the CIA's Soviet cost model not only consumed much of the agency's own resources but also depended on national optical and electronic intelligence programs for raw data and on the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and other government agencies, contractors, and academics for analysis.
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