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no conceivable internal staffing plan could provide the diversity of coverage and flexibility in shifting coverage that has been required of OSI.
The external support program has enabled OSI to produce considerably more intelligence than it would have been able to produce otherwise. It accomplished an across-the-board survey of Soviet research and development of intelligence significance, in a much shorter period of time than it could have been accomplished internally without a considerable increase in personnel, who might later not have been needed. Also, farming out low priority tasks such as NIS work has undoubtedly saved many internal analyst manhours for application to higher priority work. The most significant contribution of OSI contracting, however, has been in buying highly specialized technical competence that could not reasonably have been duplicated within the Agency, even if a managerial decision had been made to do so. Some of these contractors, guided by OSI, can be said to have pioneered new and important areas of scientific intelligence.
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