Former NSA director: Threats facing US today more numerous, varied than in Cold War era

The "scope and size" of foreign threats the U.S. faces today are greater than during the Cold War era, according to William Studeman, director of the National Security Agency under former President George H. W. Bush.

"We were focused on the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union ended in 1991, but it was a considerable adversary, particularly at the higher end of conflict, clearly a very large nuclear power, a very big intelligence power as well," Studeman told Just the News. 

"But compared to today," he continued, "where you not only have Russia, but you've got China, North Korea, Iran, the global war on terrorism hasn't stopped, emerging African nations, all the other things, and what's going on in the South Pacific or even in Latin America, Central America. The scope and size of the portfolio of intelligence is just huge, and you never know which one is going to be the most important each day."

In response to the multiplying foreign threats the nation faces, the government is investing commensurately larger sums in the intelligence community than during the epoch of superpower bipolarity dominated by the U.S. and the Soviet Union, Studeman noted.

"[I]t's just a bigger, bigger portfolio, and it's a bigger community that costs more in response to that," he said, citing a range of security concerns spanning "all the way from the issue of deterrence, nuclear weapons, escalation control, for near-peer competitors at one end of the spectrum all the way down to trying to continue on with dealing with the global terrorism threat, the Middle East, radical Islam."

Studeman was interviewed after participating in the 13th annual Intelligence and National Security Alliance Achievement Awards.