“Expansion of this authority is necessary to permit DOD to conduct revenue-generating commercial activities to protect such operations and would provide an important safeguard for U.S. military forces conducting hazardous operations abroad,” the request for legislation says. It was first reported by my colleagues at Inside Defense.

But a former senior intelligence official with years of experience handling a wide array of covert operations is skeptical that DIA, which has never run such operations before, will be able to pull this off.

“Having commercially-covered military collectors is easy to say and conceptually makes sense but would be very difficult to do well. Commercially-covered operations are cost-ineffective and require a long-term view and lots of patience. It is a non-trivial task, and as far as I know DIA has no experience in this area,” the ex-official told AOL Defense.

On top of DIA’s inexperience in running such ops, there is the basic question of why they need to do this and how they would coordinate with their colleagues at CIA.....