[Zigurd]

Which, these days, buys fewer than 5000 active duty personnel. Total. Including officers, enlisted, logistics, medics, etc. This is a speed bump between Putin and Riga. It is symbolic, to show Latvia could contribute some personnel to joint operations. Some parts, like the air force, are probably below minimum table stakes and are completely militarily ineffective.

I expect the signals intelligence effort to be proportionate and be similarly militarily relevant.

[tptacek]

I think you missed the question in my comment. That's OK. It was rhetorical.

[Zigurd]

No, it's a serious answer.

Let's say you have a sack of potatoes for that IE 'sploit. Now you have to target it, plant it, exfiltrate data, analyze the data, and provide a context for it among other data gathered, store the data and the analysis, etc.

Compare this to Latvia spending a serious fraction of the military budget keeping, maybe, a couple obsolete, militarily irrelevant, and expensive to maintain Russian helicopters flying. There is a level below which simply saying that you have an air force, or signals intelligence, amounts to nothing of any significance.

Many many nations are in that condition, or are able to do no more than haphazardly tap their own switches and harass some dissidents.

The scale at which the NSA operates is commensurate to that of a navy with a dozen carrier battle groups. Even China cannot put an air wing on one antique (ok, "vintage") carrier. Nobody on the whole planet operates the way the NSA does. The people of the US have vast scope to change that before it even comes close to affecting a balance of effectiveness versus actual adversaries, never mind being in all our supposed freinds' pants.