Training and Educating U.S. Intelligence Analysts

In the United States, the training and education of national security intelligence analysts in both government and academia is undergoing significant changes. Most of them are associated with efforts to improve the quality of analysis in the wake of the 11 September 2001 (9/11) terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., and the controversy over the accuracy of intelligence regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs. Additional changes are likely as analytic training is subsumed into a broader national effort to professionalize the country's analytic corps.

CURRENT STATE OF TRAINING AND EDUCATION

In terms of intelligence analysis, the term “training” is usually associated with internal government programs intended to provide specific instruction for the implementation of job-related tasks, while the term “education” is normally associated with academic courses or programs geared to provide more conceptual or theoretical frameworks having less immediate effect on performance, but laying the foundation for improved performance over the longer term. But these distinctions between training and education are disappearing. Government agencies are providing educational opportunities to their students in addition to the more frequent training opportunities, while academia is simultaneously beginning to provide training in analytic production while maintaining its traditional educational role. Thus, at least in the U.S., the lines between government and academia, in terms of providing analytic training and education, are beginning to blur.

Analytic Training and Education in Government

Practitioners in any profession care about performance, both organizational and individual, and one way to improve performance is to increase proficiency. Organizations can employ training as a tool to improve practitioner proficiency, primarily by using that training to increase analytic expertise.

Over the past eight years, the United States government has created a number of organizational entities responsible for improving analytic training in its intelligence sector. For example, in 2000, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) created the Sherman Kent School for Intelligence Analysis to train its analysts. ¹ In 2002, the Agency created CIA University as a broader effort to coordinate training across the organization. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) later created its College of Analytical Studies, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) created the “virtual” National Intelligence University as a way to coordinate training across the Intelligence Community (IC). The new “Analysis 101” course, which provides the same basic training to analysts across the Community, is an example of this kind of coordination. ²

While most of these training centers are recent creations, at least one predated the recent push: the Joint Military Intelligence Training Center (JMITC) at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). The JMITC was created in 1993 as the training complement to an educational entity that has been in existence at DIA for decades.

The various analytic training courses differ in terms of seniority of student, content, and duration. Some, such as the CIA's Career Analyst Program, are generic analytic courses for entry level analysts, and may last for several months. Others are more targeted to individual analytic disciplines—such as political, military, economic, or leadership analysis—and are taught over a shorter period of time. While the names and general goals of the intelligence courses are unclassified, the specific contents for most of them are not in the public domain. ³

While the individual members of the U.S. Intelligence Community have been creating analytic training centers, they have also begun to devote more attention to the teaching and application of structured analytic techniques such as Analysis of Competing Hypotheses, brainstorming, key assumptions check, red cell analysis, devil's advocacy, Team A/Team B, alternative futures, and others. ⁴ In contrast to the old way of doing analysis, which involved reading a lot and coming to a judgment about the issue, based on the individual analyst's expertise, the new way of doing analysis involves the application of structured techniques, which are more amenable to formal instruction.

Questions About Structure

There is a “chicken and egg” question here, though. Do the training centers teach structured methods because they are the best way to do analysis, or do they teach structured methods because that's what they can teach? And, are the intelligence organizations emphasizing the value of structured methods because their application produces better analysis, or because the formal process of teaching these methods provides a way for the organizations to prove to external overseers that they are improving in the post-9/11, post-Iraq WMD environment?

As yet, answering these questions may not be possible. As argued elsewhere, ⁵ teaching these structured methods could be useful because having such an approach to assessing a problem is better than none at all. But, before the teaching and application of these techniques becomes mandatory, taking a step back and asking just how structured intelligence analysis should be, and whether or not that structure will actually lead to improved analysis, is important. At this point—given the general intuitive approach that analysts use and the relative paucity of data showing that structured techniques would improve accuracy—the value of mandating the use of more structured methods is uncertain. Teaching them may be important, if only because any inherent value in their application might be useful to practitioners. But people think in different ways, and until the Intelligence Community can demonstrate that these techniques are an improvement over time-honored intuitive models for all practitioners, their use should not be mandated. Instead, more time, money, and effort should be devoted to developing the capacity to evaluate the utility of these approaches rather than merely developing and teaching them.

Thinking Carefully, Not Frenetically

While training is accepted as an important factor in improving practitioner proficiency, education supplements training by providing the time to learn and think about concepts and theories that can be used to provide context for what the analyst does on the job. The literature on intelligence analysis frequently observes that analysis proceeds at a frenetic pace, with information coming at analysts as if they were figuratively drinking water from a fire hose. In addition, a frequent critique of the analytic process is that it tends to emphasize short-term analytic reporting, known as current intelligence, over longer analytic reports. This focus on current intelligence has significantly eroded analysts' ability to acquire topical expertise because longer research reports are a primary means for an analyst to learn more about a particular issue. ⁶

Analysts only infrequently have the opportunity to think deeply and carefully about the issues they are addressing. They therefore find various kinds of sabbaticals—such as rotation to a staff job or the opportunity to pursue graduate education fulltime—to be conceptually refreshing. But the value derived from these sabbaticals is more than being merely an escape from the pressures of analytic production; it also comes from the opportunity to reflect on the analyst's experiences, identify what worked and what did not, and to explore new substantive and procedural ideas that relate to his or her professional responsibilities. These sabbaticals are educational in both a formal and informal sense. More structured educational opportunities provide the analysts with opportunities to learn concepts that might help them on the job, but that they wouldn't otherwise have time to explore.

For example, according to Ernest May and Philip Zelikow,

from 1986 to 2002, Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government had an executive program for senior managers in the US intelligence community, known as the Intelligence and Policy Program. It ran once or twice a year for one to three weeks. Participants typically had twelve to twenty years of experience. … The Intelligence and Policy Program aimed to teach managers in the intelligence community how to think about needs in the policy community and about ways in which they and their associates might better serve those needs. This would be done in part by exposing them to elements of decision, bargaining, and organization theory, but primarily through Socratic discourse centered on case studies. ⁷

This program was a form of education for analysts and managers of analysts, because—as Zelikow and May put it—most attendees “came from the Directorate of Intelligence (DI) in the Central Intelligence Agency.” Harvard no longer offers this course; when the CIA University was created in 2002, a decision was made to teach it in-house rather than outsourcing it.

Another example of analytic education provided by the government can be found at the National Defense Intelligence College (NDIC; formerly known successively as the Defense Intelligence School, the Defense Intelligence College, and the Joint Military Intelligence College), which provides undergraduate and graduate degrees in Intelligence Studies. Its earliest iteration, the Defense Intelligence School, was created in 1962 by “consolidating all strategic defense intelligence education into a single organization” which “was attached to the Defense Intelligence Agency for administrative support.” ⁸ Its “short courses emphasized specialized training while the year-long, graduate-level … [course] emphasized the development of broad career skills.” ⁹

NDIC and the Joint Military Intelligence Training Center (JMITC) reprise this division between short and longer courses, with JMITC specializing in short course training and NDIC providing both undergraduate and graduate education in the study of intelligence. NDIC's accredited Masters degree program provides intelligence professionals with “the opportunity to engage in advanced study and research in intelligence while concurrently improving the quality of intelligence analysis.” ¹⁰

NDIC may also have been the model for the creation of the National Intelligence University. In 1999, Lloyd Salvetti—at the time the director of CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence—said he

believe(s) we need to explore creation of a National Intelligence University that would more fully inform professional military officers and civilian government employees about the capabilities and processes of the intelligence community. Our University would not necessarily have a campus, but rather would consist of coordinated course offerings that would be taught by the [IC] members. ¹¹

He then went on to say that he believed that the JMIC (now NDIC) should be “the foundation for such a university.”

The National Intelligence University, created after the 9/11 attacks, is, in its current form, a university in name only, a virtual university without a faculty or actual classrooms. Meanwhile, the NDIC continues to push the envelope in terms of intelligence education by establishing a cooperative Ph.D. program with the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland at College Park. According to the NDIC, the program is “designed for NDIC students, graduates and faculty or civilian DIA employees only,” with the ultimate goal being a dissertation “on an unclassified intelligence topic.” ¹²

While the government has been developing its own capacities to train and educate analysts, academia is beginning to play a larger role in the process.

Analytic Training and Education in Academia

Traditionally, academia provided four separate kinds of value to the Intelligence Community's analytical personnel: (1) as a place to recruit graduates with substantive knowledge and expertise of use to the Community; (2) as a place to send analysts for acquisition of more or different knowledge (i.e., continuing education); (3) as a place to acquire specific knowledge or expertise from academic experts; and (4) as a place to acquire information or advice in terms of managing the Intelligence Community from those who specialized in intelligence studies (frequently from either a political science or history perspective).

Each of these four kinds of relationships between academia and the U.S. Intelligence Community continues, but a fifth is beginning to emerge: academia as a provider of graduates possessing a practitioner's skill set (i.e., training), as well as an educational base emphasizing procedural expertise (i.e., analytic tradecraft) rather than substantive knowledge. It does this primarily by taking the knowledge that has been developed about the processes for doing intelligence analysis, and teaching those processes to the students. The academic programs that produce these graduates are identified as “intelligence studies” programs, with a dual focus on both practice and theory. Graduates of these programs are considered “generalist” analysts in a specialist versus generalist typology.

As previously argued, “individual analysts possess varying cognitive strengths and weaknesses. As a senior (CIA Directorate of Intelligence or CIA/DI) analyst noted in an internal computer discussion in 1997, there may be two types of cognitive preferences not “mutually exclusive” that differentiate one kind of analyst from another: “Some people are better at … a broad range of issues, areas, and disciplines. These make the best current intelligence analysts because they generally are quick to learn an account. … In simple terms, these are the people who are good at crafting a coherent story from a jumble of seemingly disconnected parts. … Becoming an expert at this kind of analysis requires a great deal of experience. … An expert of this type needs to continuously cast a net over a greater range of evidence and then relate it.” He then goes on to add that it is better if this kind of analyst has experience on multiple accounts. Then he contrasts this expert generalist to “the other type of expert analyst … who concentrates on learning as much as possible about their [sic] chosen subject, area, or discipline. These are our specialists. They do the basic research, build our corporate knowledge base, and concentrate on depth rather than breadth. In the DDI's old days, managers called these analysts the “investors.” They put money in the bank account which the current intelligence analysts draw out to spend. … University study, technical training, language proficiency, and several years on an account are a necessity for developing the type of analytical expertise we need for our specialists.” ¹³

Both kinds of analysts provide valuable and complementary contributions to the production of finished intelligence analysis, but, as I have written elsewhere, the Intelligence Community has historically been

remarkably blind to differentiation in both analysis and analysts. … (I)nstead of differentiating between analysts [the intelligence community] uses a one-size-fits-all recruitment, placement, training, and promotion strategy, and for the most part views analysts as interchangeable. As a result it has perennially had difficulty creating an appropriate mix of analytic abilities and skills for intelligence production when an issue or crisis develops. ¹⁴

Most discussions regarding analytic improvement or reform emphasize the importance of the specialists and suggest ways to bolster their expertise or contributions. Yet, the important, and often underappreciated, role of the generalist analyst has not been sufficiently acknowledged or emphasized. ¹⁵

Of late, however, a focus on the generalist has emerged in academia, primarily through Intelligence Studies departments such as the one at Mercyhurst College in Pennsylvania that emphasize the education of analytic generalists. Mercyhurst's goal is to produce graduates who possess knowledge about the theory of Intelligence Studies, as well as proficiency in the practice of intelligence analysis. Some evidence indicates that the broader U.S. Intelligence Community values this approach; Mercyhurst has contracted with private sector firms connected to the IC such as Booz Allen Hamilton and Northrop Grumman to provide graduate-level certificates in Intelligence Studies to some of their selected employees. In addition, Mercyhurst has worked, in conjunction with the National Intelligence Council, on exploring the potential of wiki technology by having its students develop a wiki-based National Intelligence Estimate on the threat from infectious disease; ¹⁶ Mercyhurst faculty have developed courses on contract for the FBI's College of Analytical Studies, and also provide “train the trainer” courses to other IC entities regarding the teaching of Structured Analysis of Competing Hypotheses. ¹⁷

But Mercyhurst isn't the only college now emphasizing analytic education with an emphasis on the practical skill set. Other schools have developed Intelligence Studies programs recently or are in the process of developing them. For example, American Military University (AMU), an accredited online university which offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in Intelligence Studies, currently has over 3000 students enrolled in those programs. AMU has already established cooperative relationships with several military intelligence training schools, including the Army's intelligence training school at Fort Huachuca in Arizona. Intelligence Studies departments, programs, or concentrations have sprung up at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona, Notre Dame College in Ohio, Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, and James Madison University in Virginia, among others.

Not so long ago, the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence was able to document the total number of academic courses on intelligence being offered. At this point, doing so would be nearly impossible given the proliferation of courses over the past few years. This success is based on previous efforts to advance the study and teaching of intelligence in academia, but with that achievement comes the corresponding problem of trying to accurately describe this growing academic field.

Bringing Government and Academia Together

Differentiation between the U.S. government training and academic education has begun to fund the development of Intelligence Studies capabilities and programs in academia through the Intelligence Community Centers of Academic Excellence (IC/CAE) program. This program is intended to increase the cultural diversity of IC personnel by providing grants to colleges with diverse student populations to help create the infrastructure necessary to produce graduates with knowledge, skills, and abilities of value to the Intelligence Community. In 2005, the “maximum level of the grant awards [was] $750,000 per year with up to four option years based on the accomplishment of criteria and metrics.” ¹⁸

While the colleges and universities are not required to use the money to develop Intelligence Studies departments per se, at least a portion of the money has been used by the recipient institutions to increase their ability to teach intelligence-related subjects, including analysis. In 2006, IC/CAE held a workshop for academic programs on “Teaching Intelligence in America's Universities,” and in 2007 held a workshop titled “Partnering With America's Universities: Understanding the IC Critical Missions, Global Trends, National Security Challenges and Impacts.” Through these workshops, the IC/CAE program is able to provide representatives from many different colleges and universities with information about teaching intelligence, insight into the IC's current personnel requirements, and the kinds of knowledge, skills, and abilities that graduates should possess in order to get those jobs. Specifically, in terms of analytic training, the workshops also included presentations by CIA/Kent School instructors on how to teach intelligence analysis to students in academia. This IC/CAE program is essentially an effort on the part of the government to coordinate with academia in a way that would benefit both parties. But it is not the only such effort.

The International Association for Intelligence Education (IAFIE) is bringing government and academia (and training and education, and theory and practice) together as well. Created in 2004 as a mechanism to advance the teaching of intelligence, ¹⁹ IAFIE serves as a catalyst for the sharing of information about intelligence training and education for those currently practicing intelligence and those desiring to enter the field. As a result, those who teach intelligence in government and those who teach intelligence in academia are given an opportunity to exchange opinions on events or resources of mutual interest, course materials, pedagogy, and the like. Because IAFIE spans the national security, law enforcement, and competitive intelligence disciplines, it also provides a venue for cross-fertilization among them. As of late 2008, IAFIE had more than 500 members, representing numerous institutions across both government and academia.

While IC/CAE and IAFIE are working to bring the government and academia closer, at least in terms of teaching intelligence (with an emphasis on analysis), broader forces may foster additional changes.

PROFESSIONALIZING INTELLIGENCE ANALYSIS

Over the past few years the U.S. Intelligence Community has begun viewing analytic training in context of analytic professionalization. ²⁰ , ²¹ Intelligence analysis is both a craft and a profession: a craft because it requires mastery of a skill set that can be acquired only through practical experience, and a profession because much of the substantive knowledge that practitioners require can be transferred to new practitioners through a structured personnel process that includes an educational component. But, until now, intelligence analysis has been managed largely as a craft rather than as a profession. Because of this, intelligence analysis has neither well-defined systemic formal knowledge—such as a coherent doctrine or theory—nor standards that are formulated or enforced by other members of the profession. Knowledge regarding intelligence analysis methods has not been cumulative, and the various attempts to improve organizational performance have remained isolated from other efforts. No codified process for entry into the profession, standards in terms of educational requirements, professional development processes, or ways to accumulate and transfer knowledge from generation to generation currently exist. As a result, intelligence analysis as an occupation is not “all that it could be.” Therein begins the discussion about professionalization and improvement in the practice of intelligence analysis.

I have previously described how intelligence analysis appears to be spontaneously professionalizing. Specifically, the formal practices of a profession are being developed simultaneously along five different tracks: human capital management; training and education; certification and licensing; knowledge advancement; and ethics. The premise here is that for continued performance improvement, analytic training cannot be addressed absent a concern for other factors that affect both individual and organizational performance. The broader professionalization process is an effort to formalize some of these other factors.

To illustrate this argument, medicine can be used as a possible model for the professionalization of intelligence analysis. ²² Yet, medicine is perhaps the hardest case to make because it is arguably the most formal of all the professions, and it may provide an inappropriate standard. As a result, medicine should not be the only model considered. Rather, it provides a starting point for discussing the possible paths that the professionalization of intelligence analysis could take. Other professions, including education or journalism, may provide better models for the professionalization of intelligence analysis, particularly in terms of the profession's educational practices.

Regardless of the model or analogy chosen, however, the continued professionalization of intelligence analysis has implications for existing programs in both government and academia, in terms of training, education, and knowledge advancement.

Training and Education

Professionalization, in the context of both preemployment education and new analyst training, constitutes the establishment of standard operating procedures to be implemented by organizations in order to improve the quality of the final product. But, to convince others of the need to establish these more formal processes, their benefits need to be proven rather than merely asserted.

In training and education, the link is to practitioner proficiency. In order to be able to improve practitioner proficiency, analytic trainers must deconstruct the analytic process—to figure out what was going on, and how it could be improved—in order to teach anything of real use to the analyst. But knowing whether or not this kind of training actually improves practitioner proficiency, absent some kind of evaluative process, is not possible. To ensure a link between training and education in both government and academia, the benefits must be actualized, then proven.

In other professions, such as medicine, law, education, business, and journalism, preprofessional graduate-level educational programs provide prospective new entrants the necessary knowledge and skills to succeed as practitioners. But some professions—such as medicine and law—require and use that academic credential as a way to regulate the expertise of their practitioners. Mandatory preemployment educational requirements ensure that all prospective candidates are schooled and acculturated into that profession before they actually enter it. And these professions would not require this kind of preemployment education unless, in the aggregate, they lead to more proficient practitioners. Of course, exceptions are possible. Could someone become an effective lawyer or physician without going through those preprofessional programs? Certainly—through self-study or an apprenticeship, as was frequently done years ago. But those would now be the few exceptions rather than the rule. An educational requirement provides a formalized, regulated approach to the acquisition of the knowledge and skills required to do well in a profession, as well as a means of ensuring that practitioners possess at least a minimum expertise and proficiency.

Other professions—specifically education, business, and journalism—are somewhat less regulated. Their graduate level academic educational programs provide knowledge and contacts, but are not necessary for success as a practitioner. They might help, but not to the same degree that a graduate education does in medicine and law.

For intelligence analysis training and education programs to be incorporated fully into the professionalization process and thus required for all practitioners as they are in medicine and law, trainers and educators must be able to deconstruct the knowledge, skills, and abilities expected of the analyst, and build the educational infrastructure necessary to improve the analyst's performance. And if a link can be made between the educational program and increased proficiency, the grounds then exist to begin requiring that program for all practitioners. In the end, intelligence educators should prove that their intelligence and training programs produce a better intelligence analyst if they want their programs to be mandated as part of a professionalization process.

At the ODNI level, considerable efforts are going on to professionalize intelligence analysis, with training being incorporated into this process. For example, the ODNI staff has been developing analytic competencies and standards for the IC that will be initially incorporated into analytic training programs across the Community, and, if they prove successful, may eventually be incorporated into performance reviews and promotion decisions. ²³

In addition, the IAFIE's 2007 conference addressed the professionalization of intelligence, and its 2007 colloquium addressed the setting of standards for the teaching of intelligence. ²⁴ Discussions continue within the IAFIE about the possibility of turning it into an accrediting body for Intelligence Studies programs—the educational complement to practitioner discussions regarding analytic certification processes. Members of IAFIE have intensively discussed the role that it can play in terms of developing standards for certificate, undergraduate, and graduate programs in Intelligence Studies.

While a good argument can be made that such a function may be needed in the future, developing standards for programs that either train or educate analysts is premature. Instead, intelligence educators should reevaluate Intelligence Studies as an academic discipline with a discussion revolving around first principles such as purpose or value.

Yet, these IAFIE-derived discussions are a valuable component of the broader conversations going on within the Intelligence Community over how to professionalize its analytic corps through more formal personnel practices. The entity most responsible for the professionalization of medicine in the United States—the American Medical Association—was founded in 1847 out of a concern about unregulated medical schools and the poor training and education that some doctors were receiving therein. The AMA's initial goal was to “elevate the standard of medical education in the United States,” ²⁵ but, over time, its mission expanded to include other aspects of medical professionalism. With the AMA as an obvious model, the IAFIE is one organization that holds particular promise in contributing to the future professionalization of intelligence analysis.

Knowledge Advancement

Another aspect to professionalization overlaps intelligence education: knowledge advancement. Building knowledge about the field is an important part of any profession. For intelligence analysis to be considered as a profession, it must develop a unique and specific body of knowledge, to be taught to new entrants via a professional education process.

While an important component of an Intelligence Studies department is to prepare a student for entry into the occupation, an emphasis on the skill set of the analyst is not sufficient. The academic justification for the existence of Intelligence Studies is to provide greater knowledge and understanding of the field itself. And by creating coursework about the practice of intelligence and all that it involves … conventionally understood as “intelligence studies” … the transmission of this knowledge to students in courses about intelligence should provide them with a context that allows them to do well in the occupation over the long-term.

For example, courses built on the study of intelligence failure, intelligence ethics, intelligence oversight, and the comparative study of intelligence—each relying on the best scholarship residing in the intelligence literature—could provide graduates of an Intelligence Studies program with the conceptual foundation useful to them much later in their career. These courses should encapsulate the range of issues in the intelligence literature, and no Intelligence Studies program should exist without those kinds of courses.

In the end, the value of Intelligence Studies departments—whatever will make them unique from such other departments as national security studies, homeland security, and criminal justice—should come, not from the career aspirations of their students, but rather from the intelligence-specific knowledge offered by their faculty. And that knowledge should address issues about intelligence at a conceptual and theoretical level, in addition to the more process-oriented knowledge directly related to actually doing intelligence analysis.

Basically, a profession without its own unique body of knowledge is merely a craft masquerading as a profession. So, one implication that intelligence professionalization may have for intelligence education is the need to focus more attention on building a unique intelligence literature—in all of its forms—and making it more cumulative, i.e., a focus on theory as well as practice. This aspect can form the second part of an educator's contribution to the professionalization process—by advancing knowledge in the field through scholarship.

Both government and academia have so far contributed significantly to knowledge advancement in the field of Intelligence Studies. Until recently, the U.S. government has participated in this process mainly through the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence, and the NDIC through its Center for Strategic Intelligence Research. In addition, the primary venue for the development of academic intelligence studies scholarship in the United States—and perhaps the world—is the International Studies Association's Intelligence Studies Section (ISA/ISS). ISA/ISS, created in the mid-1980s by those in academia who study and teach intelligence, is where much of the intelligence studies literature is being developed and presented. The emphasis of ISA/ISS is on the contributions by its members and participants to the literature and scholarship on intelligence. Its members are primarily researchers or scholars (many of them active and retired professional intelligence officers and analysts) who reside in Political Science departments across the U.S., with a fair amount of participation from those in other countries, such as the United Kingdom, Israel, Canada, Sweden, and India. Currently, the ISA/ISS is engaged in an effort—as part of the broader ISA “Compendium Project”—to document all knowledge that has been thus far produced on Intelligence Studies. This involves the production of literature review essays covering twenty different topics drawn from the intelligence literature. The goal is to provide a single point of reference for scholars and graduate students who want to learn what has been written on a subject to date. ²⁶

Intelligence Studies programs and departments provide the potential to centralize these efforts and push them to the next level of graduate research capability. The NDIC's new Ph.D. program in Intelligence Studies is a step in the right direction, but for Intelligence Studies to acquire its own body of knowledge, the rest of academia and its graduate capabilities must follow suit. Currently, American Military University's Intelligence Studies department is considering creating a Ph.D. program, as are a few other schools. For a complete body of knowledge regarding intelligence analysis to develop, Intelligence Studies programs must feature a Ph.D. capability, with an emphasis on contributing to, and learning from, the cumulative body of knowledge.

Within this framework, the benefits of Intelligence Studies departments in academia are threefold. First, such departments centralize knowledge about the theory and practice of intelligence as a profession, and as such can provide this knowledge to government, other parts of academia, the news media, and other segments of society in a more structured way than has been done in the past. Second, the knowledge resident in these departments—in the form of knowledgeable professors, staffs, libraries, and the other infrastructure of the department—provides the optimal learning experience for those who want to learn more about or enter the intelligence profession. And third, the graduates of such departments—educated in the roles and responsibilities of intelligence analysts vis–à–vis other government functions, and trained in the requisite skill set—fill a need for generalist analysts that the Intelligence Community and its private sector contractors require.

Professionalizing Intelligence Training and Education

The community of intelligence educators has traditionally been divided into two camps, frequently described as training versus education, or otherwise as the practitioners versus the scholars. The members of those two camps sometimes have difficulty seeing eye-to-eye on issues relating to teaching intelligence. Since professionalization entails formal practices that relate to both the knowledge and skills of prospective practitioners, as well as knowledge advancement, the professionalization framework may well provide a neutral ground where the contributions of each—the practitioner and the scholar—can be recognized and encouraged.

In the end, the professionalization of intelligence analysis will change what intelligence educators do in two different ways: they will be required to do a better job proving that the programs produce better analysts, especially if their efforts are to become a required part of the professionalization process. And they will be required to work harder at creating a cumulative literature that provides the conceptual and theoretical foundation for the emergence of a more formal and improved intelligence profession.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stephen Marrin

Stephen Marrin is Assistant Professor in the Intelligence Studies Department at Mercyhurst College, Erie, Pennsylvania, and Program Cochairman of the Intelligence Studies Section of the International Studies Association. Formerly an analyst with the Central Intelligence Agency, he later served with the Government Accountability Office.