Global Security and Intelligence Studies Volume 2, Issue 1, Fall 2016 | Page 19

Academic Intelligence Programs in the United States
Discussion
Now that we have discussed training and tradecraft as conceptualized and
practiced in the IC, as well as the views and practices of intelligence educators
in U.S. colleges and universities, we will discuss what facets of training and
tradecraft academic programs can address. We are guided by intelligence educators’
input and more generally what comfortably seems to fit in the educational realm. In this
way, the new class of U.S. intelligence programs may move closer to realizing their full
contribution to higher education and the IC. By considering what facets, and in what
measure, can be broached in an academic setting, we also move closer to populating the
instructional areas that may be used to transfer some content from IC training to higher
education, as James G. Breckenridge has suggested.
As we have seen, analytic tradecraft, in practice, has been found to be idiosyncratic
(Johnston 2005) and more extensive analytic training in the IC is still a relatively recent,
limited, and flawed phenomenon (Bruce and George 2015; Campbell 2011; Chang and
Tetlock 2016; Marrin 2003; 2009). Additionally, the practice of intelligence analysis
shares key characteristics with social science methodology (Johnston 2005; Office of
the Director of National Intelligence 2015). This all suggests that analytic training and
tradecraft may not be so specialized, or frankly, special, and not necessarily beyond the
capacity of academic programs. And as we have seen, some programs and educators
have embraced training and tradecraft, and several in our sample said some programs
have fully crossed into that territory. As one educator told us, exemplifying what was
certainly one of the most training-oriented approaches:
The idea is that what we wanted to produce was somebody who had the
skills to actually produce intel…it’s like an engineering program…we
provide our students with the tools that they need for their toolkit, we give
them the practical experience, and when they graduate they walk out the
door and they’re ready to build intelligence…
SATs seem to have taken on a noticeable role in academic intelligence programs,
often with an emphasis on the social science techniques that underpin them. This
seems like an especially ripe area for the IC and higher education to cooperate around
in order to design a more purposive approach to teaching students these techniques
and their foundations. This would not only promote a deeper understanding of SATs,
and continually reinforce that understanding, but could also help support a better
shared understanding of SATs and address issues that both trainers and educators find
problematic. On this latter point, IC trainers will, in certain cases, be apprehensive about
the tradecraft instruction students are receiving, and could be well-served by a voice in
that instruction. This may be somewhat attenuated by the reality that many instructors
in intelligence programs and courses are former intelligence professionals (Smith 2013).
Conversely, the shortcomings and blind spots of SATs can be more explicitly recognized
and covered. This would—and does—also afford an opportunity to demonstrate and
teach the practical importance of rigorous social science methods, countering both the
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