Intelligence Studies versus Intelligence School and Implications for IAFIE

Email sent via IAFIE listserv

6 July 2008

From: Marrin, Stephen

Subject: [members] Intell Studies v Intell School and Implications for IAFIE
Date: Sunday, 6 July, 2008, 15:43

Using the ideas in the previous email (below on "Learning the Lessons of All-Source Intell
Analysis") re: the Reece’s Peanut Butter Cup analogy, below is the outline of the presentation I
was planning to give at the IAFIE conference but was not able to because of time considerations.
I am sending it out now to elicit thought/discussion re: intell education; please consider it a
'working paper' since it will likely be adapted for publication in the near future....
 
The general theme is the differentiation I’m making between intelligence studies and intelligence
school, and what that might mean in terms of degree granting programs in academia and the
implications for IAFIE both as an association as a possible future player in intelligence education
certification processes….
 
The caveat on the front end is that I am speaking mostly to the US national security community
that teaches or studies analysis from the perspective of colleges and universities. How this plays
out in terms of people from other countries, other disciplines (law enforcement, business), other
specialties (the various –INTs, counterintelligence, etc), and those who teach to either intell
studies or practitioner proficiency from the perspective of governmental training programs
or private sector firms (ie. Pherson Associates; Lowenthal's Intelligence and Security
Academy) will have to be addressed by those who are more immersed in those communities…
 
At the end of the long email/presentation are a series of questions; please consider them as
possible points to discuss via the listserv or at future conferences...
Regards,
Stephen Marrin
 
 
INTELLIGENCE STUDIES
As specified in the previous email, I consider intelligence studies to be the study and
understanding of the intelligence processes themselves. It began as an academic complement to
the practice of national security intelligence; the contribution that higher education has made to
interpreting its past, understanding its present and planning for its future. This intelligence
studies literature—which is quite large, and growing—has historically been produced in political
science or history departments, with additional contributions from a handful of publication
venues within government. In the mid-1980s, a new section was created at the International
Studies Association, called the Intelligence Studies Section. That section provided a single focal
point for research on the subject and brought together scholars from different disciplines to talk
about intelligence.  I don’t think intelligence studies would exist in the form it is today without
the presence of the Intelligence Studies Section at ISA.  And out of these conversations,
intelligence studies as an academic discipline was born. Sort of (and there I defer to Bill
Spracher on the ways that intell studies is….and is not…an academic discipline).
 
While many people read the words “literature” or “scholarship” as the touchstone of the
irrelevant academic, in the case of intelligence studies those who do are blinded by their own
biases and misconceptions. While some literatures are truly ivory-tower-ish, others have direct
applicability to practitioners. In an academic sense, the intelligence studies scholarship is much
closer to practice than it is to theory. Many of the participants in Intelligence Studies panels at
ISA are current or former intelligence practitioners; those with one foot in government and one
foot in academia. Which is good, because it keeps the field much more relevant to practice than
the more abstract or theoretical strains of the political science or international relations
literatures.
 
Optimally, an intelligence analysis literature will contain the conceptual and contextual
understandings of all the various aspects that relate to intelligence analysis. Even though some
aspects of intelligence analysis….particularly substance…should remain classified, other aspects
—particularly those related to the processes involved in DOING analysis—can and should be
unclassified. Think of the literature as a knowledge repository; it is where you can go to find out
what people have learned about intelligence analysis so far. Many of the contributors to this body
of knowledge are either current or former practitioners; their goal was not to create abstractions
for the purposes of navel-gazing, but rather to conceptualize the function of intelligence in such a
way as to make its practice easier to manage and improve. For that reason alone, the literature on
intelligence analysis is crucial….absolutely crucial….for knowledge aggregation and
accumulation to occur.
 
The mechanism for ensurign that scholarship is relevant to practitioners is through translators on
both sides; those on the academic side who can translate the concepts into practical
recommendations, and those on the practitioner side who can adapt the concepts and
recommendations into practical programs, policies, and processes. Of course, not every
practitioner cares about scholarship or theory, but enough do to make the intersection of
government and academic intelligence studies a lively one…
 
Anyway, the point is that intelligence studies as a conventional academic discipline is a work in
progress, and its center in terms of activity is ISA’s Intelligence Studies Section.
 
In terms of teaching intelligence studies to students, the value in a liberal arts context at an
undergraduate level is primarily familiarization; to provide the students with some understanding
of what intelligence is, and what it has done. It provides concepts and context for students who
think of intelligence as James Bond or Get Smart.  For those students who go on to do other
things, it has provided them with an understanding of what this thing called intelligence is, so
that they can be informed citizens whenever news or controversy related to intelligence breaks
into the public mainstream.
 
However, these kinds of courses also provide a necessary dose of additional information for
those who might be interested in actually becoming intelligence officers or intelligence analysts.
And that’s more or less the path I took to get into the CIA; in 1994 I took an undergraduate
course at Colgate University that was about the US intelligence community. Courses such as
those provide the students with knowledge *about* the subject that can be useful when they go
out and get jobs *doing* the work of intelligence officers. 
 
These kinds of courses also have the potential to provide students with useful frameworks for
thinking about the kind of work they will be engaged in when they actually enter the field as
practitioners. For example, thinking about analytic techniques in a social science methodology
context; or the inevitability of intelligence failure—and the reasons failure will be inevitable—as
per Richard Betts’ work; or even an understanding of the role that information and intelligence
analysis might play in decisionmaking. For example, Harvard’s Intelligence and Policy Program
was an effort to provide this kind of conceptual framework for senior intelligence community
managers as drawn from a strain of the intelligence studies literature (sort of). The same benefit
in terms of conceptualizing and contextualizing the work of intelligence can be provided to
prospective intelligence officers as they work through their experiences in academia as well….
 
But these courses usually do not provide students with exercises useful in the practice of
intelligence. Sometimes professors in graduate-level security studies courses have exercises in
the production of policy papers or white papers as a way for the student to gain some proficiency
in terms of the kinds of writing or thinking required of a practitioner. But purely developing
practitioner proficiency is not the goal of intelligence studies; rather, the emphasis is on
conceptualization and contextualization of the study of intelligence itself.
 
Traditionally, as per ISA’s Intelligence Studies Section, this kind of intelligence studies
coursework was taught in a liberal arts context, while most knowledge that was applied in nature
was taught in training programs by the government itself. But that is beginning to change. An
alternate model to intelligence studies in a liberal arts context is what I’m calling intelligence
school….
 
INTELLIGENCE SCHOOL
Recently, a number of academic programs have been developed with an applied orientation; to
produce practitioners with the knowledge, skills and abilities required for entry into the
intelligence community as analysts. The goal of these programs is practitioner proficiency; for
the student to learn a body of knowledge before going out to do that work. Proficiency could
involve skills related to researching, analytic methods or techniques, writing,
presentation/briefing, and so on. I’m not convinced that there is much value in adding particular
kinds of software familiarization (other than the basic Word/Powerpoint/excel package) or
analytic tools to this set of skills (particular in a higher education vice for profit training center
context) but am willing to debate the issue….
 
Intelligence schools would be those that emphasize this pre-professional knowledge and skillset
– like medical school, law school, business school, schools of education or journalism, or even
nursing – or any of a number of academic schools or departments that are pre-professional in
nature.  The emphasis is on preparing the student for a career in that field. And from the
student’s perspective, the existence of intelligence schools provides a very workable educational
option for those who self-identify early as interested in entering the intelligence 'profession.
 
But there are different kinds of intelligence schools, at different degree levels. What role does an
undergraduate pre-professional degree play vis a vis a graduate pre-professional degree? Is there
a differentiation here – paralegal at the undergraduate versus a lawyer at the graduate level? Or a
nurse at the undergraduate level versus a doctor at the graduate level?  Or are they equivalent
degrees in terms of practitioner proficiency? For example, if you have a 4-year undergraduate
intelligence school; is the student who makes it through that program at the same level of
proficiency as the graduate of a 2-year graduate program? How do you evaluate proficiency, and
is it linked to the degree?
 
So far, the answer is that no proficiency instruments exist, and proficiency is not linked to level
of degree. But I think in general you can assume that the bulk of the graduate students will be
more proficient than all but the most proficient undergrads. So perhaps it is…or will be…
possible to make a distinction in terms of practitioner proficiency based on the degree acquired.
But it is going to take a while; we are going to have to walk carefully through a credentialing
process that is linked to practitioner proficiency in order to get there….
 
Given where we are, how should hiring authorities address the expertise acquired in intelligence
schools? Should they accept, for example, some of the courses as equivalent to what is taught in
their own training courses? Should graduates of these intelligence schools be placed out of
certain training courses by virtue of the degree they possess? And—over the long term--should
government agencies look to these kinds of intelligence schools as an opportunity to outsource
some of their skills-development training programs?
 
The big question here is: How should the intersection of pre-professional intelligence education
and the world of practice actually function?
 
If intelligence schools and their degrees are eventually going to be accepted as a legitimate
feeder stream into the intelligence community, they are going to have to make the case that their
graduates meet and even exceed basic baseline proficiency standards in the intelligence
community. If they cannot or will not do that, then they will never gain widespread acceptance
from hiring authorities. But if they can make that case, the long term vision might involve the
eventual outsourcing to the educational community the initial evaluation of prospective entrants
into the field. In other words, the student will have to graduate from intelligence school first in
order to get a job in the intelligence community.
 
That vision may be a long time in coming, but intelligence schools need to build the foundation
necessary to get there if it is to be realized. And at that point, we can talk about the creation of a
professional doctoral intelligence degree program as the intelligence equivalent to a JD or MD.
But we are years….probably decades….away from when that kind of degree will make sense.
 
Until that time comes, working to ensure that intelligence schools are able to teach their
graduates how to become more proficient, documenting that proficiency and working with the
government to compare/contrast proficiency of graduates in academia to those in government,
and eventually distinguishing undergraduate from graduate proficiency will be good first
steps….
Intell Studies Versus Intell School
 
So now we have two models of intelligence education; one I am calling intelligence
studies….that is generally taught in a liberal arts context….and the other is a pre-professional
intelligence school.
 
While proponents of each approach like to view their own model as better than the other, that
self-promotion may just be a combination of ego and a certain amount of parochialism. In
reality, neither approach is any better than the other. There are strengths and weaknesses to both
approaches, and they are best used in combination for maximum benefit.
 
For example, in a recent discussion one observer questioned “the wisdom of relying too much on
undergraduate programs of intelligence studies.” This person goes on to say that “A number of
schools have started intelligence studies majors or concentrations for undergraduates. While I
think that they can fill part of the need for (intelligence community) personnel, I think that it
would be a mistake to let those programs dominate (intelligence community) hiring. They have
the potential to add to the problem of too much intellectual uniformity in the (intelligence
community). Some could also end up doing more vocational training than educating.
Intellectually vibrant and valuable students are going to be interested in all sorts of different
things out there in the world, not just how to do intelligence analysis.”
 
This commentary is an important one, for it highlights something that has to be pointed out:
different educational programs serve different purposes, and the intelligence community needs to
take advantage of all of them.
 
As I pointed out at the meeting that led to the founding of IAFIE, the intelligence school
approach provides a pathway for one kind of student to enter the intelligence community, but the
establishment of that pathway should not do anything to change the more idiosyncratic path that
many people take before entering the intelligence community. The others in the room gave a
name to this idea: the value of the 'meandering' approach. So let me make a distinction here
about the value of intelligence studies versus intelligence school. And that is….
 
Maybe intelligence school should be considered a finishing school for generalists, and
intelligence studies is familiarization with intelligence for everyone else. There are different
kinds of analysts. And maybe they need different kinds of educations.
 
Real subject matter experts—the specialists--are the anchors of the intelligence community. They
have deep knowledge of the subject matter; the language, the culture, the history, and—in the
best case—have lived in the areas that they are subject matter experts on. They provide a
conceptual value added to the intelligence analysis product; a depth of knowledge that goes
beyond the raw intelligence itself. These kinds of specialists should probably not go through
intelligence school; they should spend their time gaining additional knowledge and expertise.
But intelligence studies courses providing concept and context might also provide value for
specialists; to give them the kind of foundation that will prove to be useful for them later on in
their careers.
 
The generalists who work in the intelligence community, on the other hand, might have some
language ability, some knowledge of culture, some knowledge of history, but their real role in
the process is to highlight issues that are of interest to US decisionmakers….to provide
decisionmakers with the best *intelligence* available on the subject, not necessarily the best
interpretation of that intelligence because they don’t necessarily have the depth of knowledge or
expertise to provide that step back assessment. But they do serve a very important purpose.  
 
And that purpose…and what they need to know and what they need to do…is different from
what a specialist needs to know and what a specialist needs to do. So maybe the education they
need should be different as well. Maybe intelligence school is the best educational foundation for
the core group of generalists who do much of the analytic grunt-work in the intelligence
community.
 
So maybe in the end what you have is a graduated educational system based on the role of each
individual in the process. Intelligence school at the undergraduate level will provide the analytic
support; the kind of people that CIA used to call intelligence assistants. These assistants can
support intelligence analysts, who are either generalists who have graduated from a graduate
intelligence school, or specialists who have taken a meandering path into the community, and
then gone through an internal training program that the intelligence school graduates placed out
of.
 
Or at least that’s one vision for how the future might eventually turn out….

PEANUT BUTTER AND CHOCOLATE?

 
In the meantime, I think it might not be a bad idea to use what I believe is a Reece’s Peanut
Butter Cup approach…Intelligence studies is one way to go; good on its own. Sort of like peanut
butter. And intelligence school is another way to go; also good on its own. Sort of like chocolate.
And each is fine on its own. But maybe there is another way to go….both intelligence studies
and intelligence school together. Like a Reece’s Peanut Butter Cup. The combination of
intelligence studies and intelligence school in one place.
 
Of course, combining the two might be complicated. It would require the equivalent of a matrix
management approach to expertise in an academic context, which is something that might be
hard to accomplish… What it would take would be faculty knowledgeable about intelligence
studies within their respective departments….history, political science, anthropology, criminal
justice, business and so on….who can teach intelligence studies courses in those disciplines to
students who are enrolled in intelligence school programs. That way the educational institution
can meet the needs of both sets of students….the liberal arts students AND the pre-professional
students…using appropriate knowledge, expertise and credentials as it does so. This way, a
graduate of an intelligence school might also be able to approximate depth of knowledge by
leaning on the other strengths in the academic program.
 
If you are able to combine intelligence studies and intelligence school, you will be able to
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
segments of society in a more structured way than has been done in the past. You will also be
able to provides the optimal learning experience for those who want to learn more about—or
enter—the intelligence profession because of the knowledge that resides in these departments—
in the form of knowledgeable professors, staffs, libraries and the other infrastructure. And
finally, the graduates of this kind of combined program—educated in the roles and
responsibilities of intelligence vis a vis other government functions, and trained in the requisite
skill set-- fill a need for generalist analysts that the intelligence community and its contractors
require.
 
The benefit of this kind of combined program is that it would also be able to provide ready
knowledge and research capacity for the government to acquire on an as-needed basis. While it is
important for the government to retain a classified library and research arm for security purposes,
much knowledge about intelligence community structures and processes is revealed in a large
and growing unclassified literature. Academics—whose knowledge is acquired by mastery of
this literature—could be a wonderful resource for intelligence analysts and managers to tap for
ideas, policy suggestions, and research performed on a contract basis.
 
IMPLICATIONS FOR IAFIE AS AN ACCREDITING OR CERTIFYING BODY
 
So what I’m saying here is that there are two kinds of intelligence education….intelligence
studies and intelligence school. And that complicates the role of IAFIE as a standards-setting,
accrediting, or certifying body. What works in one context may not work in the other. And—
complicating matters further—I’ve been talking mostly about national security and the fit of
intelligence education to the needs of the national-level intelligence community. If you factor in
law enforcement intelligence and business intelligence, the discussions get much more
complicated.
 
So my bottom line assessment is that its too early for IAFIE to create and enforce standards or
certification processes. We don’t know yet what should be required, what should be
recommended, and what should be eliminated from either intelligence studies courses or
intelligence schools. Mostly that is because we have not yet linked the content of either approach
in intelligence education to the knowledge, skills or abilities required for the appropriate
education or training of a proficient intelligence practitioner. And that might not even be an
appropriate criterion to use to evaluate intelligence studies, which may have a less tangible but
no less important value. 
 
Anyway, as Paul Cooke had pointed out previously through the IAFIE listserv, “a credential is
nothing more than a starting point, not the ending…. Just because a report is drafted by a
"professional" doesn't mean the report is worth the paper it is printed on.” In other words,
credentialing should reflect the underlying quality of the professional product, or the quality of
the person producing the product. But credentialing in and of itself does not mean anything….
 
My argument here is that rather than spend time trying to come up with some kind of formal
articulation of standards or ways that IAFIE could become an accrediting or certifying body, we
should first identify what it is that intelligence education programs accomplish, and then evaluate
how well they are meeting those goals. Before we can develop standards or certify practices, we
have to figure out what the purposes of the different kinds of intelligence education are, and how
to evaluate them.
 
At this point going forward, we should spend our time focusing on the variety of possible
substantive issues that can be explored in either intelligence studies or intelligence school....and
talk about the best ways to teach this content to students. Experimentation in terms of
intelligence education is a good thing. Variety is good; essentially, let all flowers
bloom. Artificially restricting any aspect of intelligence education absent some sort of evidence
that demonstrates it is a better way is—I believe--harmful at this stage in the development of the
field. But then--at the same time--begin the processs of evaluating the output of the various
institutions.....
 
And here, as a way to end this discussion but perhaps begin a new one, are a series of questions
that I think would be a productive way to engage the kinds of conversations that will be helpful
going forward:
 
In terms of intelligence studies, at the undergraduate level, what is an appropriate introduction to
the literature in the field? And which literature? How much should we rely on textbooks to
introduce students to the field of intelligence? Or should we be introducing students directly to
the work of Sherman Kent, Roger Hilsman, Michael Handel, and other important contributors to
the intelligence scholarship? Some combination? Essentially, this is the trade off between a
textbook-based approach to familiarization of concept versus learning directly from the main
contributors themselves….

And at the graduate level, do you require a Masters thesis that examines one aspect of the
research questions prevalent in the intelligence literature? Or what about a comprehensive exam
as an option instead of the thesis? If you do have a comprehensive exam, is it a comprehensive
summary of idiosyncratic programmatic content?  Or is it a comprehensive exam of the kind I
took for my PhD – an exam to assess mastery of the literature in the field, as defined by the
scholars in that field? And if you do head in that direction, through what venue do you create an
appropriate comprehensive exam reading list? ISA/Intelligence Studies Section?  What about
IAFIE?  Or an overlap between the two? How do you create an intelligence studies
comprehensive exam that means anything if you haven't engaged those scholars who are known
for their knowledge of intelligence studies?  
 
In terms of intelligence school, rather than nursing at the undergraduate and medical doctor at the
graduate, should the emphasis be pre-med at the undergraduate level and medical doctor at the
graduate? In other words, should the undergraduate experience be best used to acquaint the
student with core knowledge that he or she should know if they enter the profession, but not to
start the process of developing practitioner proficiency? Or does the nurse/doctor differentiation
work?
 
Maybe a better model altogether—not medicine or law—is Georgetown ’s School of Foreign
Service . It has a very specific purpose; preparing its students for the foreign service. But you
don’t HAVE to graduate from Georgetown ’s School of Foreign Service to work for the State
Department. Although graduating from Georgetown can make entering the foreign service
easier, and perhaps one could make the case that its graduates are better prepared to enter the
foreign service….
 
So maybe we shouldn’t get wrapped around the axle in terms of thinking about professional
standards or certifications, but rather just keep things simple and oriented on developing
practitioner proficiency while at the same time trying to work with intelligence community
officials to ensure that the content of intelligence schools is actually synched up with the
entrance requirements into the field….
 
Finally--and perhaps worth much additional discussion--if a doctoral degree in intelligence is
created, what should it look like? Should it be a professional doctorate, like a JD or MD? Absent
knowledge of graduate proficiency, would a professional doctorate mean anything to hiring
authorities? Or should the doctorate under consideration be a PhD...a Doctorate of
Philosophy….an academic degree? If the latter, how do you justify its creation in terms of
unique value added vis a vis other bodies of knowledge or pre-existing academic disciplines? 
What makes an intell studies PhD different from any other PhD degree program? This is a key
question for distinguishing intelligence studies from other fields of knowledge. Is intelligence
studies unique enough to separate it from security studies or foreign policy analysis or
organizational theory or whatever the theoretical or disciplinary base is?