CURRENT STATE 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.
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
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