Global Security and Intelligence Studies Volume 2, Issue 1, Fall 2016 | Page 18

Global Security and Intelligence Studies
could be construed to some degree as training. But I think at the end of the
day, because those are problem-solving skill sets, they really still are pretty
much in the education basket.
They [methods courses] are somewhat related to stuff that’s in Structured
Analytic Techniques…but, for example, hypothesis testing is a course, and
it’s not ACH [Analysis of Competing Hypotheses], it’s hypothesis testing,
it’s a more fundamental approach...
I don’t…consider [any offerings] training in nature only because we can’t
teach tradecraft in our open source courses…they’ll teach of course critical
thinking techniques…these are all things that are all open source and
nothing specific to tradecraft training.
We go into the theoretical side of critical thinking…we teach critical
thinking almost as if it’s the scientific method…they get that background
and then when they’re doing the case studies that we teach them, we’re
always adding different material that has a theoretical basis that you
wouldn’t see in a training course.
An educator from a university that had received Intelligence Community
Centers for Academic Excellence (ICCAE) funding told us that while their program
began teaching SATs on their own, they received signals and guidance from the ICCAE
program office on the inclusion of SATs in academic courses. The respondent found the
ICCAE workshops and seminars extremely helpful. Other ICCAE events for intelligence
educators served to encourage the establishment of additional academic programs.
Writing and communicating competently for a professional intelligence context
was another area that a number of our respondents addressed, in some cases with
the IC explicitly stating its importance to program directors. One respondent told us
simply that intelligence agencies want people who know how to write well—a challenge
many educators are probably well aware of. The building of these competencies was
a frequent focus across programs. This included a current intelligence briefing club
explicitly modeled on IC practice (this became a course), an express focus in each class
on intelligence writing, and the completion of “real intelligence type work” that can
include written and oral briefings for actual consumers in various sectors. Some of
those we spoke with differentiated academic programs on the basis of the role accorded
to writing for professional intelligence uses.
A number of other instructional areas were identified when we asked what
programmatic aspects were considered to be associated with training and tradecraft.
This included coursework in open source intelligence, security operations and
management, counterintelligence, financial investigations, intelligence collection and
collection management, and cyber operations. But, these areas, like SATs and critical
thinking, were often mentioned with similar caveats.
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