Advancing the intelligence profession: the case for accreditation

Established professions tend to have their identity grounded in the educational outcomes that define the academic degrees that, in turn, tend to be required prior to practice. Mature professions have their own worldview, priorities, culture, research methods, body of knowledge and perhaps some sort of occupational barrier to entry such as licensure. Intelligence, as a core national security enterprise is not new; however, as a sovereign profession, one could argue it is emergent. Its emergent in part due to its nature; that is, much like medicine, intelligence studies is a “meta-discipline” in that it includes, leverages, incorporates, synergizes with sundry other disciplines such as area studies, anthropology, economics, languages, engineering, geography, history, military sciences, political science, psychology, and sociology and more recently data analytics. Practicing analysts apply logic, methodologies, if not strategies gleaned from these and other academic disciplines to support decision makers in national security, law enforcement, emergency management, business, and non-governmental settings. With the aim of advancing intelligence as a profession, this presentation will claim that intelligence can be defined around education outcomes, will show that a credible set of education outcomes already exists, and lays out an argument for program level accreditation in academic intelligence studies programs that will act as both an external peer review of intelligence programs, but could also act to sanctify bona fide intelligence programs from those programs that are not accredited as it does in other, mature professions such as medicine, law, engineering, nursing, etc.