Intelligence Education made in Europe

TL;DR

This paper advocates for harmonized European intelligence education, highlighting successful integration of interdisciplinary training, IT skills, and methodological learning, exemplified by cyber intelligence modules to foster a common understanding among European intelligence services.

Contribution

It demonstrates how joint intelligence education in Europe can succeed by adopting interdisciplinary, IT, and methodological approaches, based on the German experience and its transfer to the European level.

Findings

Successful transfer of German intelligence education model to Europe

Importance of interdisciplinarity, IT skills, and methodology in intelligence training

Cyber intelligence module enhances data-driven decision support

Abstract

Global conflicts and trouble spots have thrown the world into turmoil. Intelligence services have never been as necessary as they are today when it comes to providing political decision-makers with concrete, accurate, and up-to-date decision-making knowledge. This requires a common co-operation, a common working language and a common understanding of each other. The best way to create this "intelligence community" is through a harmonized intelligence education. In this paper, we show how joint intelligence education can succeed. We draw on the experience of Germany, where all intelligence services and the Bundeswehr are academically educated together in a single degree program that lays the foundations for a common working language. We also show how these experiences have been successfully transferred to a European level, namely to ICE, the Intelligence College in Europe. Our experience has shown that three aspects are particularly important: firstly, interdisciplinarity or better, transdisciplinarity, secondly, the integration of IT knowhow and thirdly, the development and learning of methodological skills. Using the example of the cyber intelligence module with a special focus on data-driven decision support, additionally with its many points of reference to numerous other academic modules, we show how the specific analytic methodology presented is embedded in our specific European teaching context.