Educating the GEOINT Professional
EDUCATING THE GEOINT PROFESSIONAL
Academia has a responsibility to contribute to the community within
which the geospatial intelligence professional learns and serves.
Meeting this responsibility means engaging the IC
to influence the GEOINT profession.
By Todd S. Bacastow and Dennis J. Bellafiore
Academia has a responsibility to contribute to the community within
which the geospatial intelligence professional learns and serves.
Meeting this responsibility means engaging the IC
to influence the GEOINT profession.
By Todd S. Bacastow and Dennis J. Bellafiore
The intelligence community's failure to accurately assess the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction program raises serious questions about our preparation of those applying the analytic tradecraft. While the causes of this failure are certainly many, the Senate Intelligence Committee's report focused on the problem of groupthink.
As educators, we share in this failure, since we educated the failed analyst. Given the consequences of intelligence failures, it is academia's societal responsibility to engage the IC and contribute to the community within which the geospatial intelligence professional learns and serves. Meeting this responsibility means engaging the IC to influence the GEOINT profession.
However, the IC is not without its responsibilities. The community needs to become acquainted with academia in more than a research role-it needs to become acquainted with the educational role. To support this, the IC needs to make available unclassified data, case studies, speakers and information about relevant technologic trends, thinking and doctrine to support the education of the GEOINT professional.
During a recent panel discussion of university GEOINT certificate programs, a member of the audience commented how important such educational programs are, since deploying government civilians authorized to wear uniforms frequently "didn't know how to properly wear them." Is it academia's role to teach someone how to properly wear ACUs?
Academia's role, in addition to research and development, is education. Having said this, the word training is used most frequently when discussing the preparation of the GEOINT professional. But what does it really mean, and what is the distinction between training and education?
David Noble, a noted critical historian of education, has argued that training involves the honing of a person's mind so that it can be used for the purposes of someone other than that person. Learning how to properly wear ACUs is training; in a geospatial context, the analyst learning which buttons to push to perform an overlay analysis with specific GIS software is also training.
Training in this example entails a divorce from any knowledge of the spatial sciences and considerations of the application and the context of the use. In training, knowledge is a set of skills designed to be put to use only in a context determined by someone other than the trained person. In this framework the assertion of self is not only counterproductive, it is disruptive-like the individual wearing the ACU shirt tucked into the trousers. Further, when conducting training, the simplifications and assumptions made to create a pre-determined context are maximized to reduce complexity and possible confusion. In other words, training teaches a simplified, fixed approach within a predetermined context.
Education is orthogonal to training in that it entails not the disassociation but the utter integration of knowledge, the self and the context. Here knowledge is defined by the self and the situation and, in turn, helps one to understand the self and the context of the situation. Education allows us to use GEOINT products to understand how things like demographics-as well as the culture, or "human terrain"-influence a population. Education is more complex since the contextual assumptions are minimized, which increases complexity and possible confusion; outcomes tend not to be concrete.
So in a general sense, education is about learning for oneself and dealing with the complex, and training is about learning for the sake of someone else and dealing with the simplified general circumstance. Education opens the individual to an understanding that he or she can use to process, filter, channel or focus information about an out-of-the-ordinary situation.
Education and training are very different things, and within structured organizations, such as the military, there can be a conflict between the two. Training is conducted not only to improve task proficiency, but also to produce greater dedication, decisiveness, loyalty and leadership. Education is sometimes perceived to foster questioning that jeopardizes an on-task work force. From the opposite point of view, education is held to develop independent and original thought. This is not to suggest that education and training cannot occur simultaneously within structured organizations. But it is to say that highly structured organizations tend to focus more on training than education.
GEOINT Professionalism
Preventing intelligence failures like WMD has been a major factor for defining a GEOINT profession to govern the work and describe the knowledge. The U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation's (USGIF) accreditation efforts are an important and concrete indication of the emergence of GEOINT as a profession. Academic programs have long supported GEOINT R&D in electrical engineering, computer engineering, computer science, geography, civil engineering and geospatial sciences, but only recently has the USGIF's leadership highlighted academia's role in developing the GEOINT professional in the areas of intellect, attitude and ethics.
What is a GEOINT professional? There appears to be no adequate definition since the field is too new and too broad. Some insight is provided by the Geographic Information Science and Technology Body of Knowledge (GISTBoK), which defines some of the knowledge requirements of geospatial professional.
In a sense, the GISTBoK is a flexible form of regulation that acknowledges and accommodates a diversity of skills and viewpoints within the community. The USGIF Certificate Curriculum Guidelines apply a GISTBoK-like approach to standardize GEOINT competencies, and use many of the GISTBoK's competencies.
Given the scope of the USGIF Accreditation Standards, the major functions of the GEOINT profession are the collection, management, manipulation and analysis of geographic information. Saying this another way, the GEOINT professional is a "knowledge worker" or "symbol analyst" (a term used by the U.S. Department of Labor) who carries out multi-step operations, manipulates abstract and complex symbols and ideas, acquires new information efficiently, and remains flexible enough to recognize change.
The process by which a profession arises illustrates where GEOINT is in the process, the importance of the USGIF Certificate Curriculum Guidelines, and academia's role. Professions typically start with the establishment of a full-time occupation, progress through the establishment of training schools and educational links, the formation of a professional organization, and culminating with the development of an accepted attitude or a formal code of ethics.
Professions are usually regulated by professional bodies that may set examinations of competence and enforce adherence to an ethical code of practice. The USGIF's accreditation efforts are a necessary step in the emergence of GEOINT as a profession. The question is less clear-cut as to academia's role given the far-reaching efforts of the National Geospatial-Intelligence (NGA) College.
Successful knowledge work requires intensive study, practice and commitment. Professionalism in the area calls for a broad experience and understanding. The individual who is only interested in technology, important as it is, is therefore not fully a GEOINT professional. Nor is the technical expert ipso facto a GEOINT professional. Most significantly, a profession also has a responsibility in the functioning of society, and its members work as an association or community that governs the application of skills and knowledge.
To raise the level of professionalism-indeed, to establish GEOINT as a profession at all, rather than little more than a technical tradecraft-GEOINT needs to establish the intellectual and ethical standards that gauge the quality of one's thinking. Attitude and a code of ethics are important since professions have a high degree of control of their own affairs and exercise their professional judgment.
Academia's contribution is to develop the self-knowledge, ethical foundation and attitude that opens the GEOINT analyst to the possibilities for individual decisions-in other words, an attitude that is not conducive to groupthink. Academia is also responsible for the "scholar" side of the "warrior-scholar" equation. This is a lesson we should not forget in light of the fact that the new and apparently successful counterinsurgency doctrine being applied in Iraq is a product of a warrior-scholar, Army General David Petraeus, Ph.D.
Conveying technical knowledge of how to use a particular suite of software is important and cannot be minimized. But academia's role is first and foremost teaching the professional how to think for him or her self. What is taught is perhaps less important than the critical thinking skills the student is developing--thinking skills that will serve the GEOINT professional well in a wide spectrum of assignments, such as serving in human terrain teams, and in complex missions including humanitarian assistance, nation building and peace enforcement.
The Other Side of Academic Freedom
Few will take exception to the principle that academics should be free to inquire in any area they choose. We appreciate that forces compel institutions to be "socially acceptable"-to behave in a manner in order to reap the benefits of recognition, publication and funding. However, the responsibility of academia in the development of a knowledgeable and an ethical GEOINT profession needs to be weighed against the freedom to be socially acceptable.
The American Anthropology Association's recently expressed opposition to the involvement of academics in "human terrain" teams, or the reluctance of some academic institutions to support GEOINT programs, might seem to be making an important political statement. But in the long run academia is dodging its responsibility to define the attitude and ethics of the community within which the geospatial professional serves. Meeting this responsibility means engaging the IC with the goal to influence the GEOINT profession's thinking, vision, goals and objectives; it does not mean accepting the IC's point of view.
The responsibility is shared, and the IC is not without its potential contributions. To meet the challenge, the GEOINT community needs to recognize that academia is more than a research entity, and that is has a role in shaping the community. A small but significant step would be increased access to materials that support the education of the GEOINT professional. One educator's primary source of information about GEOINT is NGA's Pathfinder magazine; while a great public awareness publication, it is was not intended as a principal source of facts and data for educators. Educators need access to unclassified data, case studies, speakers and channels to information about relevant technologic trends, thinking and doctrine.
During the 2007 GEOINT Symposium, educators from the University of Utah, George Mason University, University of Missouri, Penn State University, Northwest Missouri State University, University of Redlands, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the Naval Postgraduate School met and organized a GEOINT Academic Special Interest Group (ASIG). The ASIG was formed to focus attention on the educational needs of the GEOINT professional. It is a venue for the interaction of practitioners, educators and others in the GEOINT community to advance the educator's knowledge, curricula, and the development of innovative concepts and pedagogy.
The group is the modest beginnings of addressing the opportunity and challenge of making academia and the IC partners in education. To do less puts our nation in jeopardy of repeating history.
As Sir William Butler, the 19th century British soldier and adventurer, wrote in 1891, "The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards." ♦
