Intelligence Analysis’ Individual Training: Towards New Approaches? How to Better-train Intelligence Analysts Through a Holistic Approach

The subject of intelligence analysis and its corollary, individual training in it, is a subject that is both complex and crucial. Paradoxically, however, it is one of the subjects on which there has been the least reflection and innovation in France, except via an academic approach or from Think-tank, and very often based on studies and processes related to economic intelligence or to entrepreneurship. Two major references nevertheless dominate these studies, which are for the first, the obvious and known failures of intelligence (in particular the intervention of a US-led coalition in Iraq in 2003), through a post-mortem approach and, for the second, the American integrated model, with very often the temptation to replicate this model by forgetting the context as well as the purposes. These references, if they prove to be useful, do not exempt from a complete and different reasoning in its approach to allow analysts to be better trained in order to be more efficient in their job. The purpose of this article is to describe potential ways of individual training in analysis, currently imperfectly explored in order to have a training system considered under a holistic prism, covering the knowledge, know-how and interpersonal skills, but also seen as an ecosystem, always with the aim of improving decision-making, the primary goal of intelligence.