Navy Intelligence Officer Detailing: A Case for Specialization

The nature of the current threats facing the United States necessitates country specific training for intelligence officers which produce country experts rather than military generalists. The detailing process, in addition to maintaining current core competencies, can help achieve this goal by providing a threat based track and by assigning intelligence personnel to subsequent jobs within the same specialized countryfield. The nature of the threat facing the United States has changed over the past two decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union. A new age of warfare wherein military forces fight disparate enemies spread across national boundaries and ideologies seem to be the new paradigm. As the nature of threat transforms, so must the military forces opposed to these new adversaries. While maintaining the combat abilities of our armed forces, we must also become experts at information. Particularly, soldiers, sailors and airmen must understand their adversaries and their capabilities. This type of knowledge is not something that can be learned, retained and used within a span of one assignment. The skills needed, language, cultural, military, and philosophical are something that must be learned, reinforced, and maintained over the span of several years. To provide warfighters with the very best information, the Navy Intelligence Community must develop officers with an expert knowledge of their target area. That is, Naval Intelligence Officers must develop and maintain a level of expertise about a specific target area throughout ones career, rather than focusing on a broad spectrum of often disparate intelligence problems. The United States Navy Intelligence community must retire its system of developing generalists and focus on the training and development of subject matter experts, focused against a particular region or threat.