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.

At a conference on the future challenges of intelligence organizations held in 2018, former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats argued that he transformation of the American intelligence community must be a revolution rather than an evolution. The community must be innovative and flexible, capable of rapidly adopting innovative technologies wherever they may arise. Intelligence communities across the Western world are now at a crossroads: The growing proliferation of technologies, including artificial intelligence, Big Data, robotics, the Internet of Things, and blockchain, changes the rules of the game. The proliferation of these technologies – most of which are civilian, could create data breaches and lead to backdoor threats for intelligence agencies. Furthermore, since they are affordable and ubiquitous, they could be used for malicious purposes.