Graduate Certificate in Intelligence and National Security
National security is a shared problem. Almost nobody is trained to work across it.
Intelligence, law enforcement, border and transport agencies, and the private companies that run critical infrastructure all hold part of the picture and answer to different authorities. Two graduate courses on how national intelligence and national security actually work across those boundaries: the law, the institutions, and the cooperation that has to happen when no single organization owns the problem.
Overview
National security does not sit in one building. An intelligence service holds part of it, a border agency another part, a transport regulator another, and a great deal of the infrastructure that matters is owned and run by private companies with no security mandate at all. Everyone involved answers to a different authority, operates under different law, and has a different idea of what the problem is.
This certificate is about working in that space. Two graduate courses.
The first covers the origins, theory and foundations of national intelligence, and the broader architecture of national security. What intelligence is for, how the institutions that produce it came to be shaped the way they are, and what they can and cannot be asked to do.
The second turns to the practical and legal realities. National security law and the security needs it is written to serve. The security risks facing both private and governmental organizations, which are not the same risks. The cooperation that has to happen between governments, and between governments and private operators, with specific attention to the inter-jurisdictional and inter-governmental dimensions of infrastructure, travel, transport and immigration.
The people doing this work come from different backgrounds and different training. That is the premise of the certificate rather than a complication: the point is to be able to work with all of them.
What you will learn
By the end of the certificate you will be able to:
- Explain how the United States defines and ranks the threats to its security, from hostile states and violent non-state actors through to natural disasters.
- Describe the institutions and policies built to meet those threats, and weigh the methods available to avoid, manage, mitigate or resolve them.
- Account for why America's critical infrastructure is treated as a networked system, and what that interdependence means for planning and response.
- Map the intelligence community: its history, its structure, where its authorities come from, and who is accountable for its work.
- Analyze how intelligence reaches senior policy makers, including Congress and the President, and where that relationship tends to fail.
- Work with intelligence as a discipline, including what collection and analysis can and cannot deliver.
- Judge whether the intelligence community is performing against a threat picture that keeps changing.
For your next step visit:Certificate Admissions
For complete details on tuition costs:
Tuition and Fees
