I was being very specific, and thinking of colonial England of the Victorian era. Usually, "Victorian" is used as a derogatory term, but the ethnographers of the colonies often performed strategic intelligence collection, while aiming at an FRS (Fellow of the Royal Society) or FRGS (...Geographical Society).
I'm still trying (not very hard right now, but it is on my 'to-do' list) to get a copy of Margaret Mead's proposal for regional ethnogeographical specialist training (saw a reference to it in
Anthropological Intelligence). She outlined a two year course of training, and from the reference, it sounded exactly like what we need. And as important as regional specialists are, we must plan on guessing wrong about which regions matter, and keep a lesson plan for how to train soldiers to become ethnographers.
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