Scarcity of linguists makes it hard to wage war

Tom Curry National affairs writer • Profile • E-mail

WASHINGTON - The United States military has a strategic shortfall — not of bullets or ballistic missiles, but of soldiers and Marines fluent in Dari, Pashto, Uzbek, and Turkmen — the languages spoken in Afghanistan.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress sent U.S. troops to Afghanistan to fight al-Qaida forces.

But after seven years on the ground, military leaders are still short of soldiers and Marines who can speak and understand the local lingo.

In movies about World War II, there's often one soldier — for instance, the French-speaking Cajun from Louisiana — who could converse with French villagers in Normandy.

But in the real world of 2008, things are a bit more complicated.

How can the United States be a successful interventionist nation without an adequate supply of people fluent enough to interrogate the locals — not just in Afghanistan — but around the world?

Where will future crises erupt?
It’s not just Pashto and Dari in Afghanistan, but Javanese and Indonesian, or Kazakh, should trouble erupt in that oil-and-uranium-rich nation.

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If today’s problem is the Dari deficit, what about five or ten years from now?

How can the Pentagon train soldiers and Marines to be proficient in critical languages if no one knows for certain where the crisis will be, in say, 2012?

The Defense Department might invest money in training a cadre of people in Farsi or Kazakh, only to find that it may not need them in five years, instead finding themselves short of Javanese and Indonesian speakers.

Rep. Vic Snyder, D-Ark., the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee’s panel on Oversight and Investigations, convened a hearing Wednesday to draw attention to this language dilemma.

Snyder said that a monetary language proficiency bonus is paid to 17,000 military service members, which sounds like a lot, until you realize that it only amounts to one percent of the Defense Department’s 1.3 million personnel.

And a significant number of the linguistically proficient, Snyder said, are senior officers involved in intelligence work — not soldiers and Marines walking into Afghan villages.

A Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, Snyder said he didn’t learn Vietnamese before his tour of duty.

Language in boot camp
But he has an idea to remedy the language scarcity: make language training a required part of boot camp for new soldiers and Marines.

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“In the Marine Corps, every Marine is a rifleman and a big part of boot camp is learning to shoot,” Snyder said. “That’s just ingrained in you, and you know that’s important. Discipline is important, honor is important, shooting a rifle is important. If we think this (foreign language proficiency) is important, then why not have that be from the get-go, from day one?”

But training soldiers and Marines to more than a rudimentary level of a language is a long, expensive task — even to get them to “2 plus” on the military’s zero-to-five language proficiency scale.

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At the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., “they’re spending 63 weeks in Arabic, five days a week, six hours a day, these kids are amazing. Sixty-three weeks — and only a portion of them can make it,” said Richard Brecht, head of the University of Maryland’s Center for Advanced Study of Language, who testified before Snyder’s committee Wednesday. “It’s real tough.”

The demands of irregular warfare
Retired Army officer Andrew Krepinevich, the head of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an independent policy research institute, said irregular warfare and counter-insurgency will demand larger numbers of U.S. foreign language speakers.

“You don’t need 100 percent of a unit to speak Pashto or Farsi — you go into an area with a platoon of 40 soldiers if a few of them speak the language you’re in pretty good shape,” he said.

Krepinevich told Snyder’s committee that he’d recently talked to one Army general who said, “Once we leave Iraq and Afghanistan, we’re not going to do this for another 30 years. The American people won’t stand for it” — but Krepinevich doesn’t necessarily believe that.

The trends, he said, point to “a disordered world.”

The inescapable demographic reality is that a huge percentage of the population in Africa, South America, and Asia is under age 15 — “a rising number of highly frustrated people” who live in countries with incompetent or corrupt governments, Krepinevich said.

These people often resort to violence and they may live in places with an impact on U.S. trade and prosperity.

“Irregular warfare is here to stay, it is a trend, I think it is going to increase in importance,” said Krepinevich

And this won’t be the traditional waging of war — blowing up bridges or dropping bombs on enemy troop concentrations — but policing, training, and patrolling.

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