Scarcity of linguists makes it hard to wage war

It is possible to imagine a scenario in the next several years in which domestic political pressure in the United States builds for military intervention to stop mass killings in a particular place, such as Darfur.

The defense secretary might turn to the president and say, “We just don’t have sufficient number of people fluent in the local languages to be able conduct long-term stability operations.” For the non-interventionists in the United States, this might sound like good news.

With the U.S. military already over-stretched, irregular warfare will require choices. “We’re probably not going to place a high priority on being able to deploy in sub-Saharan Africa,” said Krepinevich. “There are places in the world where you say if this country fails, it is going to have a major effect on U.S. security or economic well being.”

Case in point: Nigeria, from which the United States imports more than 400,000 barrels of high-quality crude oil every year, nearly as much as it imports from Saudi Arabia. “You say, ‘That’s one area we’re going to have a hard time turning our back on,’” Krepinevich said.

Brecht told the committee that the language deficit can not be remedied only by training of those already in uniform.

In the long run, recruitment of foreign speakers depends on vastly improved language education starting in the nation’s primary schools, he pointed out.

Shortage of Chinese speakers
The military language deficit is part of a larger national shortfall. There are, for instance, few U.S. elected officials who speak Chinese.

Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman is one of the only prominent American politicians fluent in Chinese. Huntsman worked as a Mormon missionary in Taiwan in the late 1970s and served as a trade official and ambassador to Singapore in the 1990s. On a trade mission to China last year he gave speeches in Chinese.

Relative to the size of state population, Utah has the highest number of students studying foreign languages of any state.

“German and French are great, but they’re a bit of an anachronism,” Huntsman said on a recent visit to Washington. “So we’ve done a bit of fortifying of the languages available in our schools. We struck up a relationship with Chinese Ministry of Education through the embassy here. We now have teachers from China dropped into some of our high schools who teach Chinese.”

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