Defense to test run foreign language corps

If you're a U.S. citizen who speaks fluent Marshallese, the Defense Department wants you.

Robert Slater, director of the National Security Language Program at Defense, said last week that the department plans to launch a major recruiting drive this fall for volunteers fluent in certain foreign languages to serve the country in times of emergency or global need as part of the National Language Service Corps.

Earlier this year, Defense announced its plans to recruit at least 1,000 people to the corps by 2010. Congress gave the department the authority to start a pilot project to create the corps in the fiscal 2007 Defense authorization act. The project ends in 2010.

The Pentagon is seeking individuals fluent in 10 languages: Chinese-Mandarin, Hausa (a language spoken in regions of West Africa), Hindi, Indonesian, Marshallese (a Malayo-Polynesian language of the Marshall Islands), Russian, Somali, Swahili, Thai and Vietnamese.

The recruitment effort involves a Web site, which will launch in the next few weeks, Slater said. The corps' current site already has had 10,000 hits, and Slater said he is optimistic about meeting the goal of 1,000 hires by the end of the pilot program. "In this next recruiting drive," he said, "the problem will be handling all the inquiries."

Slater said Defense already has been in contact with about 200 people interested in the program. The incentives include competitive compensation, he added, and the advantage of belonging to an organization that values foreign language skills and the use of government-funded software to maintain those skills.

The recruiting drive has encountered a delay, however -- clearing all 1974 Privacy Act requirements with the Office of Management and Budget. "There's a lot you have to do when you're collecting data on the American public. Since we're going out with this nationwide, we want to make sure that all i's are dotted and t's are crossed," Slater said. "At that point, there will be a new Web site and a major set of announcements to begin a recruitment drive."

Defense along with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Pacific Command will pilot an activation exercise in early 2009. This will involve recruiting members to the corps and having them respond to an actual need, Slater said.

The partner agencies "actually have exercises they're running," he said. "We will take a set of members and move them into temporary government positions, activate them, give them plane tickets and send them to places."

The pilot project includes a $19 million contract awarded to General Dynamics Information Technology under which the company will create a language and communications center, recruit corps members and provide personnel support.

"They [General Dynamics] have been superb," Slater said. "Other than any delays we've hit on the data collection, they've been ahead of schedule."

Slater said the project with the partner agencies should take place during the next six to nine months, after which the department hopes to assess whether it should make the language corps permanent by the end of 2010.

"We're all very excited about getting under way later this year with the next phase of the critical component of the program -- seeing how this actually works," he said.