At a Loss For Words

Foreign language skills can be as vital to battlefield success as any weapon-but they're a lot harder to acquire and maintain.

Few rules of warfare are more enduring than the adage "Know thine enemy." Yet fewer seem harder to apply in the global war on terror, or GWOT, as Pentagon officials refer to military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and everywhere else U.S. troops are pursuing terrorists, both overtly and covertly. To know your enemy you have to be able to get inside his head, but you can't unravel someone's thought process if you don't speak his language or understand the cultural context in which he exists. And winning hearts and minds is more than difficult if you cannot communicate your intentions.

Nearly four years into the war on terrorism, military commanders need thousands more linguists and translators on the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan-yet exactly how many is still unclear, Defense Department officials say. Also unclear is exactly how many service members have untapped language skills that could be put to use in the war effort. What is clear is that it will take years to develop the institutional talent and management tools necessary to address the need.

And unlike other military priorities, there is no "surge capacity" for linguists. No matter how much money Defense or Congress may put toward the problem, it takes years of training and diligent follow-up training-often at a soldier's own initiative-to develop and maintain a good linguist.

In the meantime, contractors are filling the void where possible, military officials say. But while contractor employees can and do provide invaluable services, they are no substitute for culturally attuned troops who can communicate effectively with the locals on a day-to-day basis. The military services, especially the Army and the Marine Corps-which provide the bulk of the boots on the ground in foreign interventions-are woefully short of troops who can bridge the communications gap.

Gail McGinn, deputy undersecretary of Defense for plans, recently led a multiservice task force aimed at defining the scope of the language skills shortfall and recommending solutions. "One of the findings was we really don't have a firm fix on what our requirements are," McGinn says. With no centralized database able to capture language requirements across the military, Defense officials are still trying to understand the full scope of the need and how to meet it. Department officials are trying now to build such a database, but it will likely take years. McGinn says the challenge is to know not only how many interpreters and translators are needed, but what level of language proficiency is required for those positions. An interpreter working with infantry troops patrolling the back alleys of Baghdad will need different skills than a translator charged with deciphering technical manuals.

The military's needs are continually shifting and evolving. An urgent demand for Somali interpreters one year changes to a requirement for Serbo-Croatian speakers another. Today, it seems clear the services will need large numbers of Arabic speakers trained in a number of dialects for the foreseeable future, as well as people fluent in Pashto, Urdu, Dari and other languages spoken in Afghanistan. At the same time, Defense language experts are trying to prepare for uncertain trouble spots years into the future. As it happens, the languages most likely to be in demand-Arabic, Korean, Chinese and Persian Farsi top the list-are among the most difficult languages to learn.

By putting more service members through intensive language training, signing up recruits from foreign-born communities across the United States, encouraging more officers to study at military institutions overseas and developing more sophisticated translation technologies, Pentagon officials hope to substantially improve language capability in the coming years.

A Difficult Road

In January, the Defense Department published the "Defense Language Transformation Roadmap," a blueprint for developing and promoting a linguistically diverse cadre of troops across the military. The document established a new management structure for tracking and measuring progress. McGinn is now the designated "senior language authority" at the department; as such, she will direct many of the management efforts aimed at bolstering language skills in each of the services during the coming months.

McGinn concedes it will take more than timelines and databases to increase the number and quality of linguists. Until language skills are as highly valued by service promotion boards as other tactical skills, soldiers will not feel compelled to learn and maintain such abilities. To that end, the roadmap recommends that all officers receive training in a foreign language and that some level of language proficiency be a requirement for promotion above the rank of colonel.

McGinn also favors enhancing incentives, both monetary and nonmonetary, for troops to undertake language training. Recently, Congress authorized the Pentagon to increase pay for soldiers with foreign language skills. They now can receive between $300 and $1,000 a month in addition to their regular pay, depending on the language and their level of proficiency.

Most military linguists are trained at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif. DLI provides intensive instruction in dozens of languages, almost exclusively taught by highly educated native speakers trained to teach language skills. Stephen Payne, the institute's acting chancellor, says few people realize how much training is necessary to become proficient in a foreign language: "People generally don't understand that one year of French in college is very different from one year of French at DLI." Students enrolled in French at DLI will burn through a typical college French textbook in about six weeks, he says.

All languages at DLI are taught five days a week, six to seven hours per day, with two to three hours of homework required every evening. Languages are categorized by complexity. The easiest are Category 1, which includes French and Spanish. Russian falls into Category 3. Category 4, which includes Arabic, is the hardest to learn. Arabic students must complete 18 months of classroom training, which is often followed by several weeks of training in specific dialects-Egyptian or Iraqi, for example. Last year, DLI graduated 521 students in Arabic.

DLI has undergone significant changes since Sept. 11, says Payne. The school's annual budget has more than doubled to $162 million. It supports more students in more languages with more types of training. The school graduated 3,300 students last year, and is in the process of revamping training to improve the proficiency of those who graduate. By reducing the student-to-faculty ratio from 10-to-1 to 6-to-1 during the next few years, improving online refresher courses for graduates, and enhancing the focus on cultural studies, DLI administrators expect to produce better-prepared linguists in the future.

"We spend a lot of time teaching critical thinking," says Payne. DLI also tries to provide students with the necessary cultural context for using their skills. For example, students must know how to interpret what they read in foreign newspapers-not just glean the literal meaning of the words. For instance, Americans are culturally attuned to the fact that a newspaper story is different from an editorial, which is different from a letter to the editor. Foreign papers have their own nuances of meaning and context. "Our students must realize the assumptions that apply [in the United States] are not valid outside the United States," Payne says. A Russian student, for example, cannot understand Russian culture without an intimate knowledge of Russian literature. "Every cab driver in Moscow not only knows [the works of Russian poet Aleksandr] Pushkin, but has memorized Pushkin. Our students need to know Pushkin too," he says.

Immediate Requirements

DLI also provides more prosaic training for troops getting ready for deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan. "We get a lot of requests for survival courses," says Mike Vezilich, the dean of DLI's distance learning division. Vezilich helped organize a number of mobile training teams that travel around the country providing troops with basic cultural and language instruction before deployment. Requests for the teams vary considerably, with the time allotted for training ranging from several weeks to one day. "There's not a lot you can do in a day other than provide some basic cultural awareness," he says.

Commanders often want their troops to receive instruction in terminology that could be used at checkpoints or in raids. The challenge, of course, is that people whose homes are being raided or who are traveling through checkpoints tend to stray beyond any script instructors might prepare for troops.

"We're not trying to make linguists out of them," says Vezilich. "We're trying to give them some cultural dos and don'ts." Instructors have spent a lot of time trying to develop materials that nonlinguist troops will find useful in the field, he says. "They're on a tight schedule and they have a lot on their minds. We hope this training could prevent an incident from escalating into a life-threatening situation."

In addition, the Army and the Marine Corps are working to recruit native Arabic speakers from immigrant communities in the United States. Army Lt. Col. Frank Demith is managing a pilot program to enlist Arabic speakers into the Individual Ready Reserve-a pool of reservists who are not part of any particular military unit. Those who sign up for service go through several weeks of basic and advanced training at Fort Jackson, S.C., after which they are assigned to a unit in Iraq for up to two years of active duty (including training time), before they are released back into the reserve pool for several years. The program's incentives are significant: Depending on their proficiency in Arabic, recruits may qualify for a $1,000 monthly bonus in addition to their base pay; they are also put on the fast-track to citizenship, if they are not already citizens.

Since August 2003, the Army has recruited 350 soldiers through the program, 77 of whom have completed training and have been assigned to units. Another 26 are in advanced training, says Demith.

Recruiting, which is not easy under any circumstances today, is especially difficult in some Arabic communities. "I wouldn't say there's hostility, but there is a lack of understanding of what we're trying to accomplish in Iraq among some people," Demith says. When notorious photos of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib surfaced in the spring of 2004, the job became that much harder for all recruiters, he says. Additionally, the Army is competing with other federal agencies and the private sector for the same skilled immigrants.

Still, Demith says the program has been successful. Some recruits have requested to continue on active duty after their initial commitment has expired. The people the Army is recruiting are highly motivated, and the units in the field greatly value the skills the recruits bring to the mission, he says. Demith expects the program eventually will be expanded to other languages.

In January, the Marine Corps began a similar program to recruit Arabic speakers. Marine Corps spokesman Staff Sgt. Marc Ayalin says it's too early to say how well the program is working, but the goal is to recruit 300 speakers by the end of 2005. It would help if the recruiters were Arabic speakers themselves, but Marines with those skills are in too high a demand in Iraq right now to be spared for the recruiting effort.

A Sputnik Moment

The long-term key to significantly boosting language proficiency at Defense will be to improve language training in the public schools, says McGinn, since "It's so much easier to learn a language as a child than as an adult." Studies have shown that children who do learn foreign languages at a young age have an easier time learning other languages as adults. McGinn would know. As a child she lived in Denmark and spoke Danish. Later, she studied German and French.

Last year, the Defense Department organized a national language conference with participants from other federal agencies, Congress, academic institutions and the private sector. In a white paper published this spring, "A Call to Action for National Foreign Language Capabilities," attendees recalled the U.S. response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik I in the fall of 1957. Congress immediately passed the National Defense Education Act in an effort to counter what was widely understood to be the Soviet Union's technological superiority. "The generation of scientists, engineers, mathematicians, linguists and area specialists created by this act put a man on the moon, helped win the Cold War, and today has a spacecraft 746 million miles from Earth soaring amidst the rings of Saturn," the paper notes.

Today, the country needs another such call to action, the paper argues: "We must act now to improve the foreign language and cultural capabilities of the nation. We must act now to improve the gathering and analysis of information, advance international diplomacy and support military operations . . . Our domestic well-being demands action to provide opportunities for all students to learn foreign languages important for the nation, develop the capabilities of our heritage communities, and ensure services that are core to our way of life."