Language Crisis In U.s

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The U.S. military's difficulties in Afghanistan and Iraq have brought to light how this lack of language and cultural knowledge in planning circles can manifest itself in military operations.

A 2004 DoD report, for example, notes Womens Shoes that senior leaders and planners in Afghanistan and Iraq "cite the lack of qualified language professionals and regional experts as a major shortcoming in initial planning for combat and contingency operations, for the execution of the combat phase, and for post-combat reconstruction and stabilization efforts".

The implications of these shortcomings are clear. When Wholesale Shoes DoD officials and U.S. Combatant Commanders lack understanding about language competencies and hold deep-rooted bias against language skills, their evaluations of the military's combat readiness do not fully ...
... account for its (in)ability to work with coalition forces and to foster understanding and resolve differences with local diplomats, military and business leaders, and civilians.

A second, albeit related, source of the national security "language crisis" is change in the post-Cold War international security environment itself, particularly since the U.S. military began to wage its Global War on Terrorism. Historian Clifford Porter of the Defense Language Institute, the U.S. military's primary language school, explains that terrorists fight "asymmetrical warfare", which involves surprise and deception rather than conventional, direct applications of military force.

Terrorist forces conducting such warfare are not "strictly organized military units," such as the United States faced and could more easily track during the Cold War, but rather "less predictable enemies that may or may not fight on conventional battlefields and hide in the hinterlands of the world where the languages spoken are rarely studied in the Western world".

The asymmetrical nature of the Global War on Terrorism, argues Porter, demands that the military invest in developing its human resources rather than sophisticated satellites and weapons: [W]hen the enemy is unconventional, hiding with civilian populations and motivated by an ideology that targets civilians, the foreign language capability of intelligence and special operations assets is one of the critical tools to unlocking the secrets of the enemy in his hiding places.

Satellite technologies and global positioning systems can help the U.S. military know where enemy forces might be located, Porter explains, but these and other technologies cannot tell U.S. commanders "how the enemy thinks from the strategic to the tactical levels of war". Such insight, DoD officials believe, can come only through learning the language and understanding the culture of key leaders and principal actors in terrorist networks.