Morgan Smiley at the Small Wars Journal blog ("facilitates the exchange of information among practitioners, thought leaders, and students of Small Wars, in order to advance knowledge and capabilities in the field") looked forward at meeting the foreign language requirements of the future.
While this is from a military perspective, this is of diplomatic readiness relevence as well.
Money quote(s):
"In order to fully appreciate any culture we are learning about, especially if we expect to conduct operations in that particular culture, it follows that learning the language will not only help one learn about that culture but be able to operate more effectively once immersed in it."
This so blindingly obvious to anyone who has ever served abroad, in uniform or out, as to seem fairly condescending when plainly stated. It's not. Not condescending, that is. Those of us who serve their country abroad at any time in our lives are a minority of Americans. Let's not fail to make a persuasive argument by not laying the logical foundation necessary.
".... the importance of culture and language training by the US military due to the changing nature of the global security environment in which state-on-state conventional wars have been supplanted by smaller scale regional conflicts, trans-national and non-state terrorist actions, and other irregular security challenges conducted among local populations and lasting several years if not decades."
The language requirements of the State Dept. are much more constant and diffuse. State is responsible for over 260 diplomatic and consular posts requiring staffing by U.S. personnel speaking scores of languages, and the need to reliably refresh those positions with language-proficient replacements every 2-3 years.
"(W)hat languages & regions to focus on given the changing security environment and our role in it. After all, conflicts affecting US and allied interests - whether they involve foreign internal defense, counterinsurgency, counter-terrorism, or post-conflict reconstruction efforts - could spring up most anywhere."
Language proficiency is a labor-intensive undertaking, and carries the opportunity costs, particularly for military personnel, of whatever training is forgone in favor of that gaining, and maintaining, that skill. It's also something of a long-lead-time item, resistant (up to a point) to surge procurement, since qualified language instructors don't just grow on trees either.
"Read Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order" and Thomas P.M. Barnett's "The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century". In "Clash of Civilizations", Huntington talks of potential conflicts arising along cultural "fault lines", for example, where Christianity meets Islam (Central Asia/ Turkey/ Caucasus regions) or where Hindu culture meets Sinic culture (Himalaya/ Central Asian region). In "The Pentagon's New Map", Thomas Barnett posits that the world is divided between the "connected" (primarily Western) regions/ countries and the "disconnected" or "Gap" areas, with many of those "gap" regions being in Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, etc. Given these two authors & ideas they put forth, the Army may want to look at educating Soldiers in Turkish, Persian, Hindi, and Chinese as well as focusing on those areas for cultural/ regional education." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)
Here Brother Smiley makes a mildly adventurous but intellectually-defensible leap about how to hedge one's future bets about where language training should be focused as a long-lead-time item, making an educated guess about where future conflicts are likely to be found.
"(W)e may want to revive the British concept of a "shooting leave" (we'll call it something else of course). During the period of British rule in India, both Company and Government, a "shooting leave" involved a British officer taking a few weeks or months of leave in order to travel through potentially hostile lands and gather information and intelligence, which involved the possibility of shooting or being shot at. For our purposes, our officers ought to be able to take a sabbatical, perhaps no more than 3 to 6 months, and embed themselves in non-governmental organizations (NGO) operating in one of the regions we are interested in (with Doctors Without Borders in Tajikistan for instance) so that he may use/ improve his language capabilities, learn first-hand information about the region he is in, and work with organizations that we may end up dealing with should we become involved in those areas."
Embedding military personnel, unless they are also medical personnel, in NGOs such as Doctors Without Borders is problematic, to say the least. There still seems to be something of a cultural wall between the two worlds, although perhaps a program of this nature would help in this regard.
"Building partner capacity has been identified as a key area of concern as we look for better, and cheaper, ways to assist friends and allies, and help others defend themselves as Mr. Gates put it. In order to do this effectively, we must field more leaders that can communicate with host-nations forces in their own languages which will allow us to better understand those host-nation environments since little will be lost in translation and cultural understanding will be enhanced. Improving our language skills may lead to more effective and efficient techniques for building the capacity of our current and future partners and reduce the need for deployments of robust US forces." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)
8/23
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