re: "Army Linguists: Too Few and Poorly Utilized"

James Joyner at Outside the Beltway ("an online journal of politics and foreign affairs analysis") examined a report of how the Army mis-utilizes its linguists.

Money quote(s):

"Big Army, which is essentially the entire force minus special ops types, is a very strange bureaucracy with little understanding of how to use unique assets. No private should be treated differently than another and it would cause resentment if Specialist Rosenthal, the only guy in the unit who spoke Arabic, were spared the guard duty, KP, and shit details (in the case of deployments to desert environments, quite literally) the other lower enlisted soldiers pulled. Naturally, too, he needs to partake of all the same common task training and Infantry skills as the rest of the boys. Keeping his Arabic skills up to speed, well, that’s something he should do on his own time."

CAA is not utterly unfamiliar with this phenomenon. An old and dear friend, now a highly-paid and respected linguist "at a government agency in the Baltimore-Washington corridor" told me about being a young French linguist freshly graduated from the Defense Language Institute and arriving at Fort Hood, Texas, where he spent the remainder of his active duty enlistment washing trucks.

As a military intelligence soldier deployed to Iraq, CAA was in a unit well-stocked with language-designated (and qualified) soldiers, none of whom knew much Arabic, Kurdish, or Farsi (the three languages which would have been useful to us). We were, however, fully competent in our non-language related skill-sets so, once we were sufficiently augmented with linguists (both uniformed and contractor) we successfully carried out our missions.

I suspect that the young soldier whose account Mr. Joyner excerpts was one of those sorts of usefully-languaged soldiers sent to augment a unit whose other, Korean language-qualified, soldiers were more useful in that organizations more usual mission roles. That is, they were probably in a unit which either deployed to Iraq from their bases in Korea or from bases where there unit had a significant "reinforce Korea" mission, such as in Hawaii.

8/25

S&S - Kidnapped Army linguist returns home to San Diego

From my archive of press clippings:

Stars and Stripes

Apr 4, 2:57 AM EDT

Kidnapped Army linguist returns home to San Diego

SAN DIEGO (AP) -- A U.S. Army linguist returned to his family in Southern California Saturday after more than two months in captivity in Baghdad, according to a National Guard spokeswoman.

Read the whole article here.

Snippet(s):

"Issa Salomi arrived home in San Diego and was "resting and beginning his adjustment back to normal life," Maj. Kimberly Holman said in an emailed statement."

re: "Language Shortfalls at the State Department, Revisited"

Domani Spero at Diplopundit ("Blogging the Foreign Service: Just one obsessive observer, diplomatic watcher, opinionator and noodle newsmaker monitoring the goings on at Foggy Bottom and the worldwide available universe.") posted an excellent piece on State's linguist shortfalls during wartime.

Money quote(s):

"(A)ssignments in hard locations like Afghanistan and Pakistan are usually “unaccompanied” and have one-year durations. Given that we’re seven years into the Afghan war, even if we reduce the number assigned to that region to 5 FSOs in each of the last 6 years, that still amounts to something like a 1 ½ tour for those qualified speakers. I suspect that almost all of those 18-language qualified employees would have done their second tour in the region by now.

Isn’t this the same old story that happened to the Arabic speakers sent to Iraq? At a certain point, you run out of qualified speakers. What do you do? Make people do repeat tours for a second, third, fourth time? Or maybe give others 3.5hours of Arabic training and send them off to battle sheep, the electric grid, water wells, etc. in the provinces of Baghdad. Only this time they’ll do this now in the rural areas of Afghanistan?"

"You know what’s going to happen – it happened before when we fumbled into Baghdad. There will be a mad scramble at the Hill to find out more about this language deficit. We don’t have enough people to go; it’s not like this is really news. But Congress will be shocked and the CRS or the GAO will be tasked to review the language shortfalls at the State Department, again."

"State’s philosophy is to hire officers with a wide range of skills that it believes are predictors of success in the Foreign Service. It does not hire exclusively for skills that State can train, such as foreign languages. As a result, State’s primary approach to meeting its language requirements is through language training, primarily through classes provided at its training arm, the Foreign Service Institute (FSI)."

&

"Our current universe is everything about risks. The current enemy stretches the globe like a giant octopus, with tentacles in many different hot spots around the world. Do you think our opponents in the "war of ideas" will wait quietly until we’re done and ready to counter them?

If there is ever a time when State’s hiring and recruitment philosophy needs an extreme makeover, that time is now. State does not have the luxury of time for training its officers from scratch whether in functional, regional or language areas. It needs to speed up, and it can't speed up using the same old SOPs from an outdated era. "

(Bold type added for emphasis. - CAA)

BG - Faster citizenship in uniform

From my archive of press clippings:

Boston Globe

Faster citizenship in uniform


February 19, 2009


THE MILITARY has long had a policy of offering accelerated citizenship to legal immigrants with green cards who volunteer for service. Now it is going to offer the same inducement to immigrants who are refugees or on temporary work or student visas. While thorough background checks will be needed to make sure the recruits aren't sleeper agents for enemy states or terrorist organizations, the program should help the Pentagon cope with two wars and the need to be prepared for other conflicts.

Read the whole article here.

Snippet(s):

"The Army, which is taking the lead on the new policy, hopes to use it to draw immigrants who have medical training or linguistic skills and familiarity with foreign cultures. The service is quick to point out that the new program is not a means of meeting overall recruitment goals."

&

"(T)he two wars of this decade have taught the military how critical it is to have troops with the ability to speak languages used in the world's hot spots, from the Pushtu of Pakistan and Afghanistan to the Somali and Swahili of East Africa. The new program also recognizes the large number of immigrant doctors and nurses working in this country, whose skills are also needed in the military. To qualify for enlistment, the immigrants will need to have been in the United States at least two years. Once sworn in, they can immediately apply for citizenship and can get it in as little as six months.

To protect against sleeper agents, all the recruits will be subject to screening by the Department of Homeland Security, in addition to the initial DHS screen done before they received their visas."

Screening Mission - Registry

Taken at Ashraf Camp, Iraq, on July 14, 2003.