Can DoD Teach Every Officer a Foreign Language?

Update (7 October): I mistook the date of publication. The article is just now available.

This morning’s (3 October 2014) Politico Morning Defense asked just that question:

     CAN DoD TEACH EVERY OFFICER A FOREIGN LANGUAGE? No answer yet on that one—the Pentagon is late delivering a report to Congress on what it would take to teach every uniformed officer a foreign language. The report is now expected by the end of April. The reason for the congressionally mandated study's tardiness is unclear, but a letter sent to the Senate Armed Services Committee describes the issue as "complex.”

I doubt that complex is the right word. As I argue in a forthcoming a new article in Small Wars and Insurgencies (February 2015, vol. 25, no. 5/6), if military organizations want to take transnational counterinsurgency seriously, they really need to speak the local language of the countries in which they’re intervening. Teaching Pashto or Arabic or other challenging languages to those raised in English (or something yet more easily mastered) isn’t easy, but it is possible, and on a large scale. Every Australian officer graduating from the Royal Military College at Duntroon is expected to attain proficiency in an East or South Asian language by graduation. Why this cannot be required at the academies in the United States is not obvious to me.

For more, wait until February 2015, and then read “'Outside their Expertise': the Implications of Field Manual 3-24 for the Professional Military Education of Non-Commissioned Officers"

Comments

[Don Bacon]

"Counterinsurgency" is a farce to begin with. The sequence:
1. Attack, invade, and/or occupy a foreign country for regime change.
2. Establish a puppet government which lacks legitimacy.
3. Call the resulting displeasure of the natives, especially those formerly associated with the US-instigated regime change, an "insurgency" composed of militants, insurgents and terrorists, depending upon the propagandist.
.
Now if any enemy of the US does what the US does, the language changes.
Thus in WWII we had "French freedom fighters."
I'm guessing that they probably didn't care overly much about the French language capabilities of the occupying Germans.
They were more interested in killing them, I suspect.

[James Hasik]

Don,

This is not quite right. Counterinsurgency, at its most essential, is simply fighting an insurgency. Whether or not a foreign power has eliminated the earlier regime, or is just assisting an existing regime, there may be rebels to fight.

Counterinsurgency is not merely FM 3-24. That's merely US doctrine for counterinsurgency. There are other ways of approaching the problem—some are more brutal, and perhaps more successful, but they're not US doctrine.

We know that foreign assistance with local counterinsurgency efforts has worked well more than a few times. While it was a long time ago, the US Army defeated the Huk in the Philippines. While the British in Malaya had unique advantages of geography, the communist insurgency there was destroyed. The campaign in El Salvador was ugly at points, but it was ultimately successful, and with American assistance. Foreign assistance in these campaigns does not always work, but it does not always and everywhere fail.

All that said, I find your example of the Germans in France during WW2 wholly invalid. The Gestapo wasn’t about building institutions for good governance.

I do not, in the paper, analyze whether the campaigns in Afghanistan or Iraq were managed well. I do not address the question of success. One might find that engaging in those fights was bad idea, but that's a separate question. I simply argue that if the US Army and the USMC could engage in counterinsurgency, and if FM 3-24 is US counterinsurgency doctrine, then the troops probably need some better education.

But if you’d like to argue that point, you should write to the editors of Small Wars and Insurgencies. They’re always looking for thoughtful essays.

JMH