Will Learn Arabic for Food

On February 26, 2004 the House Intelligence Committee reported an ongoing critical shortage of those who speak Middle East languages. In the US Army alone, up to 2,000 positions currently remain unfilled with the largest shortfall in Arabic and Farsi. As of November 2003 the Army had only about 1300 active duty soldiers who can speak or read some Arabic. All of this is despite the fact that operations in countries that speak these languages have increased dramatically for all US Agencies and are expected to increase in the foreseeable future. With the troops currently in Iraq, there's a great deal of reliance on SPEAKING VERY LOUDLY and using hand gestures. Clearly this isn't the best way to fight the War on Terror.

Arabic is the most needed but it is a difficult language to learn. A spokesman for the American Translator's Association as quoted by the Associated Press says, "It's easier to train someone to fly an F-14 than it is to speak Arabic. [source]

The Arabic language is the key to understanding over 200 million Arabic speakers as well as over a billion Muslims who use Arabic as their liturgical language. The State Department rates languages for their difficulty on a scale of 1 to 4 with 4 being the most difficult to learn. Arabic is rated as a level 4 along with Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.

There are a great many difficulties in learning Arabic. It is not of Indo-European origin as is English which means that there are no word similarities, ie, gut for good, or vater for father. It is semitic with Arabic script used to write from right to left. There are certain sounds (phonemes) in Arabic that are not present in English. Also, Arabic has diglossia which means that the written form and the every day spoken form are different. [source]

However, even with the difficulty of learning Arabic, it is important that we have sufficient Arabic speakers to interact with local populations as well as to translate intelligence intercepts. More students are taking Arabic. It is estimated that there are currently more than 10,000 students taking Arabic classes, but it isn't enough to fill the need that exists. Clearly the US Government will need to take some additional steps to fill the need.

The idea of establishing a Linguistic Reserve Corps has been tossed around. It doesn't necessarily solve the overall shortage of those who speak Arabic but it may provide for an emergency source of these people in times of national emergency. One major concern about this approach is that it may rely too much on native speakers of the language and therefore pose security concerns.

Fortunately, the US Government has a long history of training people to speak foreign languages. The Defense Language Institute in Monterey, the language capital of the world, serves this purpose. The school can currently accomodate 3,500 students at it's campus in California and additional students by contract in the Washington, DC area. The government has the ability to teach people languages such as Arabic. The remaining task then is to identify and recruit those individuals who are capable of doing so.

The Defense Language Aptitude Battery is used by the US military to measure a person's aptitude for learning a foreign language. If the US Government is really serious about winning the war on terrorism they would begin encouraging everyone to take this test and with good scores actually offer to employ and pay these people to become linguists. Current efforts to do this have not been sufficient.

In my opinion it's because the military and defense related civilian agencies are still doing things the same old way they've done them in the past. I can only hope that other aspects of fighting the war on terror are going much better than the effort to obtain speakers of Arabic and other crucial languages.