[House Hearing, 110 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
[H.A.S.C. No. 110-155]
DEFENSE LANGUAGE AND CULTURAL AWARENESS TRANSFORMATION: TO WHAT END? AT
WHAT COST?
__________
HEARING
BEFORE THE
OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
HEARING HELD
JULY 9, 2008
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
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Washington, DC 20402-0001
OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE
VIC SNYDER, Arkansas, Chairman
JOHN SPRATT, South Carolina W. TODD AKIN, Missouri
LORETTA SANCHEZ, California ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, Maryland
ELLEN O. TAUSCHER, California WALTER B. JONES, North Carolina
ROBERT ANDREWS, New Jersey JEFF MILLER, Florida
SUSAN A. DAVIS, California PHIL GINGREY, Georgia
JIM COOPER, Tennessee K. MICHAEL CONAWAY, Texas
HANK JOHNSON, Georgia GEOFF DAVIS, Kentucky
JOE SESTAK, Pennsylvania
Andrew Hyde, Professional Staff Member
Tom Hawley, Professional Staff Member
Roger Zakheim, Professional Staff Member
Sasha Rogers, Research Assistant
C O N T E N T S
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CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF HEARINGS
2008
Page
Hearing:
Wednesday, July 9, 2008, Defense Language and Cultural Awareness
Transformation: To What End? At What Cost?..................... 1
Appendix:
Wednesday, July 9, 2008.......................................... 31
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WEDNESDAY, JULY 9, 2008
DEFENSE LANGUAGE AND CULTURAL AWARENESS TRANSFORMATION: TO WHAT END? AT
WHAT COST?
STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS
Akin, Hon. W. Todd, a Representative from Missouri, Ranking
Member, Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee.............. 2
Snyder, Hon. Vic, a Representative from Arkansas, Chairman,
Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee...................... 1
WITNESSES
Brecht, Dr. Richard D., Executive Director, Center for Advanced
Study of Language, University of Maryland...................... 3
Krepinevich, Dr. Andrew F., Jr., President, Center for Strategic
and Budgetary Assessments...................................... 9
McFate, Dr. Montgomery, Senior Social Science Advisor, Joint
Advanced Warfighting Division, Institute for Defense Analyses.. 7
Zalman, Dr. Amy, Policy Analyst, Science Applications
International Corporation (SAIC)............................... 5
APPENDIX
Prepared Statements:
Akin, Hon. W. Todd........................................... 37
Brecht, Dr. Richard D........................................ 39
Krepinevich, Dr. Andrew F., Jr............................... 104
McFate, Dr. Montgomery....................................... 95
Snyder, Hon. Vic............................................. 35
Zalman, Dr. Amy.............................................. 86
Documents Submitted for the Record:
``Outlines of a National Language Education Policy in the
Nation's Interest: Why? How? Who is Responsible for What?''
paper delivered by Richard D. Brecht to the Foreign
Language Education Policy Colloquium, University of
California at Berkeley, October 2005, submitted by Dr.
Richard D. Brecht.......................................... 119
Witness Responses to Questions Asked During the Hearing:
[There were no Questions submitted during the hearing.]
Questions Submitted by Members Post Hearing:
Mr. Johnson.................................................. 148
Dr. Snyder................................................... 145
DEFENSE LANGUAGE AND CULTURAL AWARENESS TRANSFORMATION: TO WHAT END? AT
WHAT COST?
----------
House of Representatives,
Committee on Armed Services,
Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee,
Washington, DC, Wednesday, July 9, 2008.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 2:34 p.m. in
room 2212, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Vic Snyder
(chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. VIC SNYDER, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM
ARKANSAS, CHAIRMAN, OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE
Dr. Snyder. Why don't we go ahead and get started.
We have got votes coming up sometime in a half hour, 45
minutes or somewhere in that range, and I don't think it will
be a terribly long break. I don't think we have a very
complicated day. So whenever that occurs, we will leave and
hope that you will stay with us.
Welcome to all of you today to our witnesses and folks in
attendance and to the members. Our topic today is Defense
Language and Cultural Awareness Transformation: To what end? At
what cost?
And the witnesses may not know it, but our staff puts
together a hearing memo before each of these events. And I
liked the one so much for today, I am going to lift it. I am
going to read from a couple of paragraphs from it as my opening
statement.
Many experts say as there will be a continuous need for the
Department of Defense (DOD) to focus on irregular warfare,
building partnerships with foreign countries and the sustained
effort required by the long war, all spotlighting a need for
greater foreign language proficiency and cultural competency in
U.S. forces. If this is indeed the environment in which we
expect our forces to operate, then that forms the fundamental
basis for looking at the range of these capabilities. Deciding
on the optimal level and extent of proficiency, given resource
limitations is the difficult part.
Today's hearing will focus, I hope, on the following
questions: What should be the military's overarching goal in
terms of the distribution and level of language skills and
cultural awareness capabilities to support national security
requirements? And given that acquiring these capabilities comes
at a cost in terms of money, time and readiness in other areas,
what price should the Nation be willing to pay? As a result,
what is the vision of the future?
And to put it another way, for every time or hour or month
spent in language school, a person in the military is not
learning something else, and so the question becomes language
capability at what risk.
And I would say the other question is, also, if we don't do
the language training, at what risk? And I think that is the
core of what we are trying to get at today.
Most seem to agree that more language and cultural
awareness is a necessary and desirable trait for the 21st
century U.S. military in its role supporting national security.
But how much is appropriate for the military and what career
fields and in what ranks should it be concentrated? How widely
should it be dispersed among military and civilian personnel?
How much can be gained through a reserve corps or contractors?
What should the needed training aim to emphasize? And no matter
how worthy an objective, what will not get done as a result?
Will other aspects of readiness be sacrificed?
And, Mr. Akin, I think I will let you do your opening
statement now, and then I will show my film clip, and then I
will go to our witnesses. So Mr. Akin for any comments he would
like to make.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Snyder can be found in the
Appendix on page 35.]
STATEMENT OF HON. W. TODD AKIN, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM MISSOURI,
RANKING MEMBER, OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE
Mr. Akin. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
This is a topic that I think continuously is generated more
and more from other work that we have done and other witnesses
that we have had. And certainly, I think that Vic put it in a
very good light, the kind of question, I think if you are
taking a look at what is it that we are going to train our
soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and all, there are all kinds
of things competing for resources. The question is, where
does--not just the language but the language combined with the
cultural awareness kind of training, where does that fit in and
what form does it take?
My own experience came more from watching years ago the
Green Berets training in specific to go into Czechoslovakia and
how they were trained. It was very, very effective training but
probably very costly training.
What is the model? What are the career paths? How does that
priority stack against basic infantry skills? All those kinds
of questions, those are all here on the table.
I thank you for coming. We are looking forward to your
testimony.
And, Vic, as far as--I yield back, and you can roll the
film.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Akin can be found in the
Appendix on page 37.]
Dr. Snyder. What we are going to show now is just about a
2- or 3-minute clip, very brief, about a couple of folks. The
first is from a film, and then some audio called ``The Untold
True Story of Guy Gabaldon,'' which depicts Marine PFC
Gabaldon's single-handed success in persuading over 1,500
Japanese soldiers on Saipan in 1944 to surrender, including--
this is all by himself, solitary. He stumbled into a Japanese
regimental headquarters and at one time had 800 surrender at
one time.
There will be a brief film clip. It will then go blank, but
you will hear an audio that we lifted from a National Public
Radio (NPR) story a few months ago. And then you will see a
clip probably more familiar to you from the Ken Burns film
about World War II, the War of Senator Inouye.
Let's go ahead and roll that now. And for those of you who
can't see any screen, you are welcome to get up and move
around.
[Video played.]
Dr. Snyder. Well, both of those stories are from times many
years ago, decades ago in our history.
Today, we are joined by Dr. Richard Brecht, Executive
Director at the University of Maryland's Center for Advanced
Study of Language, who has extensive experience in the best
ways to acquire and sustain language skills; Dr. Amy Zalman,
who is an expert in how cultural awareness factors into
successful strategic communications; Dr. Montgomery McFate, who
has worked to develop a framework for fielding anthropologists
and other social scientists to support combat brigades and
other deployed forces; and Dr. Andrew Krepinevich, the
President of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary
Assessments, who will discuss the capabilities our future
military force will require in the area of language skills and
cultural awareness.
And shall we begin over here, Dr. Brecht? And what we will
do, Dr. Brecht, is we are going to put this little light on;
and it will flash on red at five minutes. I don't want you to
feel like you are automatically cut off, but I would encourage
you all to stay as close to that five minutes as we can so that
members can ask questions and learn from you as the day goes.
Dr. Snyder. So Dr. Brecht.
STATEMENT OF DR. RICHARD D. BRECHT, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CENTER
FOR ADVANCED STUDY OF LANGUAGE, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND
Dr. Brecht. Thank you very much for the opportunity. I
appreciate that quite a bit.
I guess my role here is to suggest to you in the very
broadest terms that the Defense Language Transformation
Roadmap, which I have studied quite a bit, is on its way to
building the first U.S.-based globalized workforce in the
history of this country. It has a long way to go, and there are
many things to do and to complete, and it has to be sustained.
But I would say that, basically, we are set out on the right
path. The question is, what still remains?
And, in my view, this building of this workforce--if you
look at my testimony, I spend a long time on a scenario in
North Africa, in Niger, suggesting that, in 10 or 12 years,
what a workforce, a military globalized workforce would look
like, and that workforce basically comprises three strong
components.
The first one--and this is the thing that is missing, from
my point of view, in all the things I have read and studied
about what the military and the Defense Department is doing--is
that every member of this globalized civilian and military
workforce has to be trained in communications competence. The
first thing people have to know is do they have a language task
they are facing or a cultural understanding task that they are
facing? And if they do, do they have the capability to deal
with it? And if they don't, do they know where to get the
resources that are actually positioned to be brought to bear?
And if they get those resources, have they worked in that
particular task? That is basically the overall global workforce
capability that is needed.
After that, you have an inherent and in-house capability of
people with languages and skills from very low level to very
high level, and we can talk about which languages those could
be.
And the third thing that this workforce has at its
advantage, it has the ability to outsource, the ability to
localize, and the ability to reach back.
Those are the capabilities that are here so that the
Department of Defense and the military and the Army and the
Marines and the people on the ground don't have to have the
full capabilities that a workforce deployed in 130 countries
basically dealing with probably something on the order of 5,000
languages and maybe 50,000 dialects has to deal with. And so it
is this picture that I am trying to present to you.
How do you build this workforce? If you look at my
statement to you, it is basically we have to have much better
recruitment. The emphasis can't only be on training. The
emphasis has to be a much stronger emphasis on recruitment, and
that is being dramatically assisted by the roadmap's emphasis
on reaching out to the K-12 and university system. Because if
you have a better education system you will have a more
effective recruitment system.
The training is, obviously, the DL--Defense Language
Institute Foreign Language Center will still lead the way with
the command language programs. But, basically, this training
has to also, besides language at all levels, include the
communication skills and the cultural knowledge as well.
We have also had a lot to do with lifelong training which
has been made available to a lot of online resources which are
now available as well.
The point I guess I am making--and I would love to go into
details on this--is that you have started down the path and I
think the path is the right one. This workforce, though, that
you are building has a lot of capabilities inherent in it and
it has a lot of capabilities waiting to be deployed if you
build a system to bring those reach-back capabilities,
outsourcing and localization capabilities to bear. That is the
real trick.
And if you build a system, a database, a net-centric
operation that will allow them in the field to reach back to
those capabilities and if you skill the people in the right
languages and that is based on, if you will, language futures,
what are the languages you need to put in the right place at
the right time, we are capable projecting that. You tell us
what areas you are interested in, and linguists and
sociolinguists can start talking about what languages you need.
I will end with the simple fact that, in Africa now,
because Africans are basically multilingual and everyone, most
of them, speak 2 or 3 languages, there are 15 core languages in
Africa which 85 percent of the population speaks. If you divide
Africa into five zones the way the African Union does, then
each one of those U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) components can
only have to deal with two or three languages as part of its
in-house capabilities.
These things are possible; and my message to you, again, it
is possible to build that workforce. And I have talked to
people and they say it is too big a task to do. It is not too
big a task to do. It takes a much more strategic,
collaborative, cohesive approach, which I think the academic
ministry and the military together can build.
Dr. Snyder. Thank you, Dr. Brecht.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Brecht can be found in the
Appendix on page 39.]
Dr. Snyder. Dr. Zalman.
STATEMENT OF DR. AMY ZALMAN, POLICY ANALYST, SCIENCE
APPLICATIONS INTERNATIONAL CORPORATION (SAIC)
Dr. Zalman. I hope you will forgive me if I read my
remarks. They are directed primarily toward the long term and
to the training and education component of cultural awareness.
Chairman Snyder and members of the subcommittee, thank you
for the opportunity to discuss the future direction of language
and cultural awareness in the U.S. military. My remarks are
divided into three parts: the challenge, the issue of
transformation, and a few potential action routes.
The U.S. military confronts particular challenges with
respect to cross-cultural awareness. The majority of deployed
forces rotate from one distinct linguistic and cultural arena
to another with relative frequency. It would be implausible for
all regular forces to become area or linguistic experts in one
region, let alone several.
Second, warfighters lack the luxury of time to reflect on
or learn organically from their surroundings. They may find
themselves thrust into situations in which they must make
decisions rapidly.
To make matters more complex, members of the 21st century
military are likely to find themselves in situations other than
war and engaged with civilians. These conditions suggest a
paradox. The military at all levels has a vital need for
cultural awareness, yet these same conditions constrain the
practical ability of many military members to acquire it.
Moreover, the current turn of events arguably has distorted
the path the DOD may take to forge a long-term cultural
awareness strategy. I might suggest that a preoccupation with
the September 11, 2001, attacks as a point of historic
departure and the subsequent focus on Islamic societies has led
to a habit of confusing knowledge of particular cultures, such
as Afghan cultures, with cultural awareness in a more
comprehensive sense. This habit can be found within and beyond
the military.
The military has tended to define cultural awareness as
facts about other cultures, especially those that appear on
their face to be least familiar. That is, of course, a
simplification. However, because regular forces cannot be
expected to accumulate nor process nearly enough information to
make this definition useful, another framework is required.
Force transformation suggests itself. This subcommittee has
already revised the existing paradigm by incorporating cultural
and linguistic awareness into the broader concept of force
transformation. The transformation framework offers a
productive conceptual vehicle for the defense community to
elaborate what it means to have a culturally aware military.
The absence of cultural and linguistic awareness from even
recent statements on transformation indicates there is work to
be done. The 2003 document, Military Transformation, calls for
processes to enable innovation and adaptability, arguing that
if we do not transform, our enemies will surely find new ways
to attack us. Despite the claim that no aspect of defense
should be left untouched if we are to maintain a competitive
advantage in the information age, the cultural aspect of
defense is left untouched.
Transformation's key concepts align well with those of
cultural awareness. The DOD defines transformation as a process
that changes--pardon me--that shapes the changing nature of
military competition and cooperation through new combinations
of concepts, capabilities, people and organizations. This
umbrella concept could easily comprehend a parallel process to
shape the changing role of cultural interaction and cultural
competence in military endeavors and to prepare for that role
through new combinations of concepts, capabilities, people and
organizations.
The directive to enable innovation and adaptability is
perfectly or at least well attuned with the 21st century
cultural awareness paradigm. In this case however, it is
people, members of the military, from regular forces to their
top leadership, who must be enabled to innovate and adapt. To
that end, a new paradigm will correspond to the operational
landscape where human communities, cultures, are also
innovating and adapting to new technological, social, material
and other realities of this millennium. Culture, in a new
paradigm, will be seen as an element of human interaction and
perhaps not only as something out there.
In the transformation paradigm, although a member of the
military may be called on to deploy in three different areas in
as many years, they will recognize in all three that they must
be watchful for their own and their interlocutor's habits of
interaction. They will have enough elementary knowledge and
language to enter into interactions, and they will have
training that gives them the cognitive tools to innovate,
adapt, and learn more or perhaps reach back as that interaction
deepens. They will not be allowed by responsible leadership to
deploy culturally unarmed.
I have three suggestions, which I won't elaborate here,
that may be followed immediately. One is to develop a cultural
and linguistic awareness transformation strategy, a top-level
document. Another is to conduct a cultural awareness training
and education audit to assess capabilities now against a
transformation set of goals. And the third is to design and
test a requisite first layer of cultural awareness learning
that would be required of all military members, although
perhaps in slightly different ways in the future.
Thank you again for this opportunity.
Dr. Snyder. Thank you, Dr. Zalman.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Zalman can be found in the
Appendix on page 86.]
Dr. Snyder. Dr. McFate.
STATEMENT OF DR. MONTGOMERY MCFATE, SENIOR SOCIAL SCIENCE
ADVISOR, JOINT ADVANCED WARFIGHTING DIVISION, INSTITUTE FOR
DEFENSE ANALYSES
Dr. McFate. Mr. Chairman and ranking members of the
Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House Armed
Services Committee, thank you very much for this opportunity to
testify on the importance of sociocultural knowledge to U.S.
military personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I am appearing today in my personal capacity vice my
official capacity. As such, my comments should not be construed
as official Department of Defense or U.S. Army policy.
Sociocultural knowledge is a critical enabler for stability
operations in irregular warfare. Stability and reconstruction
operations pose a tremendous challenge to the U.S. Government
because they require different skills, knowledge, training and
coordination than those tasks commonly required by major combat
operations.
Unlike major combat operations, stability and
reconstruction operations must be conducted among and with the
support of the indigenous civilian population. Working
effectively with local civilians in order to rebuild a country
requires knowledge of how the society is organized, who has
power, what their values and beliefs are, and how they
interpret their own history, among other things.
Experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past few years
have demonstrated the benefits of having this knowledge and the
drawbacks of not having it in terms of lives, money and mission
success.
A critical question is how U.S. military personnel should
acquire this knowledge. There are multiple possible means, to
include education, training, advisors and databases.
An additional question concerns the optimal amount of
sociocultural knowledge that U.S. military personnel should
have and the trade-offs in terms of time, money and manpower
that acquiring this knowledge entails. After all, making every
soldier and Marine into a social scientist is neither feasible
nor desirable.
Professional military education is a long-term solution to
ensuring that the U.S. military has the requisite level of
knowledge about foreign cultures and societies. Lessons
learned, insight gained and skills acquired in a classroom
influence how problems are conceived, solutions are developed
and decisions made in subsequent professional positions.
Most professional military education institutions in the
United States face a number of challenges right now:
First, a lack of qualitative social scientists within the
curricula, inadequate attention to developing intercultural and
cognitive skills, et cetera.
Second, recognizing that sociocultural knowledge has
improved the effectiveness of operations in Iraq and
Afghanistan, all branches of the military have now began
cultural pre-deployment training programs. Creating training
programs was initially a ``bottom-up'' movement in response to
lessons learned, rather than a ``top-down'' push resulting from
official Department of Defense requirements. As a result of
this process, cultural training varies widely in content,
structure and time allotted. However, the DOD, Army and other
military services are now developing comprehensive cultural and
language strategies.
Third, collecting sociocultural information in a
computerized database is another means to provide U.S. forces
with information about the local population in their area of
operations. When Operation Iraqi Freedom began, there was no
readymade repository for the collective knowledge about a given
local area. Because brigades had no system to store, sort,
organize or effectively transfer this information, much of it
was lost during transfer of authority between units.
Recognizing this issue, the DOD made an effort to develop such
a database in 2004.
Subsequently, in field testing this database, we discovered
that commanders and their staffs had little time available to
use such a tool and little inclination to do so. What
commanders actually wanted was an advisory staff element that
would be attached 24/7 to the brigade who could develop, use
and maintain such a database.
Fourth, operating forces can also acquire the requisite
knowledge about the local population through the use of
cultural advisors. At the present time, the U.S. Army's human
terrain system is probably the best-known example of such an
advisor program, although it is not the first and it is not the
only one. Colonel Schweitzer testified on April 24 to another
House subcommittee on the same issue.
To recap, the Human Terrain System (HTS) mission is to
provide commanders in the field with relevant sociocultural
understanding in order to assist them in developing courses of
action that are better harmonized with the interests of the
local population and which entail less lethal force. This
mission is achieved through five- to eight-person teams of
military and reservist personnel who are attached on orders to
the military unit that they support.
The team does not rotate out with the brigade at the end of
their tour but remains in place. For example, the human terrain
team in Taji will remain in Taji as long as U.S. forces do.
Individual team members are rotated out on a staggered basis,
ensuring the continuity of sociocultural knowledge and enabling
each brigade to start their tour at a higher place on the
learning curve.
In addition, HTS supports these teams through a research
reach-back center and a network of subject matter experts who
are able to conduct research and analysis to meet the brigade
commander and staff's requirements.
In conclusion, solutions to the military's immediate
sociocultural knowledge requirement have been ad hoc, bottom up
and developed by the respective military services in response
to their own perceived needs. For any of these solutions to be
sustainable beyond the immediate conflicts, they should be
rationalized, coordinated and institutionalized. Otherwise, the
capabilities will be lost, as happened after the Vietnam war,
and will have to be rebuilt yet again.
Thank you for this opportunity to comment, and I look
forward to your questions.
Dr. Snyder. Thank you, Dr. McFate.
[The prepared statement of Dr. McFate can be found in the
Appendix on page 95.]
Dr. Snyder. Dr. Krepinevich.
STATEMENT OF DR. ANDREW F. KREPINEVICH, JR., PRESIDENT, CENTER
FOR STRATEGIC AND BUDGETARY ASSESSMENTS
Dr. Krepinevich. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The need for cultural awareness and language competence is
really greatest in the area of irregular warfare, whether we
call it counterinsurgency, foreign internal defense or the
latest buzz phrase: stability, security, transition and
reconstruction operations.
In these kind of conflicts, the population is really the
center of gravity. Hence, the phrase, trying to win the hearts
and minds to mobilize the population to your side. Very
difficult to do that if you can't operate on what some people
in the military call complex cultural terrain.
So one of the critical questions is, is irregular warfare
going to be an important staple of the future in terms of what
kind of challenges our military has to confront?
I have talked to one general in particular who told me,
look, the Army's had its hand on the stove here for about five
years. Once we finally leave Iraq and Afghanistan, we are not
going to do this for another 30 years. The American people
won't stand for it.
That may be the case, but I think there are powerful trends
arguing the opposite. And there is also an old Army saying that
the enemy gets a vote in terms of what kind of conflict, what
kind of challenge he presents.
If you look at trends, it is hard to see how we are not
going to be challenged by an increasingly what I would call
disordered world. If you look at demographic trends throughout
Africa, the Middle East, Central and South Asia, also Central
America, parts of northwest Latin America, there is a huge
bulge, a huge percentage of the population under the age of 15.
In places like Nigeria, that percentage is over 40 percent of
the entire population.
What we are going to see in the coming years is this rising
youth bulge reach the age of maturity where they have to be
absorbed into that particular country or region's economy. Yet,
in many of these areas, you have this rising large number of
young people who generally are undereducated and uneducated,
who are going to be expected to compete not in the local
economy but in a global economy, not just against Nigerians or
Colombians but also Indonesians, Indians, South Koreans and so
on, that are unfortunate enough for the most part to live in
countries where the governments are corrupt or incompetent or,
typically, both. And this, again, presents a situation where
you are going to have a rising number of highly frustrated
people.
There is scholarship that indicates in these kinds of
situations you are looking at raised levels of internal
instability. And so there is motive here. There is motive to
create higher levels of disruption.
When you look at the communications revolution, you will
add to this the fact that more and more people, even in the
developing parts of the world, understand just how badly off
they are relative to the rest of the world. The fact that they
could be more easily proselytized, organized, recruited,
organized and trained and even equipped.
If you look at financial transfers, if you look at the
kinds of means that are falling into the hands of these groups,
over a decade ago, Aum Shinrikyo in Japan developing nerve
agents and chemical weapons, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia (FARC) looking for radiological bombs, al Qaeda
looking for nuclear weapons, and Hezbollah practicing in 2006 a
kind of hybrid war using rockets, artillery, mortars,
munitions, unmanned aerial vehicles. And not only the means but
a track record of forcing the U.S. out of Lebanon in 1983;
Somalia, 1993; the Soviets in Afghanistan in 1989; and the
Israelis losing the second Lebanon war in 2006.
So means, motive and a track record of success.
If you look at what that means in terms of a requirement
coming out of the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), you
see in terms of the way the Army, for example, is structuring
its brigade formations with the need for a surge capability,
the ability to surge brigades forward and keep them on station
for a protracted period of time, for advisors, for trainers as
part the QDR's admonition that the military needs to begin to
think of building partner capacity on an enduring basis as a
key part of our defense strategy.
And not just that but also the need for U.S. forces and
capabilities in terms of humanitarian relief operations and
what the military calls phase zero operations, trying to engage
in prophylactic effects like we have in places like the
Philippines to keep nasty situations from turning worse.
So, again, a strong need. And I would say if we are talking
about trade-offs, I would be happy to discuss this in detail.
But I think, in the area of conventional war capabilities,
nobody wants to build the next tank Army to take on the
Americans. Nobody wants to build the next combined arms
Republican Guard to take on the American military. They are
gravitating toward weapons of mass destruction and, as I said,
irregular warfare.
So, in summary, I think irregular warfare, whether we look
it or not, is here is stay. I don't think it's a fad or a run-
off. I think it is a trend. I think it's going to increase in
importance. I think the challenges are going to become more
difficult. And the key to executing this well, the key to
operating well on complex human terrain--one of the keys at
least--is going to be cultural awareness and language
proficiency.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Krepinevich can be found in
the Appendix on page 104.]
Dr. Snyder. Thank you, Dr. Krepinevich.
We will go ahead and start the five-minute clock.
I want to ask my first question. It is just very, I guess,
straightforward and not very subtle.
But it is my understanding that the foreign language
proficiency bonus is paid to a little over 17,000 service
members. So that is about 1.2 percent of DOD personnel, which
totals about $1.3 million.
Now, of that number, probably a significant number of those
are senior folks that are in intelligence, so they're not going
to be the people that are out doing street patrols and, you
know, training foreign militaries. My question is, what should
that percentage look like? Should we have 20 percent of our
folks getting the foreign language proficiency bonus? Should it
be 10 percent?
Now, I suspect every one of you are going to hedge on that,
but I want to hear the hedges. What should our specific goal
be? How do we measure it? How are we going to arrive what that
specific goal would be?
Andy, why don't we start with you this time and let's go
back the other way.
Dr. Krepinevich. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I think a lot of it has to do--as long as we are hedging--
to do with how you see your forces being employed. So, for
example, if you look at the Marines right now, they are trying
to organize themselves around units that can really break down
from the regimental level down to battalion and even company
and platoon level. And one of the examples they give is that a
battalion could have multiple deployments in different parts of
Africa performing different kinds of missions in different
locales. If that is the case, the more you break these units
down--and a lot of this kind of conflict environment or
operational environment is a series of microclimates--then that
is going to drive up the needs for language proficiency and
certainly cultural awareness.
If you are taking more of an outsourcing approach--and I am
not an expert this, but my understanding is the Army is looking
at these kinds of human terrain teams and operating in larger
units. Then, if that is the case, you might be able to get away
with a lower level of language proficiency.
But, again, I think the trade space here isn't between
necessarily how you organize. The trade space here really is
the ability to conduct this mission and be very flexible and
adaptable. So the Marines could scale up to perform Army-like
operations and the Army could break down to conduct Marine-
style operations or small unit operations. The trade space
really is between that and what I think is some of the high-
density, low-demand capability, which I think has to do more
with conventional or traditional kinds of military operations.
Dr. Snyder. Dr. McFate.
Dr. McFate. I once had a trip down to Fort Bragg which was
very interesting. I went to go visit with Army Special Forces,
and someone down there explained to me that, in terms of how
they assign people to learn languages and what languages they
choose to learn, that to some degree it's always best guess and
it always requires a little bit of crystal ball gazing. Because
you are trying to make an assessment about what's going to be
needed by the military in the future, and it is hard to know
exactly what that is going to be.
Even if you had 25 or 30 percent of general purpose forces
collecting the language incentive bonus, you still would not
end up with a comprehensive coverage of all the languages in
the world that might need to be spoken, given contingency
operations, et cetera.
So I think what's important for the committee to consider
is what are the other resources out there that can be brought
to bear to allow the military to work effectively in
environments where you may find that you don't have anybody or
you have very few people who do speak the local languages. And
I believe that Dr. Brecht could probably speak better to that
than I can.
Dr. Snyder. Dr. Zalman.
Dr. Zalman. I would also work backwards from needs. I would
hope that everybody who--I can't speak to the military levels--
but that everybody who is to deploy to a particular area has
minimal language competence and the ability to discern when
they need some greater competence. They need to be able to
enter into an interaction in a local scenario, but I don't
think that they need to have--that everybody needs to be a
linguist.
Dr. Snyder. And I agree with that. The issue is I don't
think we are satisfied where we are today, but we don't know
what the end point is.
Dr. Brecht.
Dr. Brecht. That is a really tough question. Because,
basically, as I see it from my--I mean, the last time I was in
the military was in 1963, so my perspective may be a little
off. But the mission has changed dramatically, and what the
military language requirements were in the 1980's were very
high-level skills of a pretty elite cadre, mostly for intel
purposes and so on. And in the last 20 years, because of
irregular warfare and everything we have done, that base has
spread immensely.
Now, we still--so trying to get a percentage on that is
extremely difficult. It is still difficult to acquire those
three level on a scale of zero to five takes an immense
investment, and so rewarding the people who stay with that--
basically, it takes years and years of intense language study
and exposure in the country to reach that level. So
incentivizing those people is really important.
As we go down to the lower levels, where you have a much
broader population and having to do many more jobs which we
have never calibrated on that scale basically of pay, that is a
real different kind of task.
And if I were sending people over--and I am a language
person, so my language colleagues are going to be offended at
this--but the first thing people need is what I talk about, is
they have to recognize when they are in a communications
dilemma or a cultural awareness issue. They have to be
culturally sensitive and aware of the communication task they
are facing and where to get the resources. That is the first
thing they need.
The second thing they need is some experience in that
culture so that they don't do some things that are really
damaging. But, in that problem, it's always sometimes a little
culture that can be a dangerous thing.
And then the third thing they need is the language
capability.
So we are tying everything to do with language at this
stage. We are tying--kind of an older system that was based on
fairly high-level, narrow cadres and very high-level skills.
And what it appears to me you are doing is changing the
paradigm and asking a question that is extremely hard to get
at. Because you can't separate the culture and the language at
those levels, and you can't separate those tasks at those
levels.
So is that enough hedging?
Dr. Snyder. That is pretty good hedging. We don't want to
separate it at all.
Mr. Akin for five minutes.
Mr. Akin. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
First of all, Dr. Krepinevich, most civilian organizations
or big companies, there is a promotion path. Sometimes you have
to be an accounting kind of guy, a bean counter to get to be
president. Other times, you are a line operating person or
maybe you are a lawyer or whatever. I used to work for IBM. It
was marketing. In the military, is there a certain pattern for
promotion for people who want to move up the line? Are there
certain places that you have to touch base?
Dr. Krepinevich. I will speak to the Army in particular,
because that is the service I am most familiar with. Certainly
there are a series of hoops you have to jump through, say, if
you want to become a brigade commander, a colonel.
Recently, I received a briefing from the Army. They took a
look at 20 people who had recently been selected for brigade
command. And the Army has this phrase, officers should be
pentathletes. They should be capable in many different skills.
Well, in looking at this matrix of assignments of these 15
different officers, overwhelmingly I think out of the matrix
only 3 slots weren't directly related to line troop
assignments, field assignments. And of course, you want to be
proficient in combat. That is what these assignments were
oriented on. But it certainly didn't lead to brigade commanders
who were pentathletes.
If you look at the Army's foreign area officer program,
typically not an area to get into if you want to get promoted.
You are not going to be the future Chief of Staff of the Army.
You probably won't even make general if you pursue that path.
Mr. Akin. Are you saying that the people who were being
promoted were not really people who were on the front lines or
line officers? They tended to be more staff kinds of people?
Dr. Krepinevich. No. What I am saying is people who are
promoted are people who spend most--as much time as possible
out with the field Army. That means either in troop assignments
as a commander, platoon leader, company commander, battalion
commander or in troop, staff assignments such as a battalion
operations officer. Those are the ones that get you the
greatest credit in terms of future advancement. And you can go
all the way back to the Vietnam war, and I can tell you stories
if you are interested.
But that has been the theme and the trend for a very long
time now in the Army, and whether the Army can change that
culture I don't know. There is a lot of institutional
credibility built up in terms of the field Army career path.
One of the things that I think is very interesting for the
Army in particular at this point in time is I think as an
institution it really is at a crossroads. Because if you asked
the Army in the 20th century what kind of an Army do we need,
the first half of the century is we need an Army to beat the
Germans. The Germans fought us like we fought them. The second
half is we need an army to beat the Soviets. They fought us
like we fought them.
Nobody wants to fight us that way anymore. And so when you
ask the question, what kind of an Army and you look at where
the trend lines are going, it really is an Army more and more
focused on irregular warfare.
Mr. Akin. I appreciate your setting the background and the
tone as to how that works.
So now, taking what you are saying where the Army is going,
does that mean that the higher-level leaders should be very
effective in terms of communications in cultural and language?
Or does that say those people maybe should be operating at a
lower level, and you have the people who are what the military
calls the pointy end of the spear, they are the ones that don't
necessarily have to have language. Or do you think it should be
spread up and down the chain of command?
Dr. Krepinevich. Let me give you an alternative career path
for an Army general.
You come in. You are assigned to an Army brigade that has a
high capability to deal with irregular warfare operations. You
are engaged in a lot of phase zero operations. You may be in
sub-Saharan Africa under General Ward, and you are doing sort
of reconstruction operations, security assistance these sorts
of things.
Eventually, you go off to graduate school. You go off to
graduate school in an area studies program. Your duty
assignment or your utilization tour after that is you go to
sub-Saharan Africa for a couple of years in civilian clothes,
and you wander around. And you come back in two years, and your
performance is what you wrote up of what you learned being
Lawrence of Arabia for two years.
Then maybe you go on to command that brigade that you were
in that had units operating in terms of security assistance,
training, advising in sub-Saharan Africa. Eventually, you might
command a military assistance group that is responsible for
several brigades as a general officer operating and supporting
sub-Saharan African militaries and societies and so on. And
eventually you might be the next General Kip Ward, a four-star
who is head of AFRICOM.
And so you have built that competence over time. It is a
mix of what I would call field and warfighting competence but
also that other competence that becomes critical when the
population becomes the center of gravity.
And again, if you look at the officers who have been quite
successful in Iraq and Afghanistan, people like Barno and
Corelli and Petraeus and so on, they were sent off to serious
graduate schools to get serious grad school educations and
developed an understanding for the fact that warfare can be a
lot more than just kinetics, as General Corelli says. There are
these other aspects.
Mr. Akin. What you painted is a very geocentric kind of
career path, though, to a certain degree.
Dr. Krepinevich. That is right. You would have to--and,
again, you would have to take into account the fact that you
could pick the wrong geographic area. And then you might have
to consider what I think the Army sometimes calls cross-
leveling. So if I had two brigades operating in sub-Saharan
Africa and all of a sudden I need eight, I may have to transfer
some of the staff and elements of those two brigades to sort of
even things out among the eight so that I don't have great
competence in two brigades and no competence in the six others.
And, again, there is no perfect answer, but you can
position yourself so that when you are surprised you could
adapt more critically.
Mr. Akin. Thank you.
Dr. Snyder. Mr. Bartlett for five minutes.
Mr. Bartlett. Thank you very much.
Following up on the question Mr. Akin asked about
promotion, I guess it was 56 years ago I left government
service as a GS-15, which was the highest grade, unless you
were at that time PL-313, which was super grade. I guess they
have changed that since.
And nobody reported to me. Nobody. I was all alone. And
that is because I was a scientist and I didn't need to have 49
or 450 people reporting to me to be a GS-15.
Do we have a similar thing in the military to reward people
who are really, really good at something? And what we are
talking about today could be an absolutely invaluable asset,
somebody who is really, really good at knowing the language and
knowing the culture? Can we reward them the way I was rewarded,
without having a whole Army report to me?
Dr. Krepinevich. Is that a question for me, Congressman?
Mr. Bartlett. Or whoever, yeah. Or do they remain buck
private forever because they don't have anybody to report to?
Dr. Krepinevich. My understanding--and I am not an expert
on the promotion system--but it has been quite centralized over
the years and so there is limited opportunity for sort of spot
promotions, as they used to call it, as you had in World War II
or even back in the 1950's. There are still stories about
General LeMay, when he commanded the Strategic Air Command,
promoting people on the spot and also firing people on the
spot. So that is much more, I think, limited today.
And, also, I think there is limited ability for sort of
horizontal accession into the military. In other words, in the
medical field, medical doctors, I believe still come in at a
higher rank reflective of their expertise and skill. But if you
are talking about, you know, somebody who comes in off the
street and enlists and has expert knowledge of Farsi, I don't
think they start out anywhere ahead of anybody else that comes
in off the street and enlists in the military.
Mr. Bartlett. Recognizing how valuable those skills could
be, shouldn't we have a way of rewarding them like we do
doctors?
Dr. Krepinevich. Well, yeah. I think there is a number of
opportunities here. One is, we are blessed more than the other
great powers of the world by the fact that we have a very
diverse population. Just going around Washington you can find
people who speak Spanish, Persian, Afghan, Pakistani,
Vietnamese. I mean, just get in a taxi cab. And we do make a
priority of recruiting these kind of people. We certainly set
certain--we want people with these kinds of education
backgrounds and these kinds of physical characteristics and so
on. We have to begin to orient our recruitment efforts on
trying to recruit people who maybe have English as a second
language who live in this country.
We have allies. I was at a conference last year, a
conference of European armies, and I found myself sitting next
to the French Army Chief of Staff. And he says to me, I want to
meet General Casey. Do you know General Casey? I said, I know
General Casey, but General Casey doesn't know me. But he wanted
to talk to General Casey about AFRICOM and start to say, look,
we have cultural competence in certain parts of Africa. We know
Morocco. We know West Africa. We have cultural terrain
competence in those areas, language competence, so let's sit
down and work together as allies.
The Turks, you know, another long-standing ally of the
United States. I see us having to rely a lot more on allies.
And if you look at allies that we have in the developing world
and if you look at our allies who were colonial powers at one
time, they may not be able to send 200,000 troops someplace,
but they do have an advantage over us in terms of understanding
cultural terrain and having language facility in certain
important parts of the world that we don't.
Dr. Brecht. Can I just say, there was a study of
corporate--Fortune 500 companies about 8 years ago about what
qualifications they want in their managers. And the first
qualification that the survey did--the University of Washington
also did it. They wanted, first, core competency in their
skill, in their specialty. The second is they wanted good
English. The third is they wanted experience living abroad. The
fourth one was language capabilities, for the simple reason
they didn't want to pay for language capabilities in Japanese
at a high level when they are moving someone to Santiago,
Chile, in the next--after two years. And so even corporate
America does not have what you are asking for, a focus on a
specialty in that language.
The high-level managers in the Officer Corps, they want
people who adapt to any circumstance in any part of the world;
and that is what we are seeing from the corporate sector.
Dr. Zalman. May I add two brief comments?
One is that, over the long term, as the paradigm of the
current military shifts so that cultural awareness and language
ability to some extent are not seen as exceptional or as needed
in this situation or only in that situation, the issue of
reward for most would become more of a moot one, I would think.
The second is that I would suggest that, at the lower
levels, people from heritage language communities, non-native,
non-English speakers aren't necessarily more culturally aware.
They will bring their biases, whatever they are, just as
anybody else will, to their perception of the situation and
they will enact them or communicate them. So they are in as
much need as anyone else, I would think, of a sense of
awareness that they are in a cultural situation.
Dr. Snyder. Dr. Gingrey.
Dr. Gingrey. Mr. Chairman, thank you.
I guess this mike is on.
You know, it seems that everybody agrees that we need more
of this type training that is cultural awareness and language
training. But the big question in my mind is how much is
appropriate for the military and in what career fields and in
what rank should it be concentrated. We had touched on that a
little bit. Or should we rely on civilians and contractors?
Would this be an area maybe where a civilian reserve corps
could be an asset?
Dr. Brecht, you just mentioned about corporate America and
multinational companies that don't seem to reward language
expertise because, you know, they may be in one area for two
years and then go to another one and they're not expert in this
particular language. And the same thing I think Dr. Zalman
maybe referenced in regard to the military.
But to my way of thinking, that possibly it is time for a
change in that way of thinking and that concept, that maybe the
multinational corporations would do very well to recruit and
reward individuals that have the cultural awareness and
language expertise and send them to China if that is the
appropriate language and keep them there for a while and not
move them in two years and get the full bang for the buck out
of these people. And the same thing with the military.
I know, back in my home State, North Georgia College and
State University trains their cadets in Chinese language to
better prepare them for their military careers, and they are
trying to and will with our help be starting an Arabic language
curriculum, too.
So, in the future, I guess my question is, do you believe--
this is a specific question--that in order to be promoted in
the military, knowledge of a foreign language will ultimately
be a prerequisite? And how is the Defense Department partnering
with universities to help develop these skills and how can we
improve in this area?
Dr. Gingrey. Any of you, of course.
Dr. Brecht. I think your point is exactly right. Corporate
America uses workarounds. They basically use localized talent,
and they outsource and they do everything else except bring in
an in-house capability in language and culture. That is
characteristic of corporate America. And that is because they
can. You can't localize warfighting, you can't localize intel,
and you can't outsource that kind of thing the way corporate
America does. So corporate America is a very bad example.
And, in this case, I think the Department of Defense is
leading the way--and I will come back to the term I have used--
toward a truly globalized workforce, because you can't
localize, you can't outsource. And how to build in that
capability is--and one of the things that I am particularly
admiring of the road map is that basically it has incentives,
it has requirements, it has management structure, and it sets
the tone in leadership, that you can't get promoted
presumably--officers have to have this language capability.
They have to have the experience of engaging other cultures.
And I believe any military that we have in the future, the
leadership has to have that capability. And they are not
looking at global America for that.
Dr. Gingrey. Dr. Zalman or Dr. Krepinevich, any of the
panel, I would be glad to have you respond.
Dr. Krepinevich. Just a couple of quick observations.
One is I don't think certainly 100 percent of the officer
corps has to be cultural and language experts, but I do think
it is possible. And I defer to my colleagues here. My
understanding is it is not terribly difficult to get a certain
level of cultural familiarity and some basic language training.
And if you have time, these units, on a rotation basis, they
are supposed to have at least about a year to train up before
they go on their next deployment. They typically are supposed
to know where they are going. That certainly provides an
opportunity to do those sorts of things.
I would say in terms of outsourcing language support as
opposed to cultural support, if the military is doing what is
called for, at least in terms of the QDR and some of the other
public statements, which is building partner capacity and
engaging in phase-zero prophylactic kinds of operations--and
this is a steady state. This isn't a surge capability. This is
a capability you need because the military, particularly the
Army and to a lesser extent the Marine Corps, the Navy and to
some extent the Air Force engage in this all the time.
And then finally you say knowledge of a foreign language. I
am not quite sure what level of capacity you are talking about.
Dr. Gingrey. Well, I am talking about speaking ability.
Dr. Krepinevich. The familiarity with a foreign language,
again, it has been a long time since I was in high school or
even college, but you used to have to take four years of a
foreign language in high school and at least a few years in
college. And I think there is a lot to criticize about our K-
to-12 education system and some other aspects of even our
college.
Dr. Gingrey. Well, we don't have time to get into all of
that, and I have already expended my five minutes, but let me
just say that I believe--and maybe you alluded to this or one
of the other panelists--in regard to rewarding these skills of
all this time that it takes to require an ability to speak and
understand a language, maybe it should be rewarded, just like a
higher ranking given to a physician who is coming in and has a
skill to provide for health care.
Thank you.
Dr. Snyder. Mrs. Davis for five minutes, and then we will
go break for votes.
Mrs. Davis of California. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I am sorry I missed your testimony, but I wanted to maybe
just ask a few general questions, and you can certainly let me
know whether you have already answered them.
But also share just very briefly, my community is San
Diego, and San Diego State University has embarked on a program
with the ROTC, and they are training young people in that
program in three major languages.
The beauty of that--and I met with them just the other
day--is that, instead of taking other courses in the summer,
that is all they are doing. So they are not immersed in the
same way that--I will mention another program that the Marines
from Camp Pendleton are involved in, but at least that is all
that is on their plate. And I think that has made a tremendous
difference. In fact, several people mentioned that in two weeks
they basically finished a semester, and they could really
benefit from that experience. And so that is something to think
about.
And I certainly want to follow up on that and see where,
within the ROTC programs, we can do more of that. The young
people are being paid to be part of that program; that is an
incentive. But they also feel that they are getting valuable
skills, and there may be a role there.
The other piece of that with Camp Pendleton is we are
fortunate that we have Iraqis in San Diego, and so they are
immersing these young people in the Iraqi community. They are
not living with families, which I think should be a good next
step actually, but they are going to meals, they are in the
community, they are really trying to get a better feel. And I
think that is critical.
And when I have asked them, well, what should we be giving
up? You know, when we are preparing people for deployment,
obviously there are a lot of things that need to be learned in
addition to all the basic training and the other skills that
people have. And they basically said, you know, there are
plenty of people who can be identified who don't need to be
doing everything that is going on. So pick the skills that you
need, and relieve those people of their obligations to be there
with their unit through that entire period and give them this
kind of an experience.
So I just throw that out. You know, is that the kind of
advice you might give someone if they are thinking about these
kinds of programs? Or is there something else that is critical
in doing that? Can we find the time, really, to give people? I
think it is really the--having that kind of time to study is
remarkable, if we can do that.
Dr. Zalman. Well, as you were speaking, and I was
remembering the question that was just asked previously, I
mean, this seems to me a very good idea, because he raised for
me the reminder that any language training to a certain depth,
let's say three years, every day--I mean, languages differ, but
from a serious endeavor, people tend to come out knowing about
language learning in general and about the culture that they
have been immersed in and about its history, because it is
embedded in the language.
And that, even if you go somewhere else where you need to
speak a different language, is a portable kind of knowledge, in
a sense, a portable skill. So you can go from one linguistic
environment to another but with a greater sense of self-
awareness of what people are doing when they are speaking a
language.
So if that opportunity were made available, I would think
people would want to take advantage of it for that reason. It
compounds the benefit.
Dr. McFate. Just to follow up on this, it is sometimes said
that General Petraeus is the best social scientist in Iraq. And
I think that there is actually a lot of truth in that. And that
can be said about a number of other senior leaders, as well.
And I think if you look at the life experience and at the
professional experience of people like General Corelli and
General Petraeus, they didn't have time in their otherwise very
busy military careers to engage in higher education at civilian
institutions. And I think that that opportunity is particularly
important.
To follow up on what Dr. Zalman was just saying, I think it
is very important to look at the ability of the military to
acquire general cross-cultural communication skills and general
cultural competency, specific regional knowledge and specific
language competency. These are two different approaches to the
same goal.
And I think that there is a definite benefit in terms of
thinking about this in general skills terms, because this is
transferrable and it is portable, so you don't get a whole
bunch of people who have been trained to go to China and they
all speak beautiful Cantonese or Mandarin but we are going to
actually send them instead to Bosnia. If they have general
skills and they have general knowledge about language
acquisition, that knowledge and that language skill, it doesn't
rot on the vine, it can be transferred.
Dr. Brecht. Could I underline your question about the ROTC?
As I understand, these grants now are going to ROTC programs
around the country. One of the critical things they should do
is send them abroad for an immersion in country. That is what
they should do in the summer. It would be a terrific thing to
get them in the country that is not a lot of money. And these
young future officers would profit immensely simply by exposure
to that other culture, but real exposure and immersion in that
authentic environment.
Dr. Snyder. We need to break for votes. And if you need
anything, the staff will be glad to help you. And we will come
back after the votes, two votes.
[Recess.]
Dr. Snyder. I resisted the temptation, Dr. Krepinevich, to
call you to the table just to show off that I could pronounce
your name. See, I went ahead and did it anyway.
We are going to go ahead and start. Mr. Akin will not be
able to return, which gives me free rein here until we have
another member come.
I wanted to ask, so far, probably justifiably so, we have
been pretty squishy. But I think that is an okay thing. I don't
fault you for it. I think we are just squishy as a Nation on
what we think our goals are to be, with regard to foreign
language skills and cultural awareness. So, I want to kind of
poke at it a bit around the edges.
Maybe the first thing I would get at is the video that we
showed of Mr. Gabaldon and Senator Inouye, with the contrast
between a person who had not only foreign language skills, Dr.
Zalman, but getting to your point in your thing, I think it
didn't come out in that video, but how Mr. Gabaldon learned his
skills was he had Japanese friends as a teenager, and he
traveled with them. I don't know if it was, like, right after
the Depression, or if they traveled in work; I think
agricultural work.
He had Japanese friends, so it wasn't just his language
skill in some classroom. It was, I think, he liked the Japanese
people. I think he didn't want to kill any more Japanese than
he had to. And he risked his life to keep 1,500 of them from
getting killed in a very dramatic way. And you think about, how
many U.S. soldiers would we have lost if we had to kill another
1,500 Japanese?
And the point I am getting at, Dr. Krepinevich, is these
are skills not just in irregular warfare. I mean, that is a
dramatic example of potentially the value of language skills
and I say cultural awareness in a very conventional war
setting. What if we had another 10 of the Gabaldons on that
island? What if we had 15,000 less Japanese that would have had
to have been killed before that battle would have been over?
What that would have meant for those families and to our
Marines that would have died in it.
So I think this issue of cultural awareness goes hand in
hand with language skills, but it gets right, I think, down to
the level of different kinds of combat. It has value in a lot
of different areas of combat.
I want to give you some specific scenarios, maybe get away
from some of the squishiness of it. I know a young Marine in
town here. He is one of our fellows who did a couple of tours
in Iraq. And because of some civilian life experiences, his
Arabic skills are good enough he could go on street patrols
with Iraqi troops without an interpreter, and the value that
comes from that.
Now, what does that tell us about--you know, anybody who
wants to comment; don't feel like you have to comment--but you
are talking about somebody right down at the street level. One-
point-seven percent of a lot of intelligence officers doesn't
get to that level unless we greatly enhance the number of
folks.
Now, is that an important goal or not? Do you have any
immediate reaction? Or is the expense of it too great?
I think in your statement, Andy, you talk a lot about it is
the Marines and Army that needs to benefit from this the most
because of their proximity to being on the ground. But that is
a street patrol situation, not just a----
Dr. Krepinevich. Well, again, if the Pentagon is serious
about its determination to help build partner capacity,
building partner capacity is going to involve training
indigenous forces, it is going to involve advising them once
they are trained. And language skills here, obviously, among
the trainers is going to be important, and certainly the
cultural aspect of it, and certainly advisors.
Typically, there may be a handful of advisors in, say, an
Iraqi battalion. And so, unless you are counting on the Iraqis
to have a high degree of English proficiency or you are going
to outsource translators and bring them in, it can make a
significant difference in terms of having American advisors and
trainers who do speak the language who can go out on patrols as
advisors.
Dr. Snyder. The question, then, is significant difference;
that it is significant to such an extent that it is worth the
investment in doing things differently and enhancing the road
map and setting as a national priority for this country that we
have to do better at kindergarten level up.
Dr. Krepinevich. You know, there is the interesting debate
that you raised in the questions leading up to the hearings
about, well, what do you give up? And there are certain people
in the Pentagon who are willing to give up things to accomplish
this, certain people who aren't.
Two years ago, I sat on a Marine Corps professional
military education review board with a number of retired Marine
generals. And they certainly thought that this was an important
skill-set.
Now, one thing we got into was the need, for example, to
send American officers overseas to the staff colleges of
foreign countries, the Indian Staff College, the Pakistani
Staff College and so on, not only for the purpose of language
and cultural awareness, but also for the purpose of building
relationships among our mid-career officers with theirs so that
someday 5, 8, 10 years down the road our generals know their
generals.
I had a Brit talk to me, it was a couple years ago, had
worked with the Pakistani military for quite some time, said
that he went back to Pakistan not too long ago and was greeted
very warmly in the officer club by a lot of the senior officers
and was treated very frostily by a lot of the junior officers.
And he was very much concerned that the British military was
losing that kind of relationship with the Pakistanis that had
always helped them to, sort of, deal with difficult times in
the past.
So I think this works on a number of different levels, all
the way from that street patrol in Baghdad, all the way up to
the senior officer level.
Dr. Snyder. I think it is well-accepted at the senior
level. I don't think that is an issue.
Dr. Brecht, you wanted to comment?
Dr. Brecht. I would like to direct your attention to the
written statement that I gave, which basically sets a future
scenario in Niger, in northern Africa. And the argument is that
presumably AFRICOM is divided into five regions, like the
Africa Union does. And so these troops now, they are facing
crowd control insecurity in food distribution because of a
drought, say. And so the idea is that every one of these people
has some idea, they are trained, basically they are aware of
the cultural issues in this area. Many of them have basic
phrases in the principal languages in Niger. Others can perform
at the 2-2-plus level in 2 of the 15 core languages which are
spoken there, Hausa and Fulfulda, okay. And so some officers,
they know French, because they are communicating with the
leadership there.
And then if you take this notion that there is your
internal capacity, but when you have someone, you are in an
interrogation and this person is speaking in Arabic that we
don't recognize, we can pull down this tool online which
identifies Arabic dialects, and we find out that this is, you
know, Shuwa Arabic, but nobody knows what that is, and so now
we draw back and we reach back for that capability. We don't
have to build it in there. And then we have a telephonic,
online telephonic interpretation ability and things like that.
What I try to demonstrate in this is that, if every unit,
every person in that battalion had some idea of what the
language and culture requirements are, they had a really good
idea of what the capabilities, whether they had them themselves
or whether they could draw them out, where they could reach
back, outsource, or even rely on localized populations, but
they will know in that area you can't localize the Arabic
because we have insurrections.
So I would agree with you very clearly that, if you want to
build something new, we have to build this total force that
everyone in the force is aware of the language and cultural
requirements. They know where to get the expertise; they don't
all have to have it. That is, I think, the lesson in this.
Dr. Snyder. Of course, what I thought your scenario was--it
is on page four and five of your written statement, of course,
but it was at the very beginning, I noticed, when you said in
the year 2021, which may be----
Dr. Brecht. A little off.
Dr. Snyder [continuing]. May be a realistic analysis of
when we would have those skills.
The other thing, Dr. Brecht, that you talked about is K
through 12. And I forget when our next hearing is on this, but
it is going to be hearing from the Administration, the
Pentagon, about what they are doing on the defense language
roadmap, which I look forward to.
But Dr. Chu has been very candid about, for some years now,
this is a national problem. And we have actually got defense
dollars going to States. I think we are funding a language
roadmap kind of scenario in three States. And then we have
money going to K-through-12 programs, because you just can't
keep recruiting people who don't speak any language at all and
think that you can train your way somehow through a military
career and language training to the levels you want to get. I
mean, it is a national issue.
You refer to, ``The DOD should continue to support and
serve as the bully pulpit for improvement in the Nation's
schools, colleges and universities,'' which I think is a really
interesting statement. I mean, what you are saying is this is a
national security challenge for us that is so great that it has
to be solved in our schools. I mean, it has to start in
kindergarten through all the schools, secondary, elementary,
colleges, universities. And the Pentagon has to lead the charge
in this, which I think is an interesting statement.
By the way, we are hoping to have a hearing with these
States that are getting Pentagon money to do the language
programs, defense dollars, and see what they are doing. And
George Miller, who is the chairman of our Education Committee,
is going to plan to sit in with us on that, because he is very
interested in that too.
My time is up, but does anybody have any other comments?
Dr. Krepinevich. I would just say there is a great
historical analogy. I am old enough to remember when Sputnik
went up. And right thereafter, my schoolteacher was wondering
why little Krepinevich couldn't do his sums better. There was
this huge sense that we were falling behind in science and
technology against the Soviets. And there was a great deal of
emphasis, resources, emphasis in the curriculum on science and
mathematics to make sure that we either caught up or didn't
fall further behind.
And, again, the sense was that that was a national security
problem for the United States, that the way to solve it was by
increasing the competence of the American people writ large in
terms of science and technology and engineering. Sadly, we
have, kind of, fallen back in that hole again, if you look at a
lot of the recent trends in science and technology.
But, certainly, language and global economy, where when
things go wrong it can affect our security, our economic well-
being because, you know, there is this kind of environment,
certainly I think there is a legitimate case to be made that
this needs to be a priority.
Dr. Snyder. Mrs. Davis for five minutes.
Mrs. Davis of California. Thank you. Thank you, Mr.
Chairman.
And, again, I am afraid I might repeat a question. But if
we could go back for a second to the ROTC issue that we talked
about. And you made the suggestion that, instead of training
people here in the States, even if they have good instructors,
it would be better off to send them to a foreign country and
have them learn in a better immersion program.
Is that discussion being held? I mean, where should that
discussion be held?
I think with a lot of the issues that you have talked
about, the roadmap, I think, and also the Defense Language
Institute Foreign Language Center----
Dr. Brecht. It is being held----
Mrs. Davis of California. Who is driving that train, I
guess? How do we really develop that conversation more to
really identify the best programs?
Dr. Brecht. It is my understanding that this program
resides in the National Security Education Program Office, and
Dr. Robert Slater is driving this. And I do believe that the
Senior Language Authority in the Pentagon and Dr. Slater are
talking about this issue and particularly maybe directing some
of these funds more toward immersion. But I don't know anything
more than that.
Dr. Snyder. Susan, I am meeting with him tomorrow, and you
are welcome to join us in my office.
Mrs. Davis of California. Okay, that would be great.
Do you think that the Defense Language Institute is doing
what needs to be done today? Is there something that we should
be speaking to that would push them in an expanded role here?
Dr. Brecht. I think the Defense Language Institute is doing
a remarkable job taking 19-year-olds and giving them language.
The challenge they face is that the requirements have expanded
so much that the Special Forces have requirements at the 0-
plus, 1-1-plus. And the Marines have different requirements and
so on. Across the board the requirements are so broad, and no
one institution can do it all.
What they are doing I think they are doing very well, but
they also have the mandate to reach out to the command language
programs and so on. And I just think that the task they have
taken on is huge. Raising, going to the 2-plus-2-plus-2 level
is a huge challenge, to take a 19-year-old who may not want to
be studying Pashto and take that person, where you can't even
define standard Pashto, and take that person to a 2-plus is an
incredible challenge.
And so I think that, basically, I have seen a lot of
language programs. And for full disclosure, I am on their board
of visitors, so I don't want to seem like an advocate too much.
But what I have seen, they are doing a remarkable job. It is
just a very tough, uphill climb for them, for anybody trying to
get those skills.
And they can't satisfy the broad requirements of the whole
military. Special Forces have different requirements. And the
soldiers on the ground and the Marines, it is so broad, the new
requirements of the day.
Mrs. Davis of California. Yeah. Yeah.
Does anybody else want to comment on that, the best way to
get there?
Obviously, earlier in elementary and secondary, having been
on a school board at a time that we were trying to expand some
languages, many, many years ago--and, you know, when you have
budget problems, what goes first? You are just not able to
follow through with that.
I am pleased that there are some programs in the country
that are doing a lot, a lot more than we were doing at that
time. But part of it is the training of teachers. It is
training them in a way that they weren't trained. Because even
if you have language teachers, they were trained in a way that
doesn't expand a student's ability to be fluent in a language,
only to read and write. And that has to change, as well.
I guess I would be interested in just hearing from you--
and, again, I am sorry I missed a lot of the earlier
testimony--you know, what message would you really like to
leave with us? What hasn't been asked that you want to be sure
that we are aware of, that we are thinking about?
Dr. Brecht. In K-12, I don't think there is any question,
if you took $30 million and seeded dual language immersion
programs across the United States, one in each State, where for
half a day they are learning English and the other half of the
day they are learning Hindi or Telugu or whatever. And those
programs, those dual language programs are spreading across the
country. They are one of the most successful K-12 experiments.
And they get adult support, because the heritage communities
are supporting them. And they fit No Child Left Behind, because
they are doing English as well as the other languages, and so
on.
If I had one magic wand wave, it would be that, because the
K-12 system has to be demonstrated that they can learn language
and the education system can succeed. And I think that is the
base of everything else.
Mrs. Davis of California. With DOD funding?
Dr. Brecht. No, that has to be Department of Education
funding.
Dr. Krepinevich. Well, a lot of the funding is local.
There are some interesting studies out recently. One is
called ``Falling Off the Flat Earth.'' It was done, I think, by
the National Academy of Sciences. You can Google it. It talks
about the terrible condition our science and engineering
education is, in terms of K-12.
I think the system is in crisis across the board; it is not
just in science and engineering. And, again, there is
precedent. I was just in a session with the chairman of Intel
last week. You know, Intel is pouring tens of millions of
dollars into the public education system, trying to encourage
science, the study of science and so on. And one of the big
problems they are finding is you can't get qualified public
school teachers in those fields because they are in demand
elsewhere because there is a growing shortage. The ones you can
get in may know the field, but they may not necessarily be good
teachers. And he said he had data that showed a lot of people
who are teaching in these disciplines aren't qualified. So that
turns the students off even further who might have originally
had an interest in it.
So you are in this downward spiral. And I don't know if it
is the same in the language disciplines, but certainly, as I
said, there is precedence. Fifty years ago, almost exactly 50
years ago, there was this push that said you can't be
competitive as a Nation, you can't have the underlying
foundation for a strong economy that can produce a strong
military that produces qualified, capable, literate soldiers if
you don't have a good education system.
Dr. Brecht. You said is there one thing, one message. The
message is, and to answer the chairman's question: The Pentagon
led racial integration. The Pentagon led gender equity issues,
not out of altruism, but out of strictly pragmatic approaches
to solving major problems that were endemic to the Pentagon's
needs and to society. Language is another one.
And that is what the bully pulpit means. You can't pay for
it, but you can lead it. And that is what I think your mission
could be.
Mrs. Davis of California. If I might, Mr. Chairman?
Dr. Snyder. Sure.
Mrs. Davis of California. Because you raised an issue that,
obviously, is an emotional and difficult issue. But the don't-
ask-don't-tell policy has been looked to as one area in which
we had members of the services learning languages, being quite
competent at them, who were separated from the service.
Do you have anything you would like to say about that, in
terms of how we use policy to, I guess, make a strong point
that we really need people in the services that can speak
languages? Does it impact on that at all?
Don't want to touch it. Okay. That is all right.
Dr. Snyder. Well, you will get another chance here.
Mrs. Davis of California. Okay.
Dr. Snyder. Dr. Brecht, I want to read a couple lines that
you had here. On page six of your testimony, you say, quote,
``Particularly challenging is the fact that the language needs
of the Department of Defense are real and critical, but at the
same time they appear to be so daunting that immediate and
practical workarounds seem more attractive than anything that
is proposed under the guise of a long-term solution. With
troops moving around the world on short-term, 1- or 2-year
deployments with hundreds, if not thousands, of languages in
play and with many funding priorities competing, a
comprehensive end-state of a language-competent and culturally
aware total workforce simply looks out of reach.''
And I think the reason I have been prying at this--well,
what percent? And I knew you weren't going to be able to answer
that; it is unfair. The Pentagon can't answer that. But we need
to at least say, we have it in reach. We need to at least get
to the point through all this that we can see, okay, we have a
sense of where we are going. I think the Pentagon has a sense
that they are moving in the right direction. I just don't think
they have a sense yet of what that end point is, if everything
is going as well as they want.
But I think that is a pretty good statement, it just looks
out of reach. It looks so daunting, it looks so daunting, what
we are talking about. How can we get it--it doesn't even look
in--well, we need to get it so it is in reach.
Dr. Zalman, I think you have been trying to get a word in.
Go ahead.
Dr. Zalman. Well, I am a little slow. Well, but this
actually is the right question to say it to.
I actually don't think that it is out of reach. The idea of
full competence, that is to say full fluency, in a difficult
language does seem out of reach. But, for example, the example
you gave before of the guy on the street who knows something,
there is a generalizable skill, a portable skill that he had.
In this case, he didn't view his interlocutor as exotic; he
could get up close. Somebody else can learn those skills with a
general cultural awareness training, something more elementary
without full-on language skills.
So I would divide, in order to make this not so daunting
and not so hard to swallow expense-wise and labor-wise, would
start to look at what kinds of elementary, portable skills and
capabilities can everyone be trained in. And then you have a
more, sort of, elite cadre.
And might add that there may be more places to look for
that. You alluded, the way that I read it, when you opened to
the fact that the topic today, cultural awareness in the
military, actually is a function of strategic communication or
whatever we are going to call it next. So there are other
places like the State Department, not that they are so well-
funded, but like Fulbrights, and there are so many places where
this is important, that the military is only one of them, which
is training a citizen to be a citizen in a globalized world.
Dr. Snyder. That would be the Senator William Fulbright
from Arkansas, is that correct, Dr. Zalman?
Dr. Zalman. I benefitted from----
Dr. Snyder. You were a Fulbright Scholar in Jordan, yes.
I want to ask maybe Dr. Brecht, do you have any comment or
did you form any opinion about the State roadmaps that the
Pentagon is funding? I understand there are three States with
pilots, and do you have a sense of how does it work? Are they
called State language roadmaps?
Dr. Brecht. Yes. They are a little uneven. But, frankly, I
think we need 48 more, including the District. Because I have
not seen business, local government and State government and
academe collaborate more and hold a better dialogue on language
and cultural understanding than in those. We have brought it
down to actually real people with real local problems and
dealing with the schools. And so, frankly, I think it was a
wonderful experiment, and I just need 48 more.
Dr. Snyder. Yeah.
I have a couple more questions, I think. I have to throw
out my off-the-wall idea. I have mentioned this off and on for
the last several years. I actually did it initially almost as a
kind of throwaway question, but I am not so sure that it is not
a good idea, which is that this ought to start in boot camp.
I was enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1967, Platoon 2059.
And you ought to have some choice over it. But then you get
assigned to the Farsi platoon. And for those 13 weeks that you
are in boot camp or whatever boot camp is now, perhaps during
meals--you would have to do it in a way that you wouldn't take
away from learning to shoot a rifle or, God forbid, learning
the march, but perhaps during meals you would have a native
speaker in that language, not in that confrontational boot camp
way, but your one break of the day, only you had to do it--all
of you would converse, but it had to be in Farsi. And at the
end of the 13 weeks, you would have probably some very basic
exposure. Some would do well. Some would have chosen that
language because they already had some background in it. And
then see where that would lead.
And maybe that would be--maybe they do that in that sense,
Dr. Zalman, of cultural awareness. That that goes for some
people that really hadn't had much foreign language training,
hadn't traveled much, exposure to somebody from another
country. For some it would perhaps be an early initiation to a
language that they really didn't realize they had an aptitude
for.
But do you all have any comment about starting doing that
kind of a thing?
Dr. Zalman. Someone who was in the military once suggested
to me that existing diversity training programs actually offer
a platform for, within the military, offer a platform for
learning about people who are beyond the military and in other
countries.
Dr. Brecht. Those of us who were in boot camp know that is
mostly the first time anyone has left western Pennsylvania.
They are already seeing cultures now, and being jammed up
against a major culture, the military, and also subcultures for
people from all over, and exploiting that would be a really
good idea. Because we just jam them in there and make do, but
no one has ever tried to make that first exposure to people
from really different backgrounds a cultural experience that
they could build on, leaving language aside, just on the
cultural.
Dr. Snyder. Mrs. Davis.
Mrs. Davis of California. Earlier, just to go back a little
bit, do we have the rewards in place to provide the kind of
incentives for someone to go into a program, the ROTC one I
mentioned, whether when they go on--are they there? Is it in
terms of their ability to advance? Obviously, financial
rewards.
And what do you think it would take to really reward people
for taking the time to learn a language in some depth? Any
thoughts? The incentives aren't there now.
Dr. Brecht. The foreign language proficiency pay incentive
is significant that they put in place, but it is a very high
level. It is a 3-3 in two languages, and, you know, that is
huge, it is very high. And there are very few, if any, real
incentives lower down.
I think the ROTC issue is, if you said you have two months
abroad, even if it is Kyrgyzstan, at least there is something
that is there.
And the simple answer is I don't think we have nearly
enough in place to get people to stay long enough to reach
those higher levels, let alone just deal with the lower levels
that they need.
Mrs. Davis of California. That is something that we need to
work on.
I might just tell a quick story. The captain who was
working with the ROTC students who was in Iraq walked into a
meeting that he said was so tense one day, you could just cut
it in the tent, essentially. And he kind of walked in and was
able to say in Arabic, you know, ``Where's the party?'' And it
just relieved all the tension in the room, and people kind of
decided to get down and try and work together.
And I think that that says something about the ability to
convey a message very strongly and to do it in the proper way.
And that is what we need, people that are interested in wanting
to do that.
Dr. Brecht. We have another really good experiment: the
National Language Service Corps, which is being put in place as
we speak. You asked, what are the incentives for people joining
that? There is patriotism. People will do it because it is good
for the country, I believe. But one of the things that would be
useful is, I don't think it is part of the program as yet, but
their skills are assessed. But they also should be given some
money to go take more language. And it may be a way, also, to
support the academic programs in little languages in kind of a
backdoor way.
But this is another vital experiment done in the Department
of Defense that could be very, very useful in building this
cadre where you don't have to have everybody in every language
but you have people in the warehouse waiting to be used.
Mrs. Davis of California. Right. Thank you.
Dr. Snyder. I have one final question, Dr. Brecht, and then
I am going to tell a foreign language story, Susan.
Very briefly, Dr. Brecht, you have one recommendation about
that there should be somebody in the White House that oversees
this. How did you come up with that idea? Just looking for ways
to get it as a higher priority?
Dr. Brecht. Senator Akaka, as you know, has a bill which
hasn't gone anyplace at this moment, but there have been
recommendations. We need somewhere high enough in the
Government that says language, like science and technology, is
a critical aspect of our society for the future. We don't have
that. The fact you have the Office of Science and Technology
Policy in the White House, that is the model; that at least
there is someone, the bully pulpit.
But it is not only defense. Defense shouldn't have to carry
the whole language ball, obviously. And it crosses all the
departments, and it also crosses into education, and getting
someone high enough to bring the sectors of education, industry
and Government and the heritage communities, and to get that
position at least visible. That was where it comes from.
Dr. Snyder. Let me extend to you the offer, I will ask it
as a question for the record, if any of you come up with any
written material you would like to provide or add on to any
answers, feel free to do that, and it will be added as a
question for the record.
Let me close. I will tell you my one story about foreign
language skills. I was working as a doctor in the Cambodian
refugee relief effort along the Thai-Cambodian border in 1981.
And we would go out in these Thai villages and hold clinics.
And the hospital that I admitted sick patients to was run by
Italians. And one day I went to a village, and there was a
lovely young 19-year-old woman with a sky-high fever, a
terrible dull pain, right-upper quadrant pain, and I knew she
was sick and probably was going to need to have her belly
opened up to see what was going on. I took her to the Italian
hospital.
Well, I was here, and then my interpreter who spoke English
and Thai was here. And then he spoke to the woman who spoke
Thai and Italian, and then the Italian doctor was down there.
So there were four of us. And I would say something and boom,
boom, boom, boom. I think it was old Danny Thomas event, with
Uncle Tonoose, if you remember that show.
So, anyway, in the course of this conversation, going back
and forth, I said, ``It is possible this is an atypical
presentation of appendicitis,'' a retrocecal appendix I think
is what it was called back when I actually practiced medicine,
meaning it can cause right-upper-quadrant pain rather than
right-lower-quadrant pain. So I leave it there.
I come back, like, three days later, I want to see how she
is and what happened. And I go to her bed, and she is not
there. And they say, well, she is outside getting water. I go
out there, and she is carrying a bucket of water, walking
around. I get her to come in and lay down. She doesn't speak
any English. And she has this very neat, healing, short, small,
right-lower-quadrant appendix scar. And I thought, how does an
Italian doctor know that he just had to go in like that and not
have to just open her up to see what is going on?
So I get them lined up again; you know, the doctor down
here. So I said, how did you know that was a retrocecal
appendix? And he turns to the Italian doctor, and his eyes get
big, and he says, ``I thought that was your diagnosis.''
[Laughter.]
So that is all. We are adjourned. Thank you all.
[Whereupon, at 4:43 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.
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QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MEMBERS POST HEARING
July 9, 2008
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QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY DR. SNYDER
Dr. Snyder. While the current focus is properly on Iraq and
Afghanistan, do you feel DOD is doing enough to build up a resident
capability in other languages and regions that might present
opportunities for engagement in the future or become security risks?
Dr. Brecht. In my view, the DOD could do more especially with the
languages of Africa. As I indicated in my testimony, there is a sense
among some leaders hard pressed for resources that the problem is
simply too large to address. However, I believe there are practical
steps that can be taken to begin to build an African language
capability in the DOD. Indeed, while in many parts of Africa a colonial
and official language are sufficient for official communication, the
requirements of the department clearly extend well beyond
communications within official channels as well as into areas of the
continent where so-called official channels may not even exist. This
requires a significant investment in regional languages as well as in
many of the languages and dialects in critical areas of the continent.
More generally, the Department has identified ``investment
languages'' that reflect current and projected requirements. The
problem is that, for any given geographical area, national and regional
language policy, social conditions, and local linguistic habits are
constantly evolving, and future DOD capabilities projections must take
these factors into consideration. For example, will Russian be the
lingua franca for Central Asian countries in twenty years as it is now?
Will the trilingual habits of Africans change with the growing
influence of national languages and global English? Which Arabic
dialects will be most commonly used for insiders' speech in North
Africa in the next ten years? Clearly, strategic planning and future
projections in national security should be augmented by sociolinguistic
research on future language usage in targeted areas.
Finally, in order to be able to bring to bear the appropriate
linguistic and cultural expertise for unanticipated developments around
the world, the less-commonly-taught language expertise in the nation's
colleges, universities, and heritage communities must be maintained and
enhanced. Title VI/Fulbright Hays of the Higher Education Act is the
nation's major asset in this regard, the major priority of which is to
guarantee our nation's access to expertise, programs, and resources in
world area, languages and cultures.
In all respects, the DOD's shift to capabilities-based requirements
in place of needs-based requirements is a critical step in the right
direction. This focus on capabilities, enhanced with a ``language
futures'' approach to strategic planning, could help address the
problem inherent in the current requirements driven process that makes
it difficult to invest in languages that may not be important today but
could be critical to national security tomorrow.
Dr. Snyder. What are your views about the success of the Defense
Language Institute's Foreign Language Center in guiding the process and
identifying the principal needs of DOD's language requirements? What
about the Service centers for Language and Cultural Excellence? Can you
give us an evaluation of them?
Dr. Brecht. As far as I know, the DLIFLC is not responsible for
identifying the DOD's language requirements, but it must respond to
requirements formulated and passed on by the services. Unfortunately,
these requirements seem to be focused on short term real needs and
therefore changeable according to the latest crisis. This situation
creates a significant challenge for the DLIFLC, given the fact that
hiring and firing language faculty cannot be accomplished as rapidly as
language requirements change in a system driven by immediate needs.
In general, I believe the services' efforts at identify
requirements have improved significantly; however, this is an area that
needs constant attention. Overall, as stated above, the department's
moving from threats to capabilities in the specification of language
needs is a major improvement, and there are efforts at the highest
levels to get the requirements right. Again, we still need to consider
a ``language futures'' approach to determine which languages and
dialects will be relevant in regions identified as critical in the
future.
Unfortunately, I am not in a position to evaluate the Service
centers for Language and Cultural Excellence. I know that they are
working very hard to address their specific service's needs, but I have
not worked with them sufficiently to offer an opinion on their
effectiveness.
Dr. Snyder. How much can existing and likely technological
improvements offset the need for actual language training?
Dr. Brecht. Technology, together with advances in cognitive,
cognitive neuroscience and language research, will greatly facilitate
language learning in the future. (In fact, one of CASL's strategic
goals is to dramatically reduce the time it takes to learn a language
and measurably improve the effectiveness of the process.) If
effectively deployed, this combination of tools and science can
dramatically improve classroom learning. More importantly, in the
future, language learning will be available on-demand on the job, thus
enabling life-long language learning needed by DOD career
professionals. While this will greatly relieve the classroom burden,
there is always be a need for good classroom teaching in initial stages
of instruction as well as in on-line courses delivered to the field.
Dr. Snyder. In your testimony, you stated that the Department of
Defense ``should continue to support and serve as the bully pulpit for
improvement in the Nation's schools, colleges and universities'' and
suggested that, for foreign language proficiency, as was the case for
racial integration and gender equality, the Pentagon should lead the
way with a pragmatic solution. You also argued for the drafting of
state language roadmaps in the remaining 47 states and the District of
Columbia and suggested that by using seed-money for dual language
schools, the K-12 system could demonstrate that foreign language could
be taught successfully in the education system.
We'd like to hear more about your perspectives on the state
language roadmaps.
Dr. Brecht. The DOD-funded state roadmaps were an attempt to
reenergize language education at the state and local levels, where
education policy and funding have traditionally resided in the U.S.
While national security concerns since 9/11 have focused federal
efforts on language, the strategic view requires states and local
jurisdictions to support language education as never before. The state
roadmaps can create the first dialog and necessary synergy among
government agencies, industry, not-for-profit organizations,
foundations, and the language teaching professions.
At this stage, we have seen three state roadmap efforts take place,
and we have learned a lot about how to make them more effective and how
to keep them moving forward. However, being limited to these three
states, this initiative has not benefited the rest of the states, and
thus the nation as a whole, by establishing models to be emulated and
creating synergies among states. The state roadmap initiative could be
made into an unprecedented national effort on behalf of language in the
United States. We know from recent polls that the parents of our
children are ready for action in this area; we just have not been able
to come up with a practical strategy that limited state and local
budgets and time constraints can support. No one school, district, or
state education agency can do enough alone, but a combined effort of
the constituents listed above might just ``tip'' the system towards a
``plurilingual'' America (to use a European Union term). Without this,
the DOD will continue to expend huge amounts of resources to accomplish
what the education system should have already done.
Dr. Snyder. Can you provide more detail on what actions should be
taken to improve the K-12 education system's ability to meet the
Department of Defense's foreign language proficiency needs?
Dr. Brecht. The underlying assumption of this question is, in my
view, absolutely appropriate: The education system should assume more
of the burden of language education, thus enabling the DOD to focus on
rarely taught languages, high levels, and language for specific tasks
and purposes. The Department has made this point of view clear in the
last several years, and it must now continue its financial support of
NSEP efforts as well as its advocacy of the role of the education
system in meeting the language needs of the country.
For the immediate future, I believe there are three distinct steps
to be taken: First, State Language Roadmap efforts should be undertaken
in all fifty states and District of Columbia. Second, the USED K-12
component of the NSLI should be funded and implemented. Third, the
Department of Education should launch a new dual language immersion
program aimed at funding start-up dual language programs across the
country, presumably under the NSLI mandate.
Finally, in September 2005 I delivered a paper at a conference at
the University of California Berkeley that lays out the broader,
national perspective of the role of schools and universities in
language education in the United States: ``Outlines of a National
Language Education Policy in the Nation's Interest: Why? How? Who is
Responsible for What?'' With some hesitancy, I attach it here in the
belief that it provides the broader perspective on language education
that you are seeking here. (See attachment.) This paper makes the case
that a comprehensive plan is required, one that is cohesive and
collaborative, and that its components are not beyond current budgetary
and political realities.
[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix on page
119.]
Dr. Snyder. Please outline the respective roles DOD, the Department
of Education, and the states should play in taking those actions and
how the drafting of state roadmaps can further those aims?
Dr. Brecht. The DOD should continue the implementation of the
Language Transformation Roadmap, moving on to a next phase of planning
and development that continues to support the Flagship programs of the
NSEP. The Department should also continue to be a major voice and bully
pulpit in support of language education in the United States, given the
fact that the DOD has influence among the American people and their
elected representatives that no other constituency in this country has.
The Department of Education, for its part, should add language to its
English and mathematics priorities and put in place structures and
funding to dramatically improve language education in this country.
This USED effort should focus on supporting states and local
jurisdictions as they implement state roadmaps that create the
partnerships and synergies that will make language education change
possible.
It has been particularly damaging to the nation's language capacity
that Congress has not funded the USED component of NSLI, and so the
department should make this one of its priorities.
Finally, dual language immersion programs should be launched across
the country. These programs are composed of children, half of whom
speak English as a native language and half speak a language other than
English with their parents at home. In the morning the language of
instruction is in the foreign language, say Mandarin, and the afternoon
sessions are conducted in English. This kind of program has proven
effective in giving English speaking children very impressive foreign
language skills, while on the other hand it supports NCLB by
strengthening the English skills of members of our heritage
communities.
In sum, there is no question that a significant investment at the
K-12 level would raise the bar at every level of language education in
this country, both in numbers of students and levels of proficiency,
thus buttressing every other element of the NSLI.
Dr. Snyder. While the current focus is properly on Iraq and
Afghanistan, do you feel the DOD is doing enough to build up a resident
capability in other languages and regions that might present
opportunities for engagement in the future or become security risks?
Dr. Zalman. As the outbreak of violence between Georgia and Russia
and the subsequent aid shipments by US Navy and Air Force suggest, the
U.S. has entered an era in which estimating potential military
engagement is difficult, at best. The U.S. must be prepared for
engagement anywhere, in a variety of modalities (military force,
humanitarian aid, peacekeeping, nation-building, etc.). This
recognition is evident in the DOD's vigorous emphasis on creating a
global force capable of leveraging capabilities across regions.
Given this reality, the DOD will be well served by committing
resources to building up a generic resident cultural competence \1\
capability, in addition to building regional/linguistic capabilities in
currently foreseeable areas of potential engagement, such as Southeast
Asia, and Africa's northern tier.
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\1\ The term cultural competence is used widely in health, mental
health and educational contexts. It usefully denotes not only
awareness, but also a skill; the ability to do something.
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Cultural competence is a composite skill set that enables people to
enter into an unfamiliar situation with enough cognitive agility to
interact, observe and learn from their interactions with others.
Cultural competence is something people ``do'' in interactive
situations, as opposed to a kind of knowledge that they ``have'' about
others. Cultural awareness manifests itself when soldiers, sailors,
airmen and marines can mobilize information about their own and others'
cultural predispositions in order to influence adversaries or
communicate collaboratively with partners.
This capability can be created through training in basic skills
such as: how to work in culturally diverse environments, cross-cultural
management, negotiation and conflict mediation, and training in the
tools of self-reflection. While Special Forces routinely train in these
skills, the approach among regular forces is more haphazard.
The experiences of those deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan have
amply demonstrated the need to cultivate these skills among officers
and senior enlisted members. Knowing etiquette or even basic
demographic facts about their surroundings is not enough. Many require
the ability to negotiate, distribute resources or manage competing
demands in cross-cultural contexts.
Training that helps military members practice and transport such
skills across regional and linguistic lines will indicate a deepened
commitment to preparing forces for the potential engagements of the
future.
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QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MR. JOHNSON
Mr. Johnson. The Department of Defense established the National
Language Services Corps pilot program in 2007. This effort will
identify Americans with skills in critical languages and develop the
capacity to mobilize them during times of national need or emergency.
The National Language Services Corps represents the first organized
national attempt to capitalize on our rich national diversity in
language and culture. This organization has a goal of creating a cadre
of 1,000 highly proficient people, in 10 languages, by 2010. What do
you see as its potential to support broader national security
objectives of increasing cultural awareness and foreign language
capabilities?
Dr. Brecht. In my view, the National Language Service Corps has the
potential to play a critical role in our strategic approach to
language, culture and national security in the United States. As I
indicated in my testimony, no single element in the USG can house all
the linguistic and cultural capabilities needed for the indefinite
future. All agencies must find a way to recruit, train, and maintain an
in-house language and culture capability, but they must also be ready
to localize, outsource, and warehouse resources against unexpected
requirements. The NLSC demonstrates the warehousing capability, serving
as a pilot and model for the future.
In addition, if as part of its design the NLSC would support the
maintenance and enhancement of critical language abilities of its
members, less commonly taught language programs around the country
would have access to a broader clientele, thereby justifying their
existence and traditionally low enrollments to managers in academe and
industry.
Mr. Johnson. How important do you believe it is to use a program
like the National Language Services Corps to access Americans with
diverse language and cultural skills to support our agencies during
national emergencies in the near-term?
Dr. Brecht. A major advantage of the NLSC is the potential to
recruit heavily from our almost 50 million member heritage communities
across the country. While there is a range of challenges involved in
recruiting from many of these communities, these citizens can provide a
level of language competence that is difficult to acquire for native
English speakers. In addition, such a recruitment effort will also send
an important message to speakers of other languages in this country:
that their language abilities are critical to our common well-being and
that, in addition to learning English, their duty as citizens is to
maintain their native language as a service to this country.