DEFENSE DEPARTMENT TONGUE-​​TIED

I’m way too cyn­i­cal these days. After leaf­ing through the dou­ble­s­peak and circlicued excuses for inac­tion that make up the Pentagon’s new “Defense Language Transformation Roadmap,” I blew it off.
Yes, the Roadmap is a text­book exam­ple of bureau­crats form­ing com­mit­tees and “assess­ing needs” rather than going to work. And sure, it’s awful that the Pentagon still doesn’t have a wide-​​scale pro­gram to teach sol­diers Arabic and other for­eign tongues — three and a half years after 9/​11. But whadya expect?
Slate’s Fred Kaplan has a bet­ter atti­tude. He’s out­raged. Completely dis­gusted. And with good reason.

The doc­u­ment only 19 pages, so take a look traces, all too clearly, the project’s shame­ful chronol­ogy. It got under way in November 2002 over a year after the Sept. 11 ter­ror­ist attacks when the under­sec­re­tary of defense for per­son­nel and readi­ness was directed to have the mil­i­tary depart­ments review their require­ments for lan­guage pro­fes­sion­als…
In September 2003 two years after the 9/​11 attacks that made offi­cials real­ize they didn’t know enough about the rest of the world the deputy under­sec­re­tary of defense for plans com­mis­sioned a study “assess­ing lan­guage needs…“
From June through August, 2004, the steer­ing com­mit­tee over­saw the devel­op­ment and on Aug. 31, approvedthe “Roadmap,” and sub­mit­ted it to the under­sec­re­tary of defense.
So, by the end of last sum­mer, it had taken 21 months sim­ply to draw up a 19-​​page plan.
It gets worse.
The plan lays out a series of “required actions” to improve lan­guage skills and incor­po­rate exper­tise in lan­guages and area stud­ies in the military’s pro­grams for recruit­ment, pro­mo­tion, and train­ing. But look at the plan’s dawdling dead­lines.
For instance: “Publish a DoD Instruction pro­vid­ing guid­ance for lan­guage pro­gram man­age­ment.” The dead­line: July 2005. That’s 11 months not to come up with a pro­gram, but to issue guid­ance for man­ag­ing the pro­gram…
“Develop and sus­tain a per­son­nel infor­ma­tion sys­tem that main­tains accu­rate data on all DoD per­son­nel skilled in foreign-​​language and regional exper­tise. Work closely to ensure sta­bi­lized data entry and man­age­ment pro­ce­dures.” Deadline: September 2008…
In the three and a half years after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States built a mas­sive arse­nal, equipped an equally mas­sive fight­ing force, and declared vic­tory in a world­wide war over impe­r­ial Japan and Nazi Germany.
In the three and a half years after the Soviets launched the Sputnik satel­lite in 1957, the U.S. gov­ern­ment funded dozens if not hun­dreds of Russian-​​language and Russian-​​studies depart­ments not just within the mil­i­tary but in high schools and col­leges all across America.
Now, three and a half years after Islamic fun­da­men­tal­ists flew air­planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Department of Defense is three months away from pub­lish­ing an offi­cial “instruc­tion” pro­vid­ing “guid­ance for lan­guage pro­gram man­age­ment.“
It’s pathetic.

April 7th, 2005 | Strategery | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.