On April /05, I dashed off "The US Military's language failure." Seems that things may finally be improving:
"The Defense Department has completed more than 90 percent of the tasks it set out to accomplish in a language plan launched four years ago..."
Those tasks were largely first steps, but they are a step in the right direction. The Army is also acknowledging the difficulty of the problem, and appears to be working the issue from both ends:
" "We've found it's easier to train a linguist to be a soldier than to train a soldier to be a linguist," Army Brig. Gen. Richard C. Longo, director of training in the Army’s Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, Plans and Training, said at a Pentagon roundtable last month."
To really make this effective, the military will also need a 21st century human resources approach, instead of an early 20th century one. That means a system that makes it easier to volunteer for specific missions, and combine people with the required skills. Which will inevitably include language skills. See the Small Wars Journal's article "The Personnel System at War: A View from the Generation at the Tip of the Spear" for more.
Throwing out 50+ Arabic-speaking linguists in the past few years because you find they are gay doesn't help, either.
I am the proud grandfather of a young man in the military in Georgia.
He has been in the army for nine plus months and is supposedly at his permanent station.
I spoke to his wife by phone this morning and was appalled at the situation there.
According to her, his pay records are fouled up yet and they are not recieving it all for some resason unknown to both of them.
Because of the problem she annot get a job on base until the problem is solved?. By the way she is an experienced child care individual.
In time past when he had called home ,I had always wondered why he had always mentioned a sergant when speaking of a leave.
She explained it this way, "He has to go through a chain of command of sergants, the chain consisting of the rank and time in grade of each notifing the next in line while he can only ask the first he spoke to about "what happened to my request for leave?."
I spent some years in the military and I can't beleive my ears.
Proud Grandfather
andrew, you're correct.
Much as I want to see Don't Ask Don't Tell go away, I will admit that a friend of mine who works in a civilian three-letter agency that cannot be named tells me that they like to hire people (at pay rates higher than DoD rates) trained by the military and fired as gay - it keeps the language training expense off their budget.
My taxpayer dollars at work!