Uzbek or Dari? Military learns new tongues

When 1st Lt. Aaron Wiggins graduates from language school ,proficient in Pashto, he knows an Afghanistan deployment won't be far off.

And Airman 1st Class Jennifer Burnside, a student of Arabic, expects she'll soon be flying 18-hour eavesdropping missions over the Middle East as a "listener" with an airborne intelligence unit.

Insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq, along with a broadening terrorist threat, are increasing demands on the ranks of US military linguists capable of gathering intelligence in foreign languages.

Indeed, an Army report released last fall found that "the lack of competent interpreters throughout the theater impeded operations" in both countries. "The US Army does not have a fraction of the linguists required," concludes the report by the Center for Army Lessons Learned at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

To ease the crunch, the military's main language-training center, the Defense Language Institute (DLI) here, is dramatically altering the mix of foreign tongues it teaches. With a faculty of more than 1,000 and 3,800 full-time students attending classes each year, DLI teaches 80 percent of the government's foreign language classes.

Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, DLI has added ten new languages to the curriculum, which it anticipates will be vital to curbing terrorism, such as the Afghan dialects of Dari and Pashto, as well as Chechen, Uzbek, Armenian and Urdu.

At the same time, the Institute has sharply increased the number of students learning Persian (up 70 percent), Korean (up 50 percent) and Arabic (up 40 percent) - as if tailoring the production of linguists for the three countries dubbed "the axis of evil" by President Bush: Iran, Iraq, and North Korea.

"Korean may seem disproportionately high compared to Arabic, but there's always the potential for things to go bad on the Korean Peninsula and we'd need that pool in place," says Col. Michael Simone, Commandant of DLI.

Meanwhile, DLI is adapting new technology and instruction methods aimed at speeding the study of difficult and obscure languages while making the content more realistic and relevant.

Many of the advances come together at DLI's newest branch, the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) Task Force, set up soon after the Sept. 11 strikes. "There was a lot of leaning forward in the foxhole, guessing what might be needed," says task force Associate Dean Maj. David Tatman.

On one hand, the task force responded to urgent demands for translations from the US military in the field. For example, it translated the Army's Ranger Handbook into Dari for use in training the Afghan army, and also translated letters home from detainees classified as "enemy combatants" at the US Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Meanwhile, in order to launch new DLI programs quickly in rarely studied languages such as Dari, the task force had to create curricula from scratch, hunt for the few qualified faculty, and begin training students at the same time.

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