Boot camp, camouflage, guns - and Farsi lessons?

The Pentagon makes no secret of the fact that Staff Sgt. Aaron Jarvis will soon be one of its most valuable assets in the war on terror. Yet the most important part of his daily training does not involve a fighter jet, a rifle, or an obstacle course. It involves only a classroom and constant conversation, as Sergeant Jarvis unravels the peculiar pronunciations and subtle scrawlings of Dari, one of the two official Afghan tongues.

To Jarvis, a one-time pizza-store manager who has already learned Serbo- Croatian as an Air Force linguist, the switch to Dari is just another assignment here at the Defense Language Institute (DLI). But more broadly, it is part of a fundamental shift at the Pentagon, as leaders increasingly see foreign-language skills not as a peripheral part of the military's mission, but as crucial to the success of American forces abroad.

In the future, officers could be required to have some familiarity with a second language; enlistees might receive language instruction during basic training. No decisions have yet been made. Yet when the Pentagon released its Defense Language Transformation Roadmap last month, it made clear its view that security in a post-Sept. 11 world requires not only a military capable of deploying to the remotest corner of the world at a moment's notice, but also soldiers capable of coping with the cultural and linguistic challenges they meet when they arrive there.

"We think this is, in the end, an essential war-fighting skill for the military of the future," says David Chu, undersecretary of personnel.

The Pentagon's roadmap offers only a general outline of what language skills it feels are needed in today's military. Yet its goals are ambitious. In essence, it seeks to take language from the perimeter of military life - the province of intelligence specialists translating documents and listening to radio chatter - and make it a more seamless part of modern soldiering.

Its aim is threefold: to promote at least basic language skills among the broader base of soldiers and officers, to improve the proficiency of linguists like Jarvis, and to replicate efforts like the Translator Aide Program, which recruits native speakers of key languages from immigrant communities across the country, helping the Army ramp up its translator corps quickly.

"A broader base of competence and a selection of individuals with high-end capacity is essential to our future success, and we need to have some way to react in an agile fashion to unexpected events," says Dr. Chu. "No one five years ago would have foreseen that we needed a significant Pashtun and Dari competence."

In Afghanistan and Iraq, the need is obvious and increasing. "We are trying to win the peace, and it is very important for us to be able to communicate even at a basic level," says Lt. Col. William Astore, dean of students at the DLI. "I would much rather have soldiers communicate using words rather than using a rifle butt."

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