At this point General Tailback starts screaming for GI linguists, only to find the Army doesn't have any. Or he gets one, so that he can get his restaurant menus translated, but the MPs at the gate of the base and the SF teams out in the boonies have to rely on local hires.
They never learn. After 1989, they very quickly dismantled an excellent series of programs in Eastern European languages. In the late nineties, those nations joined NATO or Partnership for Peace and we had linguistic problems again.
Then, the military takes the graduates and in many cases assigns them to duties that have little bearing on their language skill. A foreign language is a skill that erodes quickly if not maintained. Some leaders think that when their linguists are reading foreign-language papers or magazines, or watching a foreign movie, they are "wasting time" and they'd rather see them in the motor pool packing wheel bearings -- real soldier's work. So the retention of linguists is probably the lowest of any speciality in the military, even though they have some of the longest training (over a year, minimum) and to pass the school need to have high test scores.
There is no royal road to foreign language skills. Especially in a society like ours that does not value foreign languages and that has mostly purged them from the public schools. You need a long and intensive course like this, or total immersion in the language for many months, or both.
And then, because things change, unless you train a wide range of language skills, and not just those that are involved in the immediate crisis, you still risk having the wrong linguists.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
Oh, man... Tell me about it.
When I was an MI LT in 1991 (force-branched MI, can you believe?) they gave us the DLAT (Language aptitude test).
I damned near aced it. I loved that goofy test with the made-up vocabulary and stuff...
I talked to my branch officer and told him I want to learn a 'Cat IV' language--I want to learn Arabic, Mandarin, Korean--whatever there is a need for...
No dice. I couldn't get in by hook or crook...
I guess I ended up using that language skill by teaching myself to play the bagpipe...
The Army 1991-1996 was misery. So politically correct and stupid ('specially MI) that, honestly, I have had a hard time feeling at all proud of my service. I look back on it and think: "What a stupid, stupid waste of time that was..."