[Myrddin]

You learned Russian to comprehend what the Russian commies were doing. The language skill missing today is Arabic. There is lots of subversive activity being conducted in Arabic speaking circles. There's plenty of other languages in use in the Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan that warrant attention. If you don't understand the language, idioms and culture, you aren't prepared to detect what is going on.

[TomasUSMC]

If you carry a big stick you don’t need to know their stinking language. Everybody speaks BigStickish. But since we continue to fight like we did in Vietnam we are seen to carry a broken toothpick.

[conservativeharleyguy]

They offered me Russian, Arabic, or Korean. At the time, Russian was the only one that interested me, and it was the hottest thing in town for a couple of decades.

The Arabic subversives have some other built-in counterintelligence advantages that the Russians lacked that make them harder to “bust out”. With their root-level, common Islamic frame of reference, you have to not only be fluent in Arabic and its myriad regional/historical/ethnic nuances, but you must also have impeccable Koranic knowledge, with all of its subtleties. I'll let the next generation of "98-goofs" handle it.