The Pentagon's Foreign-Language Frustrations

From http://battleland.blogs.time.com/2011/08/24/the-pentagons-foreign-language-frustrations

The Pentagon's Foreign-Language Frustrations
Posted by Mark Thompson
August 24, 2011

As Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told 2,500 troops Tuesday about the foreign-language skills he championed as a congressman, an active-duty Army officer was complaining about the paucity of military personnel who can speak anything other than English.

The current push to train soldiers to speak the local languages in Afghanistan and Iraq was "haphazardly thrown together," Morgan Smiley, an active-duty Army officer, posted on Small Wars Journal, an independent website, Tuesday morning. A recent government report makes clear that – a decade into the war in Afghanistan – the Pentagon continues to bumble teaching its troops the local languages, a skill that ground commanders say is as valuable as a soldier's skill with a rifle. Several hours later, defense chief Panetta praised the Pentagon's efforts to improve the language skills in its arsenal, but conceded "frankly, more needs to be done."

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