NFLC Briefing January 2002
Language and National Security Briefing
January 16, 2002
1. The Role of Language in National Security
"...We are actively seeking and recruiting English-speaking individuals with professional-level proficiency in Arabic and Farsi. Those who would wish to join this program must be American citizens who have been permanent residents of the United States for at least three of the last five years. Each of these individuals who would seek to be employed by the FBI will be evaluated based on experience and education and must pass a thorough background investigation and language proficiency examination."
FBI Director Robert Mueller, September 17, 2001. Quoted in the Los Angeles Times, September 18, 2001, p. A9.
"There continues to be a great need throughout the Intelligence Community for increased expertise in a number of intelligence-related disciplines and specialties. However, the Committee [House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence] believes the most pressing such need is for greater numbers of foreign language-capable intelligence personnel, with increased fluency in specific and multiple languages."
House Report 107-219 on the Intelligence Authorization Act of 2002. p.18.
"In every national crisis from the Cold War through Vietnam, Desert Storm, Bosnia and Kosovo, our nation has lamented its foreign language shortfalls. But then the crisis "goes away," and we return to business as usual. One of the messages of Sept. 11 is that business as usual is no longer an acceptable option."
Senator Paul Simon, "Beef Up the Country's Foreign Language Skills," The Washington Post, October 23, 2001, p. A23.
The recent Hart-Rudman report on national security in the 21st century states: "So, too, does government need high-quality people with expertise in the social sciences, foreign languages, and humanities. The decreased funding available for these programs from universities and foundations may threaten the ability of the government to produce future leaders with the requisite knowledge in foreign languages, economics, and history to take several examples to meet 21st century security challenges."
U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century. Road Map for National Security: Imperative for Change. p.88.
A study sponsored by the American Translators Association, the Federal Interagency Language Roundtable, the Society of Federal Linguists, and the National Foreign Language Center showed that more than 80 Federal agencies have current foreign language requirements, from the Departments of State and Defense to the intelligence community to domestic and international law enforcement.
Ted Crump. 2001. Translating and Interpreting in the Federal Government. Alexandria, VA: American Translators Association.
"One cannot overstate the centrality of foreign language skills to the core mission of the intelligence community. Foreign languages come into play at virtually all points of the intelligence cycle, from collection to exploitation, to analysis and production. The collection of intelligence depends heavily on language, whether the information is gathered from a human source through a relationship with a field officer or gathered from a technical system."
Ellen Laipson, Vice Chair, National Intelligence Council, Testimony before the International Security, Proliferation and Federal Services Subcommittee of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, September 14, 2000.
The Cox Commission cited the intelligence community's lack of capacity in language as a barrier to effective intelligence gathering and analysis of Chinese efforts in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Representative Cox went so far as to state: "It is not unfair to say, if you are in the Ministry of State Security seeking to encrypt your conversation, speak Mandarin."
http://cox.house.gov/press/coverage/2000/washposttranslators.htm
"As a band of trained terrorists plotted to blow up the World Trade Center, clues to the devastation ahead lay under the nose of law enforcement officials.
"The F.B.I. held videotapes, manuals and notebooks on bomb making that had been seized from Ahmad Ajaj, a Palestinian serving time in federal prison for passport fraud. There were phone calls the prison had taped, in which Mr. Ajaj guardedly told another terrorist how to build the bomb."
"There was one problem: they were in Arabic. Nobody who understood Arabic listened to them until after the explosion at the Trade Center on Feb. 26, 1993, which killed six people and injured more than a thousand."
Diana Schemo, Washington Cites Shortage of Linguists for Key Security Jobs," The New York Times, April 16, 2000, p. A1.
"More than 40,000 U.S. troops are or have been stationed in more than 110 nations (excluding NATO countries and Japan) since 1991, including every nation in Latin America, all but two of the fifteen successor states to the USSR, some forty nations in Africa, and throughout South and Southeast Asia. More than 140 languages are spoken in these nations."
Glenn Nordin. "Language and the Department of Defense: Challenges for the 21st Century." NFLC Policy Issues 2, 1 (November 1999).
"In April 1988 Saudi Arabia asked the U.S. to withdraw its newly appointed ambassador, Hume Horan, after only six months. News reports said King Fahd just didn't like the U.S. envoy. What the Saudis didn't like about him, though, was that he was the best Arabic speaker in the State Department, and had used his language skills to engage all kinds of Saudis, including the kingdom's conservative religious leaders who were critical of the ruling family. The Saudis didn't want someone so adroit at penetrating their society, so -- of course -- we withdrew Mr. Horan. Ever since then we've been sending non-Arabic-speaking ambassadors to Riyadh..."
Thomas L. Friedman, "Drilling for Tolerance." The New York Times, October 30, 2001, p. A17.
2. America's Language Capacity
Military and DoD:
The U.S. Military maintains a formidable language capacity:
| Source | Number of personnel with language skills |
|---|---|
| Military (language in records) | 170,000 |
| Military (language specialists) | 11,500 |
| DoD Civilian Employees (est.) | 40,000 |
| Commercial Services (est.) | 15,000 |
Glenn H. Nordin, "Toward a National Language Strategy: A Proposal for the Interagency Federal Language Roundtable." October 19, 2001.
Elementary and Secondary Education:
According a report by the Center for Applied Linguistics, in 1997 31% of all elementary schools taught foreign language. This represents an increase of 9% over 1987. Of elementary schools offering foreign language instruction 79% offered Spanish, 27% offered French, 5% offered German, 3% offered Japanese, 2% offered Hebrew or Italian, and 1% or less offered one of 13 other languages.
The same report showed that 86% of secondary schools offer foreign language instruction. Among the schools 93 % offered Spanish, 64% offered French, 24% offered German, 7% offered Japanese, 3% offered Italian, 3% offered Russian, and less than 1% offered one of 14 other languages.
Nancy C. Rhodes and Lucinda E. Branaman. 1999. Foreign Language Instruction in the United States: A National Survey of Elementary and Secondary Schools. Washington DC: The Center for Applied Linguistics and Delta Systems.
The latest data (from 1994) on foreign language enrollments in elementary and secondary schools shows that 6 million students in grades 7 through 12 were taking a foreign language; of these, 3.9 million (64%) were enrolled in Spanish classes, 1.36 million (22%) in French, 373,000 in (6%) in German, 57,000 (0.9%) in Italian, 18,000 (0.3%) in Russian, 9,500 (0.16%) in Chinese, 2,600 (0.04%) in Arabic, among others.
Jamie B. Draper and June H. Hicks. "Foreign Language Enrollments in Public Secondary Schools, Fall 1994." Foreign Language Annals, 29 (3), pp. p303-06, Autumn 1996.
Higher Education:
Less than one percent of all college students study critical languages, according to a recent survey by the Modern Language Association, and the number of students taking any foreign language has remained at eight percent for more than 25 years.
Richard Brod and Elizabeth B. Welles. "Foreign Language Enrollments in United States Institutions of Higher Education, Fall 1998," ADFL Bulletin, Vol. 31, No. 2,Winter 2000, pp. 22-29
3. Critical Languages in Southwest Asia[1]
3.1. Arabic: Spoken by more than 160 million worldwide and by more than 3 million in the U.S. and Canada (source: The American Association of Teachers of Arabic)
3.2. Languages of Afghanistan:
| Source | Number of Speakers in Afghanistan (from www.ethnologue.com, citing 1978 data) | Number of Students in U.S. Colleges & Universities (source: www.adfl.org, 1998 data) |
|---|---|---|
| Pashto | 8,000,000 | 0 |
| Farsi/Dari | 5,600,000 | 614 |
| Azgari | 1,403,000 | 0 |
| Uzbek | 1,403,000 | 4 |
| Turkmen | 500,000 | 0 |
| Berberi/ Aimaq | 480,000 | 0 |
| Baluchi | 200,000 | 0 |
3.3. Languages of neighboring countries:
| Country | Language | Number of speakers in country (source: www.ethnologue.com) | Number of students in U.S. colleges & universities (source: www.adfl.org, 1998 data) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Iran | Farsi Azeri |
22,000,000 23,500,000 |
614 0 |
| Uzbekistan | Uzbek Russian |
16,539,000 1,661,000 |
4 24,729 |
| Turkmenistan | Turkmen Russian Uzbek |
3,430,000 349,000 309,000 |
0 24,729 4 |
| Tajikistan | Tajik Uzbek Russian |
3,440,720 873,000 237,000 |
0 4 24,729 |
| Pakistan | Baluchi Punjabi Pashto Siraiki Sindhi Urdu |
5,700,000 30,000,000 11,000,000 15,000,000 17,000,000 11,000,000 |
0 32 0 0 0 483 |
