he international war on terrorism and U.S. military action in Afghanistan are posing fresh challenges for the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center, the Pentagon’s top-notch language training school. DLI, based in Monterey, Calif., is the world’s largest foreign language institute, training 3,800 students each year in nearly 50 different languages. But even DLI’s far-reaching capacity to train significant numbers of people on short order is being tested by the war on terrorism.
The institute quickly responded by ramping up its training of government linguists in Dari, Pashto, Uzbek and Tajik—two of the languages of Afghanistan and the two languages of neighboring former Soviet republics. DLI accelerated production of field survival kits including pocket-sized language cards, phrasebooks and tapes. But Ray Clifford, DLI’s chancellor and senior civilian official, calls the field kits “language Band-Aids,” compared with the much tougher work involved in intensively training military and civilian personnel in the languages.
That challenge is compounded by the weakness of foreign language instruction in most American elementary and secondary schools, says Clifford. “If we want a world-class educational system we ought to do what the rest of the world does, and that is put languages in as core curricular subjects in public education,” he says.
Clifford, who has been an administrator at DLI for 20 years, says it’s tough “educating and re-educating decision-makers [at Defense and elsewhere in the government] who have come up through the American educational system and have not understood the benefits of other languages.” He adds: “Crises such as those we are experiencing right now validate the position we’ve held that languages are the key to understanding, and we’re not going to have long-term peace and stability without them.”
Clifford acknowledges that DLI came under fire for turning out insufficiently trained graduates in the late 1970s and early 1980s. And periodically, military brass and some members of Congress have complained about shortages of qualified linguists, particularly in key but difficult languages such as Chinese and Arabic.
But DLI now has a strong reputation among senior intelligence officials at the Pentagon. “They’re a highly valued organization,” says Christopher K. Mellon, deputy assistant secretary of Defense for intelligence. “I think the problems that we have, the shortcomings and the shortfalls in the area of languages, are not problems that can be laid at their doorstep.”
DLI, a sprawling 397-acre complex of beige buildings overlooking the Pacific coast at the Presidio of Monterey, recently marked its 60th anniversary. Its origins go back to World War II, when the government established a secret language school at the Presidio of San Francisco’s Crissy Field in 1941. A select group of U.S. soldiers, most of them second-generation Japanese-Americans, studied Japanese at the school. The language facility was relocated several times, coming to Monterey after the war. It was renamed the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center in the mid-1970s.
Most of DLI’s students are service members, but the institute also offers instruction to workers at such agencies as the FBI, Border Patrol, Drug Enforcement Administration and NASA. About 500 DLI students study in the Washington area, learning more than 25 languages at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute or through private contractors.
Shifts in priorities, such as the focus on Afghan and Central Asian languages, are not new to the institute. The Persian Gulf War, for example, prompted an increased enrollment in Arabic courses. Conversely, DLI has significantly reduced its instruction in Russian since the end of the Cold War.
Ramping up instruction in specific languages on short notice poses workforce challenges for the institute. In 1997, the Office of Personnel Management granted DLI hiring flexibilities to staff up quickly, as well as a merit pay system that helps the institute boost productivity among the faculty.
The war on terrorism involves particularly difficult language demands, Mellon says. “It’s clear that in the world we live in today, for a lot of these linguistic requirements we need to be thinking about native-speaker skills and levels. . . . You’ve got to have very sophisticated linguistic skills, which are very hard to achieve through training. So the whole area of languages is a real challenge and still very much of a constraint in many instances.”
Rep. Sam Farr, D-Calif., whose district includes Monterey, has been looking after DLI’s interests in Congress. In 1993, Farr and other DLI supporters successfully fought a proposal to move the institute to Fort Huachuca, Ariz., where the Army’s Intelligence Center is located. Farr contended that the move would have led to heavy losses of experienced DLI faculty members who would likely be unwilling to relocate.
“I think the school needs to expand further,” Farr says. “My approach here in Washington is that if you’re going to have a leaner military, downsizing, then you’ve got to have a smarter military.”
Barton Reppert is a freelance journalist who previously worked with the Associated Press for 18 years in Washington, New York and Moscow. His e-mail address is breppert@compuserve.com.
