OU Zone

[SpillWay]

I'm reading a blog put up by an army guy in Iraq, and this interesting little bit of info floated up on it yesterday. This is from The Army Times. Link at the bottom will take you to the full article.


April 05, 2005

Officer promotions to be linked to foreign-language proficiency

By Andrew Scutro
Times staff writer

All junior officers will soon be required to undergo foreign-language training and foreign-language skills will be tied to flag and general-officer advancement, according to a sweeping plan recently released by the Defense Department.

With forces operating in regions where few, if any, service members arrive able to communicate directly with locals, the goal of the initiative will be expertise in certain regions and languages throughout the ranks of military and civilian personnel.

The Defense Language Transformation Roadmap, ordered by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, lays out specific milestones that cover a gamut of actions, from calling back language-skilled retirees to setting up a reserve corps of civilian linguists for use in national emergencies. Familiarization training will be provided for deploying forces.

In December 2005 there will be a survey across the services to find out what skills already exist in the ranks. The Defense Department counts 84,000 members with some foreign-language proficiency and 1,900 with some proficiency in Arabic.

http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-766976.php