Air Warrior Col. John W. Thompson - KMI Media Group

Act Globally, Talk Locally
wa r a n D w o r D s: Co u r s e s, H a r D w a r e let s o l D i e r s C o m m u n i C a t e w i tH l o C a l s.
The United States has fought much bigger
wars than the war on terror, but it has
never fought in so many places, and in so
many ways, where speaking so many local
languages is so essential. The challenge of
communicating globally has expanded traditional
language instruction and led to rapid
innovation in technology to bridge communication
gaps. The Holy Grail of technology is
a field device that can do two-way translation
of natural speech. That may be coming soon.
The U.S. Army’s John F. Kennedy Special
Warfare Center and School now runs the
second-largest language school in the country,
after the Defense Language Institute
in Monterey, Calif., according to Lieutenant
Colonel Rusty Nance, chief of Language and
Human Dynamics. His school trained 2,000
students in 13 foreign languages this year and
expects to ramp up to 17 languages for 2,100
students next year.
“Unlike Monterey, we seek oral proficiency
only, listening and speaking,” Nance
explained. The goal is proficiency of 1+ as
measured by International Language Roundtable
(ILR) standards, though a simple 1 is
sufficient for graduation.
“The most important languages are for
where the bullets are flying, like Arabic,
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Pashto and Urdu,” Nance said. “But Russian
and Mandarin Chinese will also be important.”
The Center has a major French program
and is tentatively planning to add Czech,
Hungarian and Polish.
The students are all Army and special
operations forces with military occupational
specialties of 18 or 18A for SOF officers, 37 for
Army military information support or 38 for
civil affairs. Other services have similar and
quite good language programs, but these are
orders of magnitude smaller than that at the
Special Warfare Center.
Language class takes five hours per day
for four months in French, Spanish or Indonesian,
six months for other languages. SOF
soldiers must pass these courses before they
go on to further training.
The center has just started intermediate
training, to ILR level 2+, for a select number
of students and is considering going to
ILR level 3+.
Instructors are private contractors provided
by MiLanguages, but this contract is up
for bid. There is a push to bring instructors
on board as government employees. This
may be difficult, as the center must employ
U.S. citizens, which many current instructors
are not.
By He n r y Ca n a D a y, soteCH Co r r e s p o n D e n t
C a n a D a y H@k m i m e D i a g r o u p.C o m
Personal instruction in classes is by far the
best way to teach languages, Nance emphasized,
and technology is only used for reinforcement.
The center uses Rosetta Stone,
CL-150’s Rapid Rote and authentic materials
like broadcast feeds for reinforcement.
In addition to language, all center students
are trained in the cultures of intended
deployment locations. And long after they
leave the center, soldiers can still tap its
resources. Nance has a sustainment program
for deployed troops to help them
retain their new language, and even a contingency
program for soldiers trained in one
language but assigned to another location.
Transparent Language developed CL-150,
an extremely broad suite of products and
services to help train and assess soldiers in
about 80 critical languages. President Michael
Quinlan said special operations as well as
Marine, Navy and Air Force units have enterprise-wide
licenses to use CL-150 both in
the United States and in theater, online or
off, for both initial training and refresher
courses
“Where we differ from other language
products is that we support learning for special
government purposes,” Quinlan said. “We
go far beyond the standard conversations.”
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