“Language equities across the Air Force are in high demand and are a significant and costly resource to create and maintain,” McAndrews said. That document positions the United States in military competition with China and Russia, with a lesser emphasis on countering North Korea, Iran and violent insurgencies around the world. For now, the Air Force is prioritizing languages that fall in line with the National Defense Strategy. The military wants additional, more stable funding for its various foreign language education programs for a more stable bench of polyglots. The service hopes that more frequent proficiency tests will make that knowledge stick more quickly than in DLI’s usual course.Ĭontractors also help retrain linguists who need to brush up on a new language, stat, she said. McAndrews said the Air Force has started a pilot program, dubbed “Linguist Next,” at the institute in an attempt to fast-track language expertise. “They try to, as best as possible, keep everyone going and keep everyone relevant,” Brown said. He noted that the military has tried ways of quickly retasking its linguists as needed, but it hasn’t gone well. It’s constantly a struggle,” said Brown, who specializes in Chinese. “We have to basically plan for the world’s messes, crises, five years out - can’t really do that. The Army is in charge of training cryptologic language analysts there. Part of the problem is that the service has to reserve spots at the Defense Language Institute five years in advance. With language and culture expertise, they were injected into every role at every step of the process without any formal training for this type of mission,” McAndrews said.ĭespite a constant need for foreign language proficiency in its ranks, the Air Force hasn’t found a way to avoid the last-minute scramble for multilingual airmen in an emergency. “For Operation Allies Refuge/Operation Allies Welcome, the linguist teams at the camps were a critical asset. military, federal agencies and nongovernmental organizations. Those airmen acted as advocates for Afghan evacuees as they tried to piece together a path forward with the U.S. That grew from eight people to about 130 airmen who offered language support during the massive U.S.-led humanitarian evacuation and the domestic resettlement effort, McAndrews said. “Trying to spin them up in order to safely get through the Afghanistan withdrawal was challenging,” Armstrong said. That included two Chinese experts who had previously studied Pashto. “We brought some folks back who had already gone to other languages, but hadn’t quite become unqualified yet.” Between, we split them up the best we could,” Armstrong told Air Force Times in April. military dealt with that time crunch firsthand while withdrawing from its two-decade war in Afghanistan last summer.Īs of May 2021, the Air Force had just eight linguists who spoke Pashto, one of Afghanistan’s two official languages that is spoken by about half of the population, said Armstrong, who helped manage the withdrawal as an operations director at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, before moving to Offutt. In many cases, getting someone up to speed to decipher military chatter in a foreign language - heard over a crackly headset, during a crisis, with little backup - requires squeezing what is typically an 18-month process into a matter of weeks. “After shadowing her for a day, I stepped in and did the interpreting for all of the Ukrainian students so she could focus on learning the material.” “One of the Ukrainian students was originally working as an interpreter for the other students,” Garcia said. The students were in Mississippi when Russian forces invaded their home country on Feb. Garcia spent three weeks with the Ukrainians as they progressed through courses on patrol craft, diesel systems maintenance and international tactical communications. “My development through LEAP training and eMentor courses helped me be able to adapt and learn at the speed I needed to.” “It was critical to hit the ground running, so there was not a lot of time to get spun up on the technical terminology related to the subjects,” he said in a May 12 release. The initiative offers online classes for active duty airmen and Space Force guardians to gain a working knowledge of a foreign language. Garcia, who speaks Ukrainian and Russian, was part of the Air Force’s Language-Enabled Airman Program. Navy program in Mississippi that trains foreign special operations troops in tactics and strategy, earlier this year. Jordan Garcia stepped in as an interpreter for Ukrainian students at the Naval Small Craft Instruction and Technical Training School, a U.S.
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