Slate reports on what happens when the federal government has an urgent need for more Arabic speakers:

“So, by the end of last summer, it had taken 21 months simply to draw up a 19-page plan.

… In the three and a half years after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States built a massive arsenal, equipped an equally massive fighting force, and declared victory in a worldwide war over imperial Japan and Nazi Germany.

In the three and a half years after the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, the U.S. government funded dozens—if not hundreds—of Russian-language and Russian-studies departments not just within the military but in high schools and colleges all across America.

Now, three and a half years after Islamic fundamentalists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Department of Defense is three months away from publishing an official “instruction” providing “guidance for language program management.”

Since it’s Slate, this is also used as a opportunity to tweak the Pentagon in general and Donald Rumsfeld in particular. And the Slate story will make you think that no one will even begin to learn Arabic until 2008, which is just wrong. But the gist of the article is spot on — it is shocking that we are coming up on the fourth anniversary of 9/11 and we are just now addressing the issue of not being able to communicate in the enemy’s language, and it will be seven or so years after those events before we get to work on some pieces of the defense bureacracy’s plans. This is urgency?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 6th, 2005 at 11:51 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Brilliant, but uncategorizable, Your Tax Dollars In Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.