POST: Language School, by Catherine MacRae Hockmuth, Ares, 1/31/2008
I see this sort of thing emerging everywhere I go in the national security community writ large: all sorts of islands generating SysAdmin capabilities and pushing them up toward some assumed integration up the chain.
What I don't see is the serious construction of that integration mechanism up on high. Defense reluctantly picks up what it must. State nervously contemplates the possibility of being supersized to handle responsibilities it institutionally loathes.
Where is the natural bureaucratic center of gravity, around which these offered capabilities could naturally concentrate?
It is yet to be built, with fear the primarily obstacle. We are afraid to contemplate the reality that Iraq is not a one-off (more like a three-off).
Add up the Yugoslav babies, the Iraq trio, Afghanistan, Haiti and the looming Somalia divorce. How many nations has our military purposefully or inadvertently helped birth or tried to rebuild over the last two decades? As many as twenty. As many as one per year.
Think about that.
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Comments (3)
I like your comments here. The recent spate of nation-birthing ties, in my view, to the incomplete processes put in motion during the waves of decolonization after WW2.
In many cases, new national boundaries (mostly) followed old colonial boundaries. This produced hodgepodge states like Iraq, Sudan, Nigeria, and Congo/Zaire, which had sovereign borders that did not correspond to ethnic, religious, or linguistic realities.
During the Cold War and after, the status-quo powers usually had a vested interest in ongoing stability, rather than in promoting the "right" long-term answers e.g. for southern Sudan, Eritrea, or the Igbo-dominated areas of Nigeria.
As you rightly indicate, events have already overtaken the old status quo in places like Yugoslavia and Ethiopia. In my view, this will keep happening in Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan (and the 'Stans generally), and similar areas until the ethnic / social / political "potential energy" in the equation is expressed as the "kinetic energy" of devolution, revolution, civil war, partition, et cetera.
Posted by Tim Walker | February 14, 2008 10:47 AM
The best way to expand capability such as languages is at the very base of the education system. As globalization continues to make connections, the market will demand employees with language skills as well as business, engineering science and tech skills. Get business involved in education not from a marketing standpoint, but from a future employment standpoint. If the government wants to additionally foster that sort of capability offer aid packages to college students who double and triple major in State Dept. and Sysadmin friendly combinations. Add to that an encouragement of languages to students who use the G.I. Bill when coming out of the Leviathan and the Leviathan feeds even more into the the Sysadmin.
Posted by Arherring | February 14, 2008 7:21 PM
Another benefit of a central coordinating agency; some direction for sub-agencies to work towards. Why on Earth is Vietnamese one of their test languages?!
That said, there's another idea to consider. I read an article on Morocco (I think, it's been a while) once that described its college graduates as knowing 5 languages, but being unable to get a job. We'd have to be careful how we handled them, but such people (from Morocco and from other countries with similar educational disfunctions) would seem to be one potential source of language specialists.
Posted by Michael
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February 15, 2008 6:51 PM