Robert D. Kaplan, Author of Imperial Grunts, on the media coverage of the military and the military's challenge in fighting a new type of war. An excerpt:
Inquirer: You have written that we need to become more sensitive to the cultural terrain in other countries, and get better at operating within that terrain.
Kaplan: Our bureaucracies are getting better at it. They're teaching foreign and exotic languages in military training now. At Annapolis, for example, two years of exotic-language training is required for every midshipman. The Pentagon also is getting better at this, but it's still way behind. The exception is SOUTHCOM [the United States Southern Command, which operates in Central and South America], which has most operators on the ground militarily speaking Spanish, but we don't have nearly that level of expertise around the world. As for what the military calls "culturally sensitive," few academics would be very impressed. We're still pretty weak there. Outside of the technical services, such sensitivity is very, very important. Obviously, people on destroyers and subs don't, as a rule, need this stuff. There's a whole side of the military that's so technical this isn't needed. But in the cases of the Army and the Marines, it's very important. So often I've met a soldier trained as an artillery officer - but then he's sent to Iraq or Afghanistan. He has no use for his technical expertise and now needs cultural and language expertise he was never trained to have. In the Army and Marines, you just can't assume people won't need this knowledge. You get career tracks that run at a right angle to what you've been trained for. That's why you need broad-based cultural language training, at least for our land forces.
[HT: RealClearPolitics ]
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