And because of that link, soldiers must understand the significance they play on the battlefield, said Maj. Gen. John Custer, commander of the Intelligence Center and Fort Huachuca.
“We have to create language-enhanced soldiers and culturally-enhanced soldiers,” Custer said.
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And it’s not just for intelligence soldiers. The general said an infantry soldier walking down the street needs to be able to do more than just report back and say, “I see a lot of graffiti and spray paint,” or while walking though a market say, “There’s a lot of tomatoes here, a lot of pears today.”
The meaning of the graffiti and what is being said in the marketplace is more important.
“A language-enhanced soldier can report back and say it’s ‘Sadrist’ graffiti talking about a meeting tomorrow night at which (Muqtual al-) Sadr will speak,” or while going through a neighborhood market overhearing “talk about the Sunnis going to do something, the Shi’as doing something or other or the Kurds planning something,” he said. Sadr is the leader of a vehemently anti-American Shi’a group.
All that comes together because soldiers have been enabled to understand the language and the culture in which they find themselves. When they report back what they have seen or heard it provides critical information to the decision-makers.
“This could be a private that reports back, not an analyst or a Department of the Army civilian paid to do analytical work. This is the age of every soldier as a sensor. This is the age of the strategic private,” the general said.
The strategic private can help or harm commanders.
“Never before has an 18-year-old private had the ability to impact the world, certainly the world news cycle, like he or she does today,” Custer said.
There are plenty of examples of how stupid decisions made by soldiers have caused problems, he added.
“Who was the smart guy who thought he would take the Koran out on the rifle range and shoot at it? That caused an international incident. That was two privates doing that,” the general said.
Then there was the incident of soldiers pouring gasoline over the bodies of dead Taliban in Afghanistan.
If that wasn’t bad enough, Custer said, “They burned them, filmed it and put it on YouTube. Were they smart guys? No.”
Those are examples of strategic soldiers impacting the world. When an American does something bad in the Islamic world, “You’ll have (people in) 27 countries going crazy,” especially when the news cycle that used to take 24 hours to report is now down to an hour, Custer said.
But, he added, the U.S. Army is unlike any other force in the history of the world.
“We have built the most professional, the most lethal force the world has ever seen. It is without a doubt the best agent for positive change in the world today,” Custer said.
The 18-year-old man or woman who enters the Army today is so much smarter, so much more socially attuned, cosmopolitan, even if he or she hasn’t traveled widely, simply because of the worldwide media, Custer said.
Acquainting soldiers with another culture and a little bit of language “means they will become a valuable sensor on the battlefield,” he said.
The general said the look at culture and language isn’t just happening at the intelligence school. Infantry brigade commanders understand the need for having both.
“They are taking intelligence-funded programs, taking infantrymen, hundreds of them, 100 infantrymen per Stryker brigade at Fort Lewis (in Washington), and putting them into language training for 10 months to a year,” the general said. “Think about it: These are infantrymen who should be out shooting mortars, digging foxholes, practicing how to raid a room, but they are sitting in a language classroom.”
The expectation isn’t for the soldier to become an expert linguists. The goal is for them to have familiarity with the language, being able to read and speak it, and have a knowledge of what is being written and said around them at checkpoints or in market places, Custer said.
“The old adage that everybody understands English if you speak it loud enough and slow enough isn’t true. That’s simply not the way of the world,” he said.
It is a way to reach a population, which is important in the future of warfare.
“Despite what governments want to do, despite what governments impose on their people, the perception of the people is the critical path, the center of gravity that will involve future military operations,” Custer said.
A Vietnam War-era policy of winning the hearts and minds of the people is true today.
“You don’t do that by sending soldiers who don’t understand the population, can’t speak the language and could care less about the cultures. That’s exactly why we have a language and culture strategy and why Fort Huachuca has built so many programs of instruction, sending so many mobile training teams out. We trained 50,000 soldiers last year throughout the Army. We work with every brigade going to Iraq and Afghanistan because soldiers have to understand the framework those nations, it’s peoples, culture and languages,” Custer said.
The Intelligence Center is in the process of contracting for a 24-week Pashto immersion course, a language spoken in Afghanistan and Pakistan, at the fort.
“While the vast majority of units are still going to Iraq, for the units notified they are going to Afghanistan we can quickly teach that language and culture,” Custer said.
The center is already involved in two Arabic immersion courses, one lasting 41 weeks and the other lasting 24 weeks.
The way to fight the wars of the future comes in understanding the threats and how those threats have developed, the general said. Some of the causes may be religious or ethnic based. The current emphasis concerns the Islamic world.
Custer said what must be answered is what has caused the rise of Islamic radicalism. “It’s a we-versus-they fight” involving 1/100th of 1 percent of militants like al-Qaida and the Taliban and other such groups far outside the mainstream of moderate Islam, he said.
“We have to ensure moderate Islam is on our side, the side of civilization. It’s the forces of light versus the forces of darkness, the forces of the future against those of those of the past,” he said.
In this ongoing conflict, “the language-enhanced and culturally-enhanced soldier is the key to success” and will enable the United States and the free world to survive, Custer said.
Herald/Review senior reporter Bill Hess can be reached at 515-4615 or by e-mail at bill.hess@svherald.com.
