Stanley McChrystal: recommendation

Transcript context

…If recruiting is hard, and we want to recruit more people, and learning languages, developing cultural acuity is hard, how do we push all that together and make it work? What has to give? You’ve got to be willing to train them. You can go out and try to hire people who already have language skills or very high language potential to learn, but we have not taken the time to train people in languages. We have to put the resources. During World War II, in the first year or two, we trained something like 5,200 Americans to become fluent in Japanese, a very difficult language. In the period in Afghanistan and Iraq, I don’t think we trained one-tenth that many, even though we were there much longer. We were unwilling to make the commitment, and it wasn’t just money. The military services have been averse in the past to sending someone like Tyler Cowen to school for language, because they have fear that you’ll become focused just on that, and they will lose your skills for the wider service. We’ve always celebrated and promoted generalists. In fact, when I was a young officer, I had Spanish language on my record. I wasn’t very good in Spanish, but I’d taken advanced Spanish at West Point. But it was not a good thing to have on my record because every year or two, they’d come up with this idea. They’d send me off to some assignment I really didn’t want, which wasn’t going to be very good for my long-term career. I tried to jink and jog and avoid those. You’ve got to change that a bit. I think you’ve got to make being fluent in at least one language for officers a requirement, and for more junior soldiers, something that we will reward. When you went to West Point, what was, for you, the most interesting class?…

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