Colonial Service

I was wondering what you folks thought about the idea of changing our deployment cycles to reflect something more along the lines of that used by the old British colonial service. Perhaps a major increase in deployment times wouldn't be necessary, just a shift from the current practice of personnel being shifted to geographically disparate commands over the years.

One of the problems I hear about repeatedly is the limited number of personnel who speak the language of strategically important regions (e.g. Iraq). There also seems to be a defecit of cultural understanding of the regions we work in.

Just as importantly, perhaps more so, our senior commanders don't have the opportunity to take advantage of the political relations they develop over the years with their foreign counterparts.

By initially assigning soldiers and Marines to a particular geographic region, and then ensuring that on each rotation they return to that region, integrating language instruction with our PME, then from the level of squad leader on up we could have skilled regional specialists.

When a surge of forces to a new region is required, for combat ops or training, regional specialists could be integrated with in-bound units as required.

Obviously not everyone is going to become cunning linguist, but certainly we can do better than we're doing now. This would give us both tactical and operations advantages that we're short on now. Intelligence gathering ops would be greatly facilitated, an obvious boon in counterinsurgency ops.

Just brainstorming here, but I'd appreciate feedback.

Best,
Dan

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Originally Posted by Dan M.

I was wondering what you folks thought about the idea of changing our deployment cycles to reflect something more along the lines of that used by the old British colonial service. Perhaps a major increase in deployment times wouldn't be necessary, just a shift from the current practice of personnel being shifted to geographically disparate commands over the years.

One of the problems I hear about repeatedly is the limited number of personnel who speak the language of strategically important regions (e.g. Iraq). There also seems to be a defecit of cultural understanding of the regions we work in.

Just as importantly, perhaps more so, our senior commanders don't have the opportunity to take advantage of the political relations they develop over the years with their foreign counterparts.

By initially assigning soldiers and Marines to a particular geographic region, and then ensuring that on each rotation they return to that region, integrating language instruction with our PME, then from the level of squad leader on up we could have skilled regional specialists.

When a surge of forces to a new region is required, for combat ops or training, regional specialists could be integrated with in-bound units as required.

Obviously not everyone is going to become cunning linguist, but certainly we can do better than we're doing now. This would give us both tactical and operations advantages that we're short on now. Intelligence gathering ops would be greatly facilitated, an obvious boon in counterinsurgency ops.

Just brainstorming here, but I'd appreciate feedback.

Best,
Dan

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Not with only 10 divisions.

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Originally Posted by Dan M.

I was wondering what you folks thought about the idea of changing our deployment cycles to reflect something more along the lines of that used by the old British colonial service. Perhaps a major increase in deployment times wouldn't be necessary, just a shift from the current practice of personnel being shifted to geographically disparate commands over the years.

One of the problems I hear about repeatedly is the limited number of personnel who speak the language of strategically important regions (e.g. Iraq). There also seems to be a defecit of cultural understanding of the regions we work in.

Just as importantly, perhaps more so, our senior commanders don't have the opportunity to take advantage of the political relations they develop over the years with their foreign counterparts.

By initially assigning soldiers and Marines to a particular geographic region, and then ensuring that on each rotation they return to that region, integrating language instruction with our PME, then from the level of squad leader on up we could have skilled regional specialists.

When a surge of forces to a new region is required, for combat ops or training, regional specialists could be integrated with in-bound units as required.

Obviously not everyone is going to become cunning linguist, but certainly we can do better than we're doing now. This would give us both tactical and operations advantages that we're short on now. Intelligence gathering ops would be greatly facilitated, an obvious boon in counterinsurgency ops.

Just brainstorming here, but I'd appreciate feedback.

Best,
Dan

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I think what you describe is already happening, and will probably accelerate.

Personally, though, I don't think language ability is the silver bullet that DoD seems to consider it. As someone who has been in the "international" game for 30 years or so now, it has been my observation that some people simply have an instinctive ability at languages and some have an instinctive ability to operate cross-culturally. The two are not necessarily the same. I consider myself fairly good at the latter but stinkoid at the former.

So what I'm getting at is that I think we're going to churn out a bunch of officers and NCOs with conversational ability in a foreign language but who are still inept in a foreign culture (or, heck, in any culture outside the fence of their base). You can be the most fluent linguist in the world but if you've never lived outside Fort Bragg or the Green Zone, your utility is limited.

That's where your analogy of the colonial service is useful. Those folks not only had language and historical/cultural training, but they lived with the locals. I don't think we can get there from here.

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Originally Posted by RTK

Not with only 10 divisions.

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Ahh, grasshopper, but what matters is not how many division flags there are, but how many BCTs.

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Originally Posted by SteveMetz

Ahh, grasshopper, but what matters is not how many division flags there are, but how many BCTs.

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Then I have a question:

If the BCTs (HBCT, SBCT, IBCT) are all geographically oriented and all BCTs are to be "plug-n-play" organizations, so to speak, wouldn't the Corps and/or divisions need to be geographically alligned as well? Additionally, won't many of the BCTs have to have a hybrid geographical orientation (more than one)?
It seems the army wishes to do with conventional forces the same things they've done with SOF in a lot of different ways. How long will it take people to realize you can't wish an apple into an orange?

Steve is right that language ability does not automatically equate to cross-cultural operational capacity. There are folk who can operate cross culturally without knowing the language well, semi-fluently, or even at all. There are also folk who are excellent linguists who can't for the life of them empathize cross-cultuarally.

That said, language is a key part of any culture. One who is without the language of that culture operates at a significant handicap. A book that comes as close as any I've seen to demonstrating the relationship between language and culture from the perspective of a third party player in both insurgency and counterinsurgency is Bill Meara's CONTRA CROSS (discussed in this forum).

If regional commands have any object, then it would be to keep a core staff familiar with the different facets of the region. Not running ops from a Central Command in Florida. The current Unified Commands probably have too diverse areas under their hat (esp CENTCOM). Another problem are up-or-out promotions.

Since the globish-speaking "world culture" is quite popular abroad working in cooperation with regional forces might be easier than teaching some NCO or 2Lt Farsi. But doesn't mean that they shouldn't have the opportunity to do so!

The analogy with the British army has the problem that the U.S. armed forces do not yet have indigenous units with indigenous NCOs. And the British Empire was much more based on trade than on armies. Key was the navy, and I don't think that they bothered to learn local languages.