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