They did considerably up the language proficiency pay, although not nearly as much as you suggest, Carl. The max is far less than that figure, although nothing to sneeze at, but in order to get the max, you have to be professionally proficient, or nearly so, in three testable languages. Add to the problem the fact that the Defense Language Proficiency Test has nothing to do with your ability to rap with someone in Dari, Pashtu, or Arabic, but has everything to do with whether you can read newspaper and magazine passages and listen to Syrian soap operas and al-Jazeera and then answer questions meant more to stump the chump than to test your comprehension. So our metrics are off because they do not test the skills we need to employ operationally. For those who might think this sounds like sour grapes, I get 3/3 on the Arabic test, so I'm not mad that I can't pass it. I'm mad that the system is so broke and no matter how hard you try, the arrogant "academics" at DLI and the inertia of the bureaucracy there stymie all efforts.

That's where, as you said pretty much, "can do" runs into a brick wall. For a number of reasons, from the agencies where DLI's money comes from, to the cultural factors that affect how the native instructors want to teach their languages, to the fact that they're trying to teach last year's high school grads how to understand passages in a foreign language that cover college level topics (for instance an article about pegged and floating currencies... it made no sense to them, even once translated), the ship there has a broken rudder. And even when they have forums to try to get input, responses range from defensive counters to every point to DoD officials telling students and instructors who try to bring up valid points that they are out of line because they're not saying that DLI is doing great. Eight years and really all they've done beyond some curriculum reorganziation and cramming an extra semester in on the students' backs is to hand out iPods, and I think now laptops, to every stud. As is typical anymore, technology money rains freely down, but if you try to suggest substantive improvements it is too hard or off base.