I suspect that part of the reason that the military does not have more terps in house is that the military takes a long view of the whole thing. Sure, we need a lot of Pashto speakers now but, eventually, we will leave there. In today's contentious political climate you never know if that might not be sooner rather than later. If that does happen, what do you do with all the extra Pashto speakers? That's why the military likes contractors for a lot of things. If we don't need them tomorrow, we just don't renew their contracts. Whereas if we fill those needs in house and the requirement goes away or at least gets reduced a lot then we still have all those bodies that we can't just get rid of. Now we have to either retrain them, which after all the resources spent on training them in the first place is not particularly attractive option, or we have a draw-down, which is also expensive.

SFC W