Schmedlap did request we focus on languages specifically for the Middle East and S. Asia (Afghanistan/Pakistan), but when he put the 20 years in the future qualifier on it, I decided to look not just in CENTCOM, but globally (another crystal ball).

Concur with the languages identified for the Middle East, but would weight the effort on Persian and Arabic (one can argue that Arabic is now a global language due to the global distribution of Islamic schools funded by NGOs from the Middle East).

Concur with Bob's World that the SOUTHCOM AOR is becoming increasingly important for both countering security threats to our nation and facilitating our economic interests, so I suspect that Spanish and Portuguese will "remain" important.

China and India will remain strategic players, so Chinese is a must add, but since India has several languages, to include English I wouldn't invest too much time learning Hindi.

In Europe it is hard to say. For Africa French, Portuguese, and Arabic will probably remain the key languages (in addition to English).

I agree with WILF, we can make a "guess", but we'll never know with any degree of certainty. Unfortunately, language training is an investment that takes considerable time to see a return on, so we're forced to use our crystal ball and make the best quessimate possible before we invest resources, and after we invest we then we cross our fingers and hope we got it right. If not, we do what we have always done, we scramble to try to get it right.