Why Americans Aren’t Linguists

Here’s another fantasy. At CIMSEC Benjamin Van Horrick wants to bolster our ability to oppose China in the Western Pacific and South China Sea by increasing the number of speakers of Korean, Japanese, Thai, and Tagalog:

A dire shortage of Asian operation linguists in the First Island Chain hinders the United States’ capability to deter Chinese aggression. The joint force’s campaigns depend on strengthening regional partners and fighting as coalitions. Operational linguists act as interpreters and translators, forge trust, assist with planning, and enable the execution of coalition operations. Since language is culture, linguists also inform and educate the commands about the host nation’s cultural and social nuances, such as those that can affect operational integration. However, the present number of operational linguists in the Pacific is already insufficient for regular peacetime campaigning, let alone for crisis or war. The new administration can fix the problem and add more operational linguists in the Pacific before the operational need becomes a damaging shortfall.

To accomplish that they will need to draft Korean-Americans, Japanese-Americans, etc. into the military. Training serving personnel adequately in languages rated as difficult (which describes most of the languages he wants us to expand on) takes years.

Americans aren’t linguists. There are multiple reasons for that. The most obvious is that there are many places in the U. S. where you can travel for hundreds if not thousands of miles in any direction without hearing a language other than English spoken. Other than Spanish nowadays of course. Furthermore, the only reasons for Americans to study languages other than English or Spanish is nostalgia or personal enrichment. It opens no career possibilities. American companies hire native speakers of other languages not people who’ve learned other languages in school.