The General Accounting Office has found that the intelligence sectors of the U.S. military and key federal agencies are suffering from a lack of language interpreters, but it’s being allowed to happen because too few dollars are being spent to produce adequate numbers, officials say.
In a report released Tuesday, the GAO found that four federal agencies “reported shortages of translators and interpreters, as well as shortages of staff, such as diplomats and intelligence specialists, with foreign language skills that are critical to successful job performance.” Editor’s note: The link above opens a .pdf file; you must have an Adobe reader to view it.
The deficit of trained personnel in each of the agencies examined – the FBI, the State Department, the Foreign Commercial Service and the Army – has “adversely affected agency operations and hindered U.S. military, law enforcement, intelligence, counterterrorism and diplomatic efforts.”
“Many of the shortages were in hard-to-learn languages from the Middle East and Asia,” the congressional watchdog agency’s report said, though shortages varied depending on the agency, language and occupation.
The GAO’s findings mimic those first reported by WorldNetDaily in January. According to various sources at the Army’s language and counterintelligence school at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., the school routinely operates at only two-thirds strength and was facing the loss of even more personnel in early February by threatening to lower contractor salaries.
In fact, in response to the GAO’s report, some of the agencies involved blamed a lack of resources for its language problems.
“The GAO is correct in identifying a number of difficulties the department faces in meeting its diverse and changing language requirements,” said the State Department in a memo responding to the watchdog agency’s findings.
“We believe that the single largest, and overwhelmingly, the most significant factor that prevents us from meeting our language staffing and proficiency goals is our staffing shortfall of over 1,100 people as outlined in our Diplomatic Readiness report,” said the State Department document. “Without adequate capacity to fill all positions and without a ‘training float’ of personnel to ensure we can send people to training without suffering staffing gaps, we will not be able to meet our goals.”
Lt. Col. Marian R. Hansen, public relations officer for the U.S. Army Intelligence Center at Fort Huachuca, also blamed a lack of funding for ongoing personnel shortages.
“Because of declining resources, USAIC has looked toward other, more economical options for providing instructors,” Hansen said in response to a WorldNetDaily inquiry last month. “The decision was made [in February] to contract with individuals, vs. a corporation. This method is more labor intensive for government personnel to administer, but it is significantly less costly in terms of contract dollars.”
Hansen said the individual contractors would save the Army $162,000, or about 37 percent, over the previous corporate instructor contract, which cost $442,000 from April 1 through Jan. 31. The new contract, for six instructors, will cost approximately $280,000 from the period Feb. 1-Dec. 31 of this year.
While “contractors are selected based on their technical expertise, past performance and their offered price,” Hansen said, “the best value is the determining factor.”
But is such penny-pinching the problem? Past and current Fort Huachuca contractors and instructors say that’s a big part of it.
“Can you say ‘intelligence failure?'” one source, who spoke to WorldNetDaily on condition of anonymity, said. “With 10 classes scheduled for this year, imagine the quality of instruction these guys are going to get.”
He added that the school has a history of budget and personnel problems.
“The bottom line is,” he said, “the school doesn’t have enough people to handle the current load, and it’s losing half the people it has. And the way the military is, no one is going to say, ‘We can’t do the job,’ because they’d get canned.”
Tanja Linton, a spokeswoman for Fort Huachuca’s public affairs office, defended the action, explaining that “we [only] have certain sums of money, but we still have to get the mission done.”
“In some cases, we have to look at saving some dollars,” she told WND. “That’s what happened here. For us, it’s a smarter business decision to get the mission done with individual contractors.”
According to other sources, the Army only has around 500 interrogators, who, together, speak dozens of languages. It has only slightly more counterintelligence personnel.
As part of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki’s “lighter, more lethal Army” concept, the interrogation and counterintelligence, or Intel/CI, divisions are being merged, sources said.
Intel/CI personnel are needed to help military and federal law enforcement officials interview suspects, decipher intelligence communications and perform other language-related tasks that, collectively, help form the basis for U.S. intelligence efforts. At all times Intel/CI capabilities are vital, but during wartime they become crucial.
In its report, the GAO said the Army only has about 50 percent of the translators and interpreters from Arabic that it needs – and a worse situation exists with Farsi, the primary language spoken in Iran and, to a lesser extent, in Afghanistan.
As the terror war widens, Army officials warn they may not have enough personnel to sustain more than one front.
“The Army said it does not have the linguistic capacity to support two concurrent major theaters of war, as planners require,” the GAO report said.
“To teach interrogation and debriefing, you have to do it one on one,” one linguist told WND. “In real life, you never interrogate more than one prisoner at once.”
“Diplomatic and intelligence officials have stated that lack of staff with foreign language skills has weakened the fight against international terrorism,” said the GAO report, noting that “more than 70 federal agencies have foreign language needs.”
In response to the GAO report, David S. C. Chu, the Army’s undersecretary of defense for personnel, said the service “in general … concurs with the report.”
“The management of foreign language assets is an area of [Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s] interest and emphasis,” Chu said. “It also represents an important component of the Human Resource Strategic Plan now being prepared to shape the next issuance of the Defense Planning Guidance.”
Though Hansen and Pentagon officials say USAIC is now being staffed with quality instructors, others disagree.
“Nothing has changed,” said one former instructor who now works for another contractor at the school. “There are wives of [instructor/graders] playing roles, [yet] these women do not meet the criteria mentioned in the Statement of Work from contracting. A definite disadvantage exists for the student who must interview them.”
“These housewives may save money, but for the love of God, don’t put a soldier in a war that has their life depending on what has been learned in the school,” said another.
School officials “asked the school chiefs to put together a slide presentation for them,” detailing all the problems, another former instructor said. “At our end, the slide show had to be whitewashed at both battalion and brigade level. Amazingly, all the ‘issue’ slides – contractors, lack of military instructors, funding, etc. – vanished.”
“Everything is ‘perfectly fine’ here according to the officer corps,” he added.
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