And I think that people really underestimate how hard it is to learn these languages well. It can take years of immersion to be fully fluent to where communicating really really effective. I would think that we would have jobs in our military that would be responsible for learning languages from all kinds of places around the world, should we need to be there.
They (=the us government) actually do, and the foreign service institute has some of the best language programs around [1] (some old courses are now even in the public domain [2]). Unfortunately those are mostly reserved to diplomats and would be hard (impossible?) to scale to occupation-army levels.
But they clearly either don't have enough people in that MOS or have enough but specializing in the wrong languages, if frontline units still need to rely on hired translators.
The Defense Language Institute has massive failure rates for students in the Cat 5 languages. Most of these courses are also at least a year long, if not more. They would probably have to increase the overall size of that facility 20-fold to produce enough linguists annually to have qualified linguists embedded in every unit.
The other big problem is that the people that (traditionally) do best in a linguistics MOS are usually highly intelligent and work well in an intelligence type of career field. Most of these would not do well in a battle-hardened infantry unit.
There has to be enough people in our ranks with enough intelligence to learn these languages. You don't have to be the best linguist, just a capable one that is willing to work hard. Not to mention that every combat troop should probably be getting at least cursory training in the local language as part of their on going training when not out in the field engaged in combat.
Our soldiers are not stupid, and if we treat them like the intelligent and invaluable human beings that they are then I think we might see far more success that we can even imagine. Imagine if you could understand the locals even 20% of the time vs our current nearly 0% for most units. How much more effective would we be in not only our intelligence in the field, but being able to convey our support for them and helping to relate to the local population.
It's not intelligence, but motivation that line units lack, in my experience. People who volunteer for the front line are more interested in solving problems with firepower than more peaceful interactions.
This sort of observation led to a suggestion that the American military should be divided into a Leviathan part and a System Administrator part, an idea I think is worth considering. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon's_New_Map for more.
That might work, if units weren't on 6-12 month rotations. If anything, our "professional" military is probably not professional enough. If we were actually going to attempt to garrison these places and build relations with the natives, you'd need to commit to leaving units in place for years, and allow officers and men to develop the intimate local knowledge and relationships to succeed.
