From AFT:
“None of
the US Air Force’s linguists spoke Ukrainian. Then Russia invaded.”
(Senior Airman
Christian Jackson, a cryptologic language analyst with the 97th Intelligence
Squadron, sits at a computer simulating his in-flight duties at Lincoln
Airport, Neb., May 11, 2021. Airmen from different Offutt Air Force Base, Neb.,
squadrons posed for photos on a RC-135V/W Rivet Joint.)
The Pentagon
knew something was coming in Ukraine. Air Force reconnaissance planes had flown
over eastern Europe for months, staffed with military linguists who could
interpret what nearby Russian forces were discussing as they prepared to invade
neighboring Ukraine in February. The U.S. had pledged solidarity with Europe’s
second-largest country and approved more than $1 billion in military aid. There
was just one problem. “We have no Ukrainian-specific linguists. We don’t train
Ukrainian,” Staff Sgt. Bobby Brown, airborne language analyst program manager,
recently told Air Force Times on a visit to Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska.
As the
situation along Ukraine’s borders — and eventually, inside them — grew more
dire, the Air Force rushed to find troops who could pass the Pentagon’s
Ukrainian language proficiency test. Some with family ties to the country
already spoke it, while others with an appetite for languages set out to learn.
Airmen who study Russian could help out in a pinch as well, since the two share
similar alphabets, grammar and vocabulary. “The Department of the Air Force has
the ability to track language capabilities in the military personnel systems
and can quickly identify airmen/guardians with the required language skills, to
include Ukrainian,” service spokesperson Laura McAndrews said Friday. The Air
Force “surged to meet emerging requirements” for Russian language analysts at
the beginning of the conflict, she added. McAndrews declined to answer how many
Ukrainian and Russian linguists are currently supporting U.S. and NATO
operations related to the four-month-old war, citing operational security.
The Pentagon’s
Defense Language Institute trains service members in about a dozen languages,
including French, Spanish, Indonesian, Farsi, Russian, Tagalog, Mandarin,
Japanese, Korean, Pashto and four Arabic dialects. The most difficult courses
can last more than a year. Those airmen tend to specialize in one of a few key
tongues at a time — typically Russian, Mandarin Chinese, Korean and Arabic. But
it’s more complicated than knowing how to ask for a bathroom. Cryptologic
language analysts, as they are formally known, intercept the messages and
conversations of foreign troops and decision-makers so the U.S. is clued into
their possible next steps. That comes in handy for tracking troop movements on
the ground in real time as well as longer-term mission planning.
“We have our
own slang and acronyms and things we talk about that are not conversational
language,” said Maj. Eric Armstrong, an RC-135 Rivet Joint pilot who now serves
as deputy director of the base reconstruction effort at Offutt Air Force Base,
Nebraska, where airborne linguists are first stationed at the 97th Intelligence
Squadron. “They have to understand the mission’s military language … so they
can grasp, ‘This type of person is probably talking to this type of person in
this role about these things,’” he said. The intelligence gets routed through
organizations like the National Security Agency and shared with countries that
work with the U.S. That collaboration has helped Ukrainian troops kill multiple
Russian generals and sink a key warship in the Black Sea. “If it is a threat to
our partners, we’re able to tell them that threat,” Armstrong said. “We may not
have to give them the whole ‘who, what, why and where,’ but we can tell them
that, ‘Hey, there’s something dangerous and watch out.’”
Service
members who are well-versed in other languages can also help train foreign
forces. For example, Air Force Capt. Jordan Garcia stepped in as an interpreter
for Ukrainian students at the Naval Small Craft Instruction and Technical
Training School, a U.S. Navy program in Mississippi that trains foreign special
operations troops in tactics and strategy, earlier this year. Garcia, who
speaks Ukrainian and Russian, was part of the Air Force’s Language-Enabled
Airman Program. The initiative offers online classes for active duty airmen and
Space Force guardians to gain a working knowledge of a foreign language. “It
was critical to hit the ground running, so there was not a lot of time to get
spun up on the technical terminology related to the subjects,” he said in a May
12 release. “My development through LEAP training and eMentor courses helped me
be able to adapt and learn at the speed I needed to.” Garcia spent three weeks
with the Ukrainians as they progressed through courses on patrol craft, diesel
systems maintenance and international tactical communications. The students
were in Mississippi when Russian forces invaded their home country on Feb. 24. “One
of the Ukrainian students was originally working as an interpreter for the
other students,” Garcia said. “After shadowing her for a day, I stepped in and
did the interpreting for all of the Ukrainian students so she could focus on
learning the material.” In many cases, getting someone up to speed to decipher
military chatter in a foreign language — heard over a crackly headset, during a
crisis, with little backup — requires squeezing what is typically an 18-month
process into a matter of weeks. The U.S. military dealt with that time crunch
firsthand while withdrawing from its two-decade war in Afghanistan last summer.
As of May
2021, the Air Force had just eight linguists who spoke Pashto, one of
Afghanistan’s two official languages that is spoken by about half of the
population, said Armstrong, who helped manage the withdrawal as an operations
director at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, before moving to Offutt. “That was an
absolute nightmare. Between [RC-135 Rivet Joints and EC-130H Compass Calls], we
split them up the best we could,” Armstrong told Air Force Times in April. “We
brought some folks back who had already gone to other languages, but hadn’t
quite become unqualified yet.” That included two Chinese experts who had
previously studied Pashto. “Trying to spin them up in order to safely get
through the Afghanistan withdrawal was challenging,” Armstrong said.
That grew from
eight people to about 130 airmen who offered language support during the
massive U.S.-led humanitarian evacuation and the domestic resettlement effort,
McAndrews said. Those airmen acted as advocates for Afghan evacuees as they
tried to piece together a path forward with the U.S. military, federal agencies
and nongovernmental organizations. “For Operation Allies Refuge/Operation
Allies Welcome, the linguist teams at the camps were a critical asset. With
language and culture expertise, they were injected into every role at every
step of the process without any formal training for this type of mission,”
McAndrews said. Despite a constant need for foreign language proficiency in its
ranks, the Air Force hasn’t found a way to avoid the last-minute scramble for
multilingual airmen in an emergency. Part of the problem is that the service
has to reserve spots at the Defense Language Institute five years in advance.
The Army is in charge of training cryptologic language analysts there. “We have
to basically plan for the world’s messes, crises, five years out — can’t really
do that. It’s constantly a struggle,” said Brown, who specializes in Chinese.
He noted that
the military has tried ways of quickly retasking its linguists as needed, but
it hasn’t gone well. “They try to, as best as possible, keep everyone going and
keep everyone relevant,” Brown said. McAndrews said the Air Force has started a
pilot program, dubbed “Linguist Next,” at the institute in an attempt to
fast-track language expertise. The service hopes that more frequent proficiency
tests will make that knowledge stick more quickly than in DLI’s usual course. Contractors
also help retrain linguists who need to brush up on a new language, stat, she
said. The military wants additional, more stable funding for its various
foreign language education programs for a more stable bench of polyglots. For
now, the Air Force is prioritizing languages that fall in line with the
National Defense Strategy. That document positions the United States in
military competition with China and Russia, with a lesser emphasis on
countering North Korea, Iran and violent insurgencies around the world. “Language
equities across the Air Force are in high demand and are a significant and
costly resource to create and maintain,” McAndrews said. “The Air Force works
closely with the Department of Defense through a multitude of working groups to
strike the right balance of capability to meet the needs of our nation and the service.”
^ Knowing a
Language fluently and being able to use it in the right context is extremely
important for Diplomats and for Soldiers. While many Ukrainians speak Russian it’s
a true sign of Friendship and Good Relations when your Ally learns to speak
your Language (English for Ukrainians and Ukrainian for Americans.) ^
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