Report: Special operations forces need to rethink language training

[rangerrebew]

Report: Special operations forces need to rethink language training
Special operators speak 80 languages across the military but often don't sustain that skills, a new report says.

BY PATTY NIEBERG | PUBLISHED NOV 1, 2023 6:54 PM EDT
 
U.S. Green Berets and elite Marine special operators are learning languages that aren’t always useful on deployments and missions abroad, a Government Accountability Office report found.

And those elite troops often let their skills in those languages lapse as their careers go on.


The new report sites examples like Special Forces soldiers who learn French as their assigned language, but find it useless in most European assignments, especially since the U.S. trains directly with French forces less often than many other allies in the region. Other soldiers who were trained to speak Russian told GAO investigators that rarely do in Eastern Europe and in some countries the language is even considered “culturally offensive.”

And language skills fade, those troops said, with many telling the GAO that competing training priorities get in the way of sustaining their language skills.

https://taskandpurpose.com/history/special-forces-language-gao-report/

[rangerrebew]

Those are problems just stateside.  Imagine how bad it is when they deploy!

[sneakypete]

Report: Special operations forces need to rethink language training
Special operators speak 80 languages across the military but often don't sustain that skills, a new report says.

BY PATTY NIEBERG | PUBLISHED NOV 1, 2023 6:54 PM EDT
 
U.S. Green Berets and elite Marine special operators are learning languages that aren’t always useful on deployments and missions abroad, a Government Accountability Office report found.

And those elite troops often let their skills in those languages lapse as their careers go on.


The new report sites examples like Special Forces soldiers who learn French as their assigned language, but find it useless in most European assignments, especially since the U.S. trains directly with French forces less often than many other allies in the region. Other soldiers who were trained to speak Russian told GAO investigators that rarely do in Eastern Europe and in some countries the language is even considered “culturally offensive.”

And language skills fade, those troops said, with many telling the GAO that competing training priorities get in the way of sustaining their language skills.

https://taskandpurpose.com/history/special-forces-language-gao-report/

If this is true,the people the army needs to "cut" are the leadership people in planning,not the operators.

And,after having said that,foreign language skills are NEVER useless because special operations people are prone to be called up at ANY time to run an operation in a foreign nation where that language skill,even if it isn't "local" is spoken and/or understood by  many of the locals because it was the national language while that nation was a colony.

[Smokin Joe]

They might not work much with the French directly, But French is spoken in SE Asia and a lot of Africa as well, having been the language of colonizers there. That colonial era leaves residues of culture wherever the colonizers were, and those can be more useful than just dealing with folks from those former colonial powers. This popped up on a Google Search:

Top 10 Languages By Total Number Of Speakers

    English. 1.452 billion total speakers.
    Mandarin Chinese. 1.119 billion total speakers.
    Hindi. 602 million total speakers.
    Spanish. 559 million total speakers.
    Standard Arabic. 274 million total speakers.
    French. 274 million total speakers.
    Bengali. 273 million total speakers.
    Russian.