Lack of Arabic Speakers is a Crack in US Security

MONTEREY - If the United States is going to win the war with Islamic

extremism, it will need a lot more soldiers like Aimee Sullivan. Her weapon

of choice is not an automatic rifle or an armored vehicle. Private Sullivan

is armed instead with a knowledge of Arabic grammar and an appreciation of

Arab culture.

"I like grammar," the 29-year-old Mississippi native says with a laugh.

"It's like a puzzle."

Sullivan is one of 830 soldiers enrolled in Arabic courses at the Army's

Defense Language Institute, a picturesque complex overlooking Monterey Bay that proudly proclaims itself the world's largest foreign language school.

The mostly young men and women hunched over their Arab dictionaries here are the largest group among 3,200 students studying 26 different languages.

Thanks to the war in Iraq, the demand for Arabic is skyrocketing. According to new requirements just set by the Pentagon, the DLI must more than double its Arabic faculty this next year and add almost as many in the year after that. They are rapidly adding faculty to teach previously obscure languages such as Dari, Pashtu and Tajik, the main languages of Afghanistan.

The language demand may be one of the most serious, and least appreciated, cracks in our national security. Revelations in two recent government reports highlight the problem:

* Homeland Security officers sent to Saudi Arabia to screen visa applicants to keep out potential terrorists could not speak or read Arabic.

* The FBI has failed to translate more than 123,000 hours of

counterterrorism recordings in languages such as Arabic, Urdu and Pashtu. A quarter of ongoing intercepts are not even being monitored.

That Americans care little about learning foreign languages is nothing new. There are studies screaming about this going back decades. During the Cold War, it took the National Defense Education Act to help fund programs that got as many as 30,000 college kids marching their way through Russian grammar.

But no comparable programs have been created in the new war with Islamic extremism. Only a literal handful of students -- four to six -- graduated this past year from American universities with degrees in Arabic compared with almost 700 Arabic graduates from DLI.

"We're still teaching French and German and Spanish in our universities

whereas our real needs are Arabic, Korean, Chinese and Japanese," says Col. Daniel Scott, the assistant commandant of DLI.

Much of the burden of filling that need has fallen on the shoulders of DLI. Since World War II, this vital institution has been training the grunts of the defense intelligence community. About two-thirds of the graduates -- who come from all the services plus a smattering of civilians -- end up in the National Security Agency reading captured documents or translating intercepted cell-phone calls.

The Cold War emphasis on Russian is gone -- 1,000 students in 1985 have dwindled to about 200 today. Along with the growth of Arabic, DLI rushed after September 11 to add new languages such as Pashtu. In a reminder that our military must prepare for many contingencies, the number of students studying Korean is close to the Arabic learners, followed next by Chinese.

And the use of language has changed. Students focus more on using language in real life and at close quarters, their high-tech classrooms equipped to watch Al-Jazeera or to read Arabic websites.

New immersion exercises simulate situations such as the search of a home. The soldiers are learning that culture and language cannot be separated.

"You can't just march in and demand something,'' Sullivan explains. "It sometimes takes days of negotiation before you can even ask questions."

The Arabic course takes 18 months, and requirements for proficiency are being increased. But DLI also creates quick courses to train "checkpoint linguists." They translate training manuals into Tajik and create plastic foldup "survival guides'' for "instant two-way communication without language training.''

DLI is rightly proud of its work. But it's playing catch-up and time isn't, as they say, on their side.