According to this report, the armed forces are not moving fast enough to mobilize speakers of strategically-important languages to help prevail on numerous battlefields of the War on Terror: “Figures from the department indicate that only 1.2 percent of the military receives a bonus paid to those who can speak languages judged to be of critical importance for the current conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as other areas of strategic concern.”

Although the Defense Language Institute in Monterrey has increased its class sizes since 9/11, it is still not pumping out nearly enough graduates to meet the demand. That is forcing the Army and Marine Corps, in particular, to resort to second-best expedients:

Because not enough soldiers speak foreign languages, the military has had to rely on more than 10,000 civilian contract linguists, many local Afghans and Iraqis of widely differing abilities. Captain [Eric] Nelson [a company commander in Iraq] said that his 120-man infantry company had 11 Iraqi interpreters, but that only nine were capable of doing the work

The solution is simple: Recruit more foreigners into the armed forces. That will require waiving the current requirement that all recruits must be citizens or greencard holders–something that can be done with a stroke of the Secretary of Defense’s pen. The foreign-born soldiers we get as a result are likely to prove a valuable strategic asset, bringing with them the kind of linguistic and cultural skills that are almost impossible to teach. And, like many previous generations of immigrants, they are also likely to make very good American citizens.