Fewer than half of all Army and Marine Corps special operations personnel completed any of their annual foreign language training in recent years, prompting a call to overhaul how the community prioritizes and accounts for language standards, according to a recent report.
The Government Accountability Office reviewed five years’ worth of data and interviewed various special operators and commanders following a fiscal year 2022 congressional request for a report on the status of foreign language proficiency within special operations.
After completing their initial training for their respective SOF military occupational specialties, both Army and Marine Corps special operations personnel are assigned a foreign language that they are required to learn and sustain throughout their career. Initial training ranges from four to six months for Army special operations forces and four months for their Marine counterparts.
The GAO report also reviewed Navy and Air Force special operations language requirements. However, the two services discontinued or suspended their requirements during the period assessed, 2018 to 2022. The report noted that Air Force special operations approved a new requirement for SOF personnel in the newly formed Theater Air Operations Squadrons in May 2023. The report did not provide details as to why Navy special operations discontinued its language requirement in 2021.
Several SOF operators and commanders told GAO staff that training for other skills qualifications, deployments that did not require language training and a lower prioritization of the language training by their chain of command often meant that the training went uncompleted.
The report’s authors included unattributed quotes from interviewees.
“Sustaining foreign language skills is not what gets you promoted. The skill sets trained at Joint Combined Exchange Training events are what leadership focuses on,” one individual told interviewers.
“No one has been denied the ability to deploy due to not being proficient in their assigned foreign language,” another individual said.
This was despite monthly proficiency bonus pay ranging from $100 to $500 for one language and $1,000 for multiple languages for individuals required to maintain foreign language proficiency.
“However, less than half of Army and Marine Corps SOF personnel recorded completing any of the foreign language sustainment and enhancement training,” according to the report.
This amounted to between 2,200 and 3,200 of more than 7,000 Army SOF personnel completing the training. Of those who did complete the language training during the period analyzed, the average number of training hours ranged from a high of 56 hours in 2019 and a low of 35 hours in 2021.
For the Marines, between 128 and 262 of the more than 600 Marine Corps SOF personnel recorded completing language training. Of those who did do the training they averaged between 21 to 24 hours per year.
Training requirements vary, depending on proficiency levels. Official U.S. Special Operations Command guidance directs SOF personnel to complete between 80 to 120 hours of formal foreign language training annually, according to the report.
Sometimes the language training for a given area was not matched well with the deployment cycle.
“Often we do not know where we are deploying to until three or four months before the deployment. For example, if we knew well in advance that we were going to Indonesia, I would prioritize having at least a basic understanding of Indonesian,” an individual told interviewers.
SOCOM and the SOF service component commands, such as U.S. Army Special Operations Command and Marine Corps Special Operations Command, spent between $42.6 million and $49.4 million annually on language training during the five-year period, according to the report.
The GAO report authors also found that commands were unable to explain the mission analysis they used to determine what languages were needed. One individual responsible for tracking language requirements, not named in the report, told interviewers the process was “more art than science.”
The report analyzed 198 deployments over a five-year period to 24 European countries and found the assigned languages for those deployments were of “at least moderate relevance” about 52% of the time and of low, very low or no relevance about 48% of the time.
“An official from the Army’s 10th Special Forces Group that manages foreign language training said that although French is an assigned language for SOF personnel, it is not widely spoken in locations within Europe where SOF personnel are deployed, and there are limited opportunities to work with French forces,” according to the report.
Assigned languages, by region, for active-duty SOF personnel:
- Northern Command – Spanish
- Southern Command – Spanish, Portuguese
- European Command – French, German, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian
- Africa Command – Arabic, French, Portuguese
- Central Command – Arabic, French
- Indo-Pacific Command – Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Tagalog, Thai
Source: GAO Report “Special Operations Forces: Enhanced Training, Analysis, and Monitoring Could Improve Foreign Language Proficiency”
Neither Army nor Marine Corps special operations commands have “held unit commanders accountable for monitoring whether SOF personnel complete annual foreign language training,” according to the report.
To fix the accountability problem, the GAO report recommended that commands monitor the relevancy of assigned languages at deployment locations, enforce procedures that specify consequences when personnel fail to meet language standards, and hold unit commanders accountable for monitoring and reporting language training completion.
Pentagon officials agreed with the recommendations.
Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.
