In all of these instances, the link between national security and math and science was clear and, thus, so too was the Federal mandate to build the nation's capacity in these areas. Similarly, foreign language has always been considered essential to national security and, as such, has been the target of Federal interventions. The Army Special Training Program was founded in 1942 to train linguists for World War II, and the School of Language Studies of the Foreign Service Institute was founded in 1947. The National Security Education Program, created by the National Security Education Act of 1991, responded to the rapidly expanding needs for language and area expertise brought about by the fall of the Soviet Union and the general collapse of the bilateral world. More than 140 languages are spoken in these nations.
Cultural awareness is essential in such operations.
Shortfalls impact collection, processing, exploitation, and analysis of intelligence data. Last year, the FBI's Language Specialists and Contract Linguists translated over one million pages of documents and countless hours of audio material. With the growing demand for certain languages, the work continues to back up. The information becomes perishable over a period of time, so the lead value diminishes when the translation is delayed too long. Unfortunately, while a clear argument can be made that language competence is as vital to national security as is math and science, the Federal response to building language capacity has been uneven.