Traditionally, DOD has focused on its professional communities to ensure that it has the language and regional proficiency capabilities it needs, but in recent years—prompted by the events of September 11, 2001, and military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq— DOD has grown increasingly aware of the need for these capabilities among the general purpose forces in addition to the professional communities. DOD’s professional communities of linguists and regional experts generally include personnel—such as human intelligence collectors, signal intelligence analysts, and Foreign Area Officers—who require language and regional proficiency to perform their primary functions. DOD has also explicitly identified language and regional proficiency as critical warfighting skills to be integrated into future operations to ensure that combat forces deploy with the essential ability to understand and effectively communicate with native populations, local and government officials, and coalition partners while in theater. The responsibility for developing and maintaining language and regional proficiency capabilities is shared among several DOD components, including the military services and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Each military service is responsible for staffing, training, and equipping both general purpose forces and personnel whose professions require language or regional proficiency to ensure they have the language and regional proficiency capabilities necessary to support the needs of combatant commanders. As of April 2009, the Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marine Corps have developed strategy documents intended to guide efforts to develop language and cultural awareness skills within their respective forces. Additionally, the military services provide predeployment training—the amount of which depends on the unit’s mission and the amount of time available for such language and culture training, as articulated by the commander of the unit—to general purpose forces, and each of the services has established a center to assist in coordinating, developing, distributing, and providing basic language and regional proficiency training. The military services have also taken steps to incorporate language and regional proficiency into their professional military education for general purpose forces. The Office of the Secretary of Defense has taken a number of steps over the past 5 years to transform language and regional proficiency capabilities, including developing a governance structure, updating policies, and—in February 2005— publishing the Defense Language Transformation Roadmap (Roadmap), the primary document DOD has used to guide efforts. For example, DOD established (1) the DOD Senior Language Authority, (2) the Defense Language Steering Committee, (3) the Defense Language Action Panel, and (4) the Defense Language Office. The Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Plans, under the USD(P&R), has been designated as the DOD Senior Language Authority, and serves as the DOD-wide sponsor for language and regional proficiency. As such, the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Plans oversees efforts—in coordination with other DOD components—to align DOD’s policies and doctrine in order to support the strategic relevance of language and regional proficiency capabilities, oversees and maintains responsibility for DOD’s official system for testing service members’ language proficiency, and ensures the integration of language and regional proficiency into training policy. The Defense Language Steering Committee, which is comprised of Senior Language Authorities from DOD organizations other than the Office of the USD(P&R) and chaired by the DOD Senior Language Authority, provides senior-level guidance regarding the language transformation effort and the development of DOD’s language capabilities. The Defense Language Action Panel, which is comprised of less-senior representatives from the same entities represented on the Defense Language Steering Committee, supports the activities, functions, and responsibilities of the Defense Language Steering Committee. The Defense Language Office supports the DOD Senior Language Authority in carrying out their assigned responsibilities. Additionally, the Defense Language Office is responsible—according to Defense Language Office officials—for day-to-day oversight of tasks contained in the Roadmap. DOD also updated long-standing policies—as called for by the Deputy Secretary of Defense in a May 2004 memorandum—and published implementing guidance that sets forth responsibilities for the management of its efforts to transform language and regional proficiency capabilities. Specifically, in October 2005, USD(P&R) updated its 1988 policy on DOD’s Language Program. The updated policy calls for DOD to consider foreign language and regional proficiency critical competencies that are essential to DOD’s mission and to manage these capabilities so as to maximize the accession, development, maintenance, enhancement, and employment of these critical skills appropriate to the DOD’s mission needs. Additionally, in June 2007, USD(P&R) published implementing guidance to accompany the updated policy. This implementing guidance assigns responsibilities for managing DOD’s foreign language and regional proficiency capabilities, establishes the DOD language proficiency goal for language professionals, identifies foreign language and regional proficiency as a mission-critical skill, and publishes DOD’s regional proficiency skill level guidelines. Prior work shows that implementing significant organizational change—as DOD is attempting to do with language and regional proficiency transformation—requires a strategic plan or set of linked plans that sets a clear direction for transformation efforts. DOD has made progress in transforming its language and regional proficiency capabilities, but continues to lack a comprehensive strategic plan. Our prior work and the work of others has shown that implementing significant organizational change—as DOD is attempting to do with language and regional proficiency transformation—requires a comprehensive, integrated strategic plan that sets a clear direction for transformation efforts and includes measurable performance goals and objectives and funding priorities that are linked to goals. Table 1 describes these elements in greater detail, which are based on our prior work. Collectively, these elements form a framework that can help decision makers more effectively guide and assess progress, and to do so in a clear and transparent manner. In February 2005, DOD published the Defense Language Transformation Roadmap— which officials consider to be the key document DOD has used to guide language and regional proficiency transformation. While DOD officials said that the Roadmap was not intended to be a strategic plan, the Roadmap establishes goals and desired outcomes, which DOD officials told us are the same as objectives. Table 2 lists these goals and the objectives for each. Each goal in the Roadmap is supported by several tasks, for a total of 43 tasks. In response to the Roadmap tasks, organizations across DOD have undertaken specific initiatives. For example, DOD has centralized and standardized contract language support, and published a Strategic Language List that identifies prioritized languages for which DOD has current and projected requirements and for which training and testing will be provided, incentives applied, and other resources allocated. Moreover, each military service has developed a strategy for language and regional proficiency transformation, using the Roadmap either as guidance or as a complementary document. While DOD has goals and objectives, some of DOD’s objectives are not measurable or time-bound. For example, one of DOD’s objectives is for the total force to understand and value the tactical, operational, and strategic asset inherent in regional expertise and language. However, DOD does not define how it intends to measure the total force’s understanding of language and regional expertise or provide a time frame for achieving the objective. In the absence of such measurable objectives, DOD officials assess progress toward goals and objectives by tracking the number of associated Roadmap tasks that they consider to be fully operational, meaning the DOD Senior Language Authority has determined the intent of the task has been met. According to DOD officials, 93 percent of the tasks in the Roadmap were fully operational as of April 2009. However, this approach focuses solely on the achievement of specific tasks rather than the extent to which these tasks support progress toward language and regional proficiency transformation goals. In addition, we found that DOD may consider a task fully operational before the task is complete, further complicating DOD’s ability to measure progress toward goals and objectives. For example, DOD considers the Roadmap task that assigned responsibility to the Secretary of the Army to create courses for emerging language needs to be fully operational because a plan to build these courses has been developed. Still, work remains to be done to complete this task—specifically, the creation of the courses themselves. DOD does not continue to formally track these fully operational but uncompleted tasks. DOD officials state that they identify funding priorities for language and regional proficiency in their budget requests, but linkages between these funding priorities and the goals in the Roadmap are unclear and DOD lacks information about the total cost of language and regional proficiency transformation. According to DOD officials, the 22 major language and regional proficiency programs contained in the Defense Language Program of Record—DOD’s term for its projected language and regional proficiency budget—are its funding priorities. DOD estimates that they will receive a half-billion dollars in fiscal year 2009 for these programs. In addition, DOD estimates that they will receive about one billion dollars in the fiscal year 2009 supplemental funding for the Army contract for linguist services. However, our analysis shows that there is not a clear linkage between the Defense Language Program of Record and the Roadmap goals. For example, 1 of the 22 programs is the Service Academies’ language training program, which redirects the Service Academies’ language programs’ focus to strategic languages and immersion programs. While this program may provide needed capabilities, DOD does not identify the goals or tasks which this program supports. Further, because the Roadmap does not have information about funding and DOD has not identified funding necessary to implement the tasks in the Roadmap and other language and regional proficiency transformation efforts, DOD lacks information about the total cost of this transformation. DOD officials acknowledge that they are at a point in their language and regional proficiency transformation efforts where a strategic plan is needed. Building on the foundation of the Roadmap, DOD officials are in the process of developing a strategic plan to guide transformation efforts for fiscal years 2010-2015.