DOD, the Army, and the Marine Corps have emphasized the need for improved language and culture skills in strategic guidance and are implementing training and education programs to begin to address these needs. Before September 11, 2001, DOD generally focused efforts to build language and culture capabilities on its professional communities. As military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq have continued, DOD has broadened this focus to the general purpose forces. In figure 1, we show that in departmentwide and service-level documents issued since 2005, DOD and the Army and Marine Corps addressed the need for improved language and culture skills. The responsibilities within DOD for identifying, developing, and maintaining language and culture capabilities are shared among several components, including the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the combatant commanders, and the military services. The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness provides overall policy guidance for the defense language program and is also responsible for reviewing the policies, plans, and programs of the DOD components to ensure that foreign language and regional proficiency needs are adequately addressed. DOD has designated Senior Language Authorities within the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the military services, and other DOD components, and established a governance structure for DOD’s language and culture programs, which consists of a number of entities, including the following: Defense Language Office: provides strategic direction and programmatic oversight to the DOD components, including the services and combatant commands, on present and future requirements related to language as well as regional and cultural proficiency. The Director of the Defense Language Office, within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, has been designated as the DOD Senior Language Authority. Defense Language Steering Committee: comprised of Senior Language Authorities from the military services and other DOD organizations and chaired by the DOD Senior Language Authority, the committee provides senior-level guidance regarding the development of DOD’s language capabilities. Defense Language Action Panel: comprised of less-senior representatives from the same entities represented on the Defense Language Steering Committee, the panel supports the activities, functions, and responsibilities of the Defense Language Steering Committee. Combatant commanders, such as the Commander of U.S. Central Command, are responsible for identifying foreign language and culture requirements in support of operations in their geographic areas of responsibility. In some cases, battlefield commanders, such as the Commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan, may publish guidance and other documents that specify training tasks that should be completed before military forces deploy to an area where combat operations are being conducted. Each military service is responsible for training forces with the language and culture capabilities necessary to support departmentwide and service- specific requirements and the needs of combatant commanders. Army and Marine Corps headquarters staff and service commands develop guidance and training programs to prepare forces with required skills, such as language and culture. The Army and Marine Corps have published language and culture strategies to guide servicewide efforts. Within the Army, the Training and Doctrine Command has been designated as the lead agency for implementing the Army Culture and Foreign Language Strategy and has also established the Training and Doctrine Command Culture Center. The Marine Corps has established a culture center—the Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning—which is responsible for developing and implementing the aspects of the Marine Corps Language, Regional and Culture Strategy: 2011-2015 that apply to general purpose forces. The Army and Marine Corps provide language and culture training at various points of a service member’s career through formal service institutions, such as professional military education schools, and within operational units. The following are examples: Training offered during enrollment in formal service institutions: The Army offers new recruits courses to build basic cultural competence and is in the process of adjusting training programs at each of its schools to expand the amount of cultural content in training. The Army has also provided some soldiers with an opportunity to study a foreign language in professional military education courses and develop foreign language skills through self-directed, computer-based training. The Marine Corps has begun implementing a career development program for all marines that begins when marines enter military service and continues throughout their career. During the initial part of the program, marines receive training and education on general cultural skills that that can be applied to any operational environment and an assignment to 1 of 17 regions around the world for future instruction. Each sequential part of the program is designed to deepen understanding of general culture skills and build specific regional knowledge, including some computer-based foreign language study. As of December 2010, the Marine Corps had provided more than 7,000 officers with a regional assignment. Predeployment training. The Army and Marine Corps offer predeployment training programs to provide additional language and culture instruction focused on the particular area to which a unit will deploy. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center and Army and Marine Corps culture centers provide deploying forces with language survival kits, briefings on culture issues, and mobile training teams that present more in-depth language and culture training. Funding for language and culture training programs is provided at the department and service level in base and Overseas Contingency Operations portions of the annual budget. In fiscal year 2010, DOD received about $550 million for major language and culture programs identified by the Defense Language Office. In addition, the Army and Marine Corps have received funding to implement their respective language and culture strategies. For example, in fiscal year 2010, the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command received about $13 million for activities related to implementing the Army Culture and Foreign Language Strategy and the Marine Corps’ Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning received about $10 million to develop language and culture- related programs for general purpose forces. Regarding funding for predeployment training, the Office of the Secretary of Defense directed the Army to include a total of about $160 million in its budget submissions for fiscal years 2011 through 2015 for language training sites on selected military installations to teach foreign languages to military and civilian personnel, including Army and Marine Corps operational units that are preparing for deployments to Afghanistan. This training includes self-directed learning, classroom instruction, and role playing (see figure 2). According to DOD, ultimately approximately 3,500 service members will learn basic Afghan language skills each year at its language training sites. For Afghanistan deployments, the focus of language training has varied because of the multiple languages in that country. Among the country’s many ethnic groups (which are known collectively as Afghans), Dari and Pashto are the dominant and official languages of Afghanistan. Pashto speakers are found in large numbers in Afghanistan and northern Pakistan, and the use of the language is generally limited to these regions. Dari, by contrast, can be understood by anyone proficient in Persian-Farsi. Although Pashto is the language of the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, Dari is the working language for the majority of Afghans. Our prior work shows that establishing priorities and results-oriented performance metrics can help federal agencies target training investments and assess the contributions that training programs make toward achieving strategic program goals and objectives. The Army and Marine Corps have developed service-specific strategies with elements such as broad goals and objectives for building language and culture capabilities, but the strategies did not fully address other key elements, such as the identification of training priorities and investments and results-oriented performance metrics. We found that the Army and Marine Corps had not conducted comprehensive analyses to prioritize language and culture training investments and assign responsibilities for program performance and departmentwide efforts to establish a planning process for language and culture capabilities were not yet complete. The Army and Marine Corps developed broad service-specific goals and objectives for language and culture training within their respective language and culture strategies and identified some key training programs and activities. In the strategy it issued in December 2009, the Army states that the service’s goal is to develop a baseline of foreign language and culture capabilities for all leaders and soldiers to support the accomplishment of unit missions. The Army strategy establishes language and culture subject areas and learning objectives for officers and enlisted soldiers for various stages of a military career for both career development and predeployment training.According to the Army strategy, the learning objectives are intended to provide a vision of the desired end state for soldiers at each career stage. For example, the strategy identifies three components of cross-cultural competence, which include culture fundamentals, culture self-awareness, and culture skills, and a number of learning objectives for each subject area that are tied to rank and level of responsibility. The Army’s strategy notes that its primary focus is establishing the framework and content of training, and that additional steps are needed to determine the methods that are the most appropriate for delivering the education and training necessary to support the Army’s requirements. In the strategy it issued in January 2011, the Marine Corps established a broad strategic goal to provide all marines in the general purpose forces with a baseline in cross-cultural competence while simultaneously enhancing regional proficiency and functional language/communication skills throughout the force. The strategy outlines a number of language and culture training areas that are designed to enhance marines’ ability to communicate and interact with local populations on a basic level and perform core missions in a culturally complex environment. For example, to support its cross-cultural competence goal, the strategy discusses the need for marines to be able to conduct a cultural analysis, incorporate operational culture into planning, influence a foreign population, apply operational culture, and interact with a foreign population. In addition, the strategy identifies specific programs and the training activities that are available to achieve the Marine Corps’ strategic goal. Additionally, according to the strategy, the service’s operational culture training manual identifies the specific learning outcomes and objectives across the entire training and education continuum in the areas of cross-cultural competence, regional proficiency, and communication skills. The Army’s and Marine Corps’ respective strategies did not address some key elements that could guide their training efforts and investments. Our prior work has found that effective planning includes a clear identification of training priorities and the investments required to implement and sustain training programs and activities.