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Skills for a global mission

Master Sgt. Bryan Haan spent almost seven months last year as one of only 12 Americans embedded with a battalion of 750 Iraqi soldiers.

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Haan, an independent duty medical technician with the 10th Aerospace Medical Squadron at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., provided medical care to Americans and Iraqis and trained the Iraqis in how to set up and run an air base.

The experience, he said, was bewildering in ways he never imagined.

Besides the language barrier, there were significant cultural differences Haan had to accommodate.

“If [you] want to conduct business with anyone, you can’t just cut a contract,” Haan said by way of example. “They pretty much expect you to sit down, eat with them, drink tea with them, basically develop a friendship before they want to do business with you. They don’t just want to do business over the phone or via computer.”

Haan enjoyed getting to know many of the Iraqis, he said, but, because of the need to develop social relationships, tasks that ordinarily would take a week to complete could take a month or longer.

“Having things not getting done as fast as you want and running into obstacles can definitely try your patience over there,” he said.

Haan received about a week of pre-deployment training focused on cultural and religious differences and another week or so when he arrived in Iraq, but he was still unprepared for the situation he faced, he said.

“When you get out there, it is totally different from what you might expect,” he said. “They try to prepare you, but I don’t think any amount of training could prepare you for actually living and working in that close a proximity with the Iraqis.”

Haan’s experience is increasingly common in an Air Force that is deployed across the globe fighting terrorism.

Whereas 10 years ago airmen might have limited contact with foreign nationals other than those from America’s closest allies, airmen today might find themselves working with a Thai ground crew, negotiating with an Afghan tribal leader or working with African villagers to distribute food.

Being able to work effectively with different types of people has become a job requirement essential to the success of the Air Force mission, said anthropologist Dan Henk, an associate professor at the Air War College and deputy director of the new Air University Culture and Language Center at Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala.

“What’s unique about the global war on terror and the expeditionary Air Force,” Henk said, “is now airmen are ... required to deal in foreign cultural environments to a much greater extent than was ever the case in the past. The issue here is how do you in fact communicate across these cultural barriers and build relations ... if you don’t understand the models of reality that your counterparts are living in?”

The American military’s shortcomings in cultural expertise became apparent shortly after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Henk said, and leaders of all the branches began looking at ways to solve the problem.

Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley has frequently commented on the need for airmen to be better equipped with language and cultural skills, and he ordered Air University to explore how to incorporate those skills into professional military education.

The Culture and Language Center at Air University stood up last April to undertake that task.

The center’s director, Col. Mark List, said it is in the early stages of its mission and the solutions that will emerge are still in development.

“This is a new endeavor,” he said. “We don’t think that we have the 100 percent solution yet, but we’re evaluating [it].”

List said one of his and Henk’s primary concerns is to create a PME-based language and culture program that is scaleable and sustainable into the future.

“This is not a fad,” he said. “This is something that the Air Force is engaged in. It is going to help the future of airmen of all ranks.”

Currently, the cultural and language components of PME are scattershot and inconsistent. For example, Airman Leadership School includes only a brief global diversity component, and the Air and Space Basic course for new officers contains some lessons in how to work with people from other cultures.

To improve the program, Henk said, the center is focused on fleshing out the concept of cross-cultural competence and how it can be incorporated into PME.

Henk explains the term, which has even made its way into some of Moseley’s speeches, in this way:

“What cross-cultural competence does is basically enable you to get inside that model of reality of your counterpart. ... What we’re talking about here is just ... the ability to relate to other people, whether it’s the refugees in a complex humanitarian emergency, whether it’s our coalition partner across the table in an [operations center], or whether it’s the master sergeant that’s negotiating for water in the community outside our air base in Far-away-astan.”

The concept is drawn from the academic world of anthropology and social psychology, Henk said, and the Culture and Language Center has commissioned a yearlong cross-cultural competency project in which social scientists are studying best practices in the field.

“We’re going to find the absolute state of the art in understanding what cross-cultural competence is,” Henk said, “and then we’re going to do the additional research to see how that applies to our specific needs.”

The short-term result of this study, he said, will be a toolbox of skills that culturally competent airmen must possess.

The center is investigating what it considers to be three dimensions of cross-cultural competence that should be incorporated into this skill set: language skills, regional familiarity and a more amorphous concept called deep cultural expertise.

The level of expertise necessary in each category will vary according to an airman’s rank and responsibilities, Henk said.

Talk the talk

Language has become a greater point of emphasis in the past several years as the military has had to manage with a shortage of people who speak languages such as Arabic and Pashto, the language spoken in much of Afghanistan.

Moseley has placed a particular priority on developing linguists skilled in four strategic languages: Spanish, French, Arabic and Chinese.

“We recognize that language is an important issue,” Henk said, “and we’re emphasizing foreign languages much more than was ever the case in the past. … Now we’re willing to pay you big bucks to study culture and language.”

The military has increased bonuses for those who speak a foreign language and is trying to recruit more graduates from university language programs.

The Culture and Language Center is also examining how the Air Force’s various PME schools teach languages in order to identify the most effective methods.

The level of language instruction varies greatly depending on the school an airman attends. For example, students at the Air War College can take language courses taught by skilled instructors from the Defense Language Institute in Monterrey, Calif., but students at the Air Command and Staff College can take online courses only through the Rosetta Stone program.

The center is going to do a survey in May to assess the effectiveness of these methods, List said.

But because of the time commitment necessary to develop advanced language skills, he said, PME schools aren’t expected to provide more than a basic level of language instruction.

For advanced language skills, he said, the military will continue to recruit skilled linguists and send some officers to courses at the Defense Language Institute.

Think locally

The second dimension of cross-cultural competence being studied by the center is regional familiarity.

Henk said regional familiarity includes learning about the culture and religions particular to a place.

“If I were to take the airman or Marine and put them in Fallujah, Iraq, right now, the ability to do the job properly would depend on their knowledge of the cultural reality right there. What are the identity groups right there? Is it tribes, is it clans? What are the social networks? Who do I talk to to get something done? What are the basic values here in Fallujah?” he said.

That knowledge is currently provided in a number of ways. For example, the Air War College has a program in which officers study a region and then visit it for two weeks, which List said is the ideal approach. Students at the Senior Noncommissioned Officer Academy are required to choose a region of the world to research and brief for their classmates.

For the average airman, Henk said, this training is typically provided in individual units that are preparing to deploy and is not as centralized as it is in the Army or Marines.

He acknowledged that the Air Force needs to improve its pre-deployment, region-specific training.

Walk the walk

But Henk said the third component of cross-cultural competence, deep cultural expertise, is perhaps the most important and challenging aspect.

“The Air Force is … trying not just to do the pre-deployment piece,” he said, “but to think about how you really equip people over the course of their careers with those skill sets that will give them a lot of flexibility ... across all the various contingency environments they might eventually have to deal with.”

This knowledge is independent of familiarity with the culture or language of a particular place and delves into different components that define a culture.

One of those components, Henk said, is what anthropologists call power distance, or the relationship between leaders and their subordinates.

In American culture, he said, subordinates respond best when leaders allow them to provide input and show respect for them as individuals, but in other cultures, that is not the norm.

By examining power distance and other components of culture, Henk said, an airman will be better able to relate to a counterpart in a way that he will understand.

“Knowing that gives me the basis for communicating much more effectively with him, for building relationships with him, and, let’s face it, for influencing him,” he said. “When I understand that, I can go anywhere in the world and … have a much better idea of how to approach that.”

This kind of conceptual approach is just beginning to make its way into the Air Force’s cultural training, and the Culture and Language Center is looking at ways to incorporate it more broadly beginning in the fall.

Lectures, guest speakers and extra electives likely will be added to some schools, Henk said, though training time is already severely limited.

To reach a broader audience, he said, the center is looking at a variety of distance-learning tools such as online courses and role-playing games.

The center recently partnered with an Indian gaming company to build a war game that tests an airman’s understanding of cultural concepts.

The airman plays the role of an Air Force colonel who must run a humanitarian crisis response group in Africa. The officer must work with the United Nations, host nation officials, nongovernmental organizations and local communities during the operation, and the player’s score reflects how well he understands and applies cultural concepts.

Eventually, Henk said, the language and culture curriculum will span an airman’s entire career, from basic training to senior officer training.

“This is going to be sort of a lifelong PME thing,” he said, “where you get a certain amount of the regional [knowledge] and you get a lot of the conceptuals so you can step into any environment and have the [skills] to cope.”

Such skills will continue to become more important in the Air Force, Henk said.

He pointed to the military’s new Africa Command as a realm in which cultural skills will be essential.

“This has the potential to be the first command that you might not even really call a combatant command,” he said. “This is a command that is there to pursue our security interests in Africa, but think of what those interests are: peace, stability, prosperity. Where we and the Africans partner together against things that are bad for all of us. ...

“Talk about a place where you need culturally astute people. ... We have the chance to do some really remarkable things, and most of them don’t have anything to do with the application of violence.” Ë