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2006-7 National Service Topic Guide

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Introduction

The United States spends a considerable amount of time and energy collecting intelligence that it believes will help it thwart September 11^th-style terror attacks in the United States. The US is limited, however, in its ability to use that intelligence because it often has difficulty deciphering that intelligence because it is in another language – often, Middle Eastern languages. The United States is unable to use the intelligence because it lacks adequate linguists – interpreters – to translate it and determine its meaning.

Tony Blankley, Washington Times Correspondent, THE WESTS’S LAST CHANCE, 2005p. 177

According to the 9/11 Commission Report: “Despite the recent hire of 653 new linguists, demand exceeds supply. Shortage of translators in languages such as Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, and Pashto remains a barrier to the FBI’s understanding of the terrorist threat. “ The Pentagon admits it is short about two thousand translators. Aside from the classified material left untranslated, there is a much larger domain of what intelligence officials call open sources – newspapers, Internet sites, magazine articles, television and radio broadcasts – that are not even submitted to our translators. And yet the Arabic-language Internet sites are the primary medium for spreading Islamist doctrine and even communicate actual operational information for terrorists.

The Affirmative

This affirmative argues that the United States need to acquire more language interpreters. Specifically, it isolates the military – since that is topical – and argues that the military in general, and the Army in particular, needs more foreign language specialists.

Harms

The primary harm area for the affirmative is terrorism. The Most 1ACs, such as the one prepared for this book, argue that the U.S. cannot effectively decipher terrorist communications and that those communications contain information that could be used to break-up terrorist plots. Some of the evidence speaks the growing use of the internet as a means of terrorist communication and the inability of the United States to determine the meaning of the communication.

The impacts focus on the impact of a nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons terrorist attack in the United States. Some evidence indicates that the risk of such an attack exceeds 70%!

Tony Blankley, Washington Times Correspondent, THE WESTS’S LAST CHANCE, 2005, p. 66

However, in a report issued in June 2005 by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which surveyed the best judgment of eighty experts worldwide on weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the grim conclusion was that there is a 70 percent chance of a successful WMD

There is evidence that such attacks will escalate to major wars, destroy the global economy, and collapse the global trading system.

Plans

The basic affirmative plan is to have the military train and hire more translators. The General Accounting Office (GAO) argues that the military should adopt a specific human capital management system to accomplish the task.

Department of Defense, QUADRENNIAL DEFENSE REVIEW , February 6, 2006, http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/pdfs/QDR20060203.pdf

Developing broader linguistic capability and cultural understanding is also critical to prevail in the long war and to meet 21st century challenges. The Department must dramatically increase the number of personnel proficient in key languages such as Arabic, Farsi and Chinese and make these languages available at all levels of action and decision – from the strategic to the tactical.

The General Accounting Office (GAO) supports an even more specific approach.

General Accounting Office, FOREIGN LANGUAGES: HUMAN CAPITAL APPROACH NEEDED TO CORRECT STAFFING AND PROFICIENCY SHORTAGES, 2002, http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d02375.pdf

Personnel with foreign language skills are needed in a range of federal agency programs and missions. In light of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the importance of foreign language skills will increase as the United States expands its efforts to counter terrorist activities. The federal agencies we reviewed face shortages of translators and interpreters, as well as staff with other foreign language skills. These shortages strain agency operations that depend in part on language-skilled employees to meet increasingly complex missions. Agencies have pursued strategies such as training, targeted recruitment efforts, and contracting to fill documented skill gaps. However, these strategies have not been completely effective in closing those gaps. As a result, some agencies have begun to take a more strategic and results-oriented approach to managing their workforce needs. The OPM’s five-step model for conducting human capital management and workforce planning provides one method for managing agency workforce needs. The FBI has developed and is implementing an action plan in keeping with the OPM’s 1999 workforce planning model to help fill their shortages. While the Army has developed detailed assessments of its needs for staff with foreign language skills, these planning efforts fall short of the strategic planning approach called for by the OPM’s model. The State Department and FCS have just begun their workforce planning efforts and have yet to develop strategic plans of action. Without a specific strategic direction and a related action plan that effectively implements the strategies these agencies intend to use to correct shortages in foreign language skills, it will be difficult for the agencies to fill current and projected shortages. To improve the overall management of foreign language resources and to better address current and projected shortages in foreign language skills,we recommend that the secretary of the army, the secretary of state, and the director general of the FCS adopt a strategic, results-oriented approach to human capital management and workforce planning. This approach should include setting a strategic direction, assessing agency gaps in foreign language skills, developing a corrective plan of action, and monitoring the implementation and success of this action plan.

The Negative

Harms Attacks

The negative can minimize the harms by undermining the risks of terrorism. All of the following arguments are relatively useful harm reducers, though they are not likely to make substantial inroads into the advantage.

Status quo solves. You can find decent evidence that says status quo measures are effectively reducing terrorism. This is the same evidence that you may have used for uniqueness on the civil liberties topic.

Terrorists won’t use nukes. Although this evidence is less plausible post 9-11, there is still some evidence that indicates that terrorists will not use weapons of mass destruction because killing too many people will alienate individuals from their cause.

Terrorists can’t get nuclear material. Although there is evidence that there is insecure nuclear material throughout the world, this material is more difficult to get than most pundits indicate.

Terrorists can’t build bombs. Just because terrorists can get nuclear material it does not mean that they can produce nuclear weapons. Many countries such as Iran and North Korean tried for years to get nuclear weapons without success, and terrorists have infrastructures that pale in comparison to these countries.

Solvency Attacks

Although the solvency attacks are not that strong, there are a number of good solvency arguments against this affirmative. The best argument is that the military doesn’t engage in that must intelligence assessment for the purpose of terrorist prevention. Most of that type of intelligence assessment is done by the CIA and FBI, but since it is not topical (those agencies are not “Armed Forces”) to increase the number of linguists in those two agencies, the affirmative isn’t going to solve much. Second, although I have not yet seen a piece of evidence for this argument, it is probably a reasonable argument that given the shortage of linguists, increased Department of Defense acquisition of such individuals could trade-off with linguists in the CIA and FBI who are actually engaged in terrorist prevention. Third, there is good evidence that there is simply a shortage of linguists to hire – that the Army even has unfilled slots!

Disadvantages

There are some potential disadvantages to this case.

Spending. Hiring more linguists would obviously cost money. The cause links to a generic spending disadvantage as well as a potential DOD Spending trade-off argument.

Civil-Military relations. I have found one card that says that the military does not want to hire more linguists.

Counterplans

If you could find evidence as to why it is uniquely bad for the DOD to hire more linguists, you could counterplan to have the CIA and/or FBI do it. That would solve the case. You could argue that since there are a limited number of linguists that it makes more sense for the CIA and FBI to hire them since that will solve the terrorism advantage better.

Kritiks

Most of the kritiks that link to this case are very predictable.

Terror Talk. Hyping the threat of terrorism makes terrorism more likely because individuals labeled as terrorists are likely to act like terrorists.

Threat Construction. Same rationale as terror talk – hyped threats become real.

Conclusion

This case has two strategic advantages: 1) It is difficult to link disadvantages to the case that will outweigh the harms, 2) It is very straight-forward – it will be easy for novices and judges without a lot of topic knowledge to understand. It has two strategic weaknesses: 1) The DOD doesn’t do most of the terror prevention analysis, 2) It links strong to a lot of conventional kritiks.

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