The article discusses the history and present state of instruction in the Arabic language in the Armed Forces of the United States and theUnited Kingdom within the context of their engagement in the Middle East. The analysis of the evolution of institutions tasked with Arabic language instruction since the end of the World War II mainly addresses the issues of fast language-capacity building and the cooperation between the Armed Forces and the academic sector.
The main issue in state-organized instruction in non-standard languages is a discrepancy between the required long-term nature of building of linguistic capacities and an immediate need of states addressing new regional challenges requiring a specific knowledge of new languages.