yes, it will. Our troops are knocking on doors as much as they are kicking them in. They are interviewing citizens as much as they are interrogating suspects. They need to understand the nuances of social interaction in many of the countries they visit, and by doing so they will better be able to gather intelligence and find the people who need to be killed or apprehended.
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
- Sun Tzu
You're right. Here's the problem: who is our enemy, what language does he speak, and what is his culture?
My problem isn't with learning about other cultures or languages. That's great. My problem is that the return on investment is a great deal lower than, say, missile defense.
Will we teach every soldier Farsi, Pashto, Hindi, Cantonese, Mandarin, Arabic, Wu, Indonesian, Korean, Russian, Urdu, Punjabi, Kashmiri, Sindhi, Uzbek, Turkish, inter alia (and this is not even comprehensive if we only fight in ASIA)?
Or will we teach them all one language, like Arabic, and then have them be useless when we are fighting in Afganistan? Or will we have specialists who speak all these different languages who will have to translate for our troops... oh, kinda like we have now?