Next time you hear about greedy corporations and overpaid CEO's and obscene profits, remember what IBM CEO Sam Palmisano just did for the Iraq war effort.
To honor an employee's son who was badly wounded in Iraq, IBM Corp. plans to give the U.S. military $45 million worth of Arabic-English translation technology that the Pentagon had been testing for possible purchase.The offer - made from the highest reaches of the company directly to President Bush - is so unusual that Defense Department and IBM lawyers have been scouring federal laws to make sure the government can accept the donation.
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IBM would not make Palmisano available for comment. But according to other IBM executives, Palmisano had heard from several IBM employees who have returned from active duty in Iraq that a shortage of Arabic translators has severely hampered U.S. forces' efforts to communicate.
With that and Ecker's experience in mind, Palmisano called and wrote Bush, offering to make IBM's Multilingual Automatic Speech Translator software, known as MASTOR, "immediately available for use by our forces in Iraq." Palmisano offered 10,000 copies of the MASTOR software and 1,000 devices equipped with it, plus training and technical support.
The article points out that IBM does some $3 billion in revenue annually with the federal government, and it looks like this was a product the Pentagon may have purchased anyway had Palmisano not decided to throw them a $45 million freebie. It's an admirable gesture any way you look at it. The need to speed up he translation of the millions of documents captured in Iraq alone is acute.
I happen to have some first-hand knowledge of just how acute the problem is. I work in the professional and technical recruiting industry, and our firm has among its clients several private contractors and sub-contractors who are involved in the Pentagon's DOCEX (Document Exploitation) work in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our work for them is to identify, screen and recruit people with Arabic language skills (as well as Farsi, Pashto and others) to work on translation assignments in the Middle East and some here in the States.
Suffice to say that the demand for people with these language abilities (also required are Top Secret and other clearances) is unending. If we were able to recruit and place 100 Arabic linguists this week, we would have open requisitions for 100 more next week, and we are but one of numerous recruiting firms supplying these people to the translation effort. It has been several months since I heard any figures on the percentages of captured documents that have been exploited so far, but late in 2006 the figure I heard was about 3%...and that was three and a half years after the fall of Baghdad.
As you might imagine, it isn't always easy to get skilled linguists to accept these assignments..("did I mention the job is in Iraq?"), but the money is quite good, often a lot more than comparable work in the U.S. Many of the successful placements are of recently discharged soldiers who have been doing similar work in Iraq for the U.S. military, and when they get out, they return to the war zone as civilian contractors, translating the same documents, but now making four or five times the money they were earning in the military.
Typically these kids are at one extreme or the other about returning to Iraq...there's not a lot of middle ground. Either they have no qualms at all about returning to Iraq to work...they've been there, so there's no fear of the unknown...or they say they'd rather dig ditches for a living than ever go back to the Middle East. So it doesn't take too long to rule a qualified candidate in or out.
Certainly the demand for "clearable" Arabic and other linguists isn't going away anytime soon, and one hopes the gift of the IBM translation software can make the DOCEX job go more quickly. It's sobering to think that we still have only scratched the surface of the written documentation left behind by the Saddam regime, now four years out. (Full disclosure - I have a family member employed by IBM)
Posted by dan at April 4, 2007 9:56 AM