Cultural Awareness: An Essential Element in the Security Assistance Business

In carrying out our security assistance programs, we must necessarily deal with representatives of the purchasing countries who usually do not share our language, our history, our customs or values. In short, the specific attributes that define a peoples culture may present impediments to the implementation of our programs over and above the normal bureaucratic tangles which we encounter. The ability to surmount the obstacles imposed by cultural differences is a must if the U.S. representative is to succeed, whether it be overseas in a Security Assistance Organization SAO where the individual must cope with living and working in a foreign environment, or in a training installation in the United States where the Foreign Training Officer FTO must often deal with a wide variety of cultures in a single day. The importance of cross-cultural awareness in an increasingly interdependent world was stressed in the 1979 Report of the Presidents Commission on Foreign Language and International Studies,