Foreign language = secret weapon?

Dennis Baron's excellent Web of Language has a new post titled:

Pentagon declares foreign language a weapon. O.K., maggots, drop and give me 50 conjugations.

Stunning, in a sense. As argued in the post, this is mere "lip service" (but not "curled-lip service"), but even beyond that, this is a secret weapon virtually the whole world has scads of while we are lacking in resources start to finish.