As anyone who's ever deployed with a unit that required an interpreter knows, language barriers make a tough mission tougher. And considering how the U.S. military has treated the locals hired to do interpretation for U.S. ground forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, it's a wonder we're able to recruit 'terps' at all.

"He says: 'So... this is the guy we kill when you leave yeah'?" (U.S. Marine Corps photo)

Also Read: Afghan Interpreters Risked Their Lives For Us — Now We're Abandoning Them

So it makes sense the Pentagon would have a need for something that provides real-time translation to the boots on the ground. It should come to no surprise to anyone who regularly shops around on FedBizOpps.gov (the U.S. government's business opportunities site with a name as legit as any Cash4Gold site), to see the Air Force Research Laboratory posting a need for what it calls "human language technologies."

Meanwhile, the Navy continues to pursue its strange obsession with dolphin language . (U.S. Navy photo by Photographer's Mate 1st Class Brien Aho RELEASED)

The Air Force wants to conduct research and development in "automatic speech recognition, machine translation, natural language processing, information extraction, information retrieval, text-to-speech synthesis, and other speech and language processing technologies." Maybe the military should just ask Skype how they made theirs.

The Air Force's mind-blowing rationale is that "much of the information needed to effectively understand, anticipate, manage, and operate in the global environment is found in foreign language speech, text, videos, and images" and the military is especially interested in "lesser spoken languages that have high military interest but lack sufficient linguists and automated language processing capabilities."

Basically, everything we want to know for via signals intelligence and human intelligence is another language and we don't have enough people who will help us translate it and the Air Force will spend $10 million over a five-year span to develop the technology to do it without human help.