I represented my BDE at an MI senior leader conference last year and argued the same thing. The Army Operating Concept (AOC) is 'Win in a Complex World.' GEN Perkins defines complex as the future is unknown and unknowable - we don't know for sure who/where we will fight and the more we prepare for one adversary the less likely they will actually want to fight us.
So, that means we'll never have the density of language-capable folks in the force to meet our next, much less next several conflicts. Further, a 2/2 proficiency is not even close to sufficient to conduct effective interrogations. You might be able to conducted limited MSO but even then, you really don't want to misunderstand or miss out on a significant portion of what's being said. Leadership doesn't like it because it creates more cost for contingency operations but interpreters are a requirement for MSO and interrogation at the tactical and operational level. That's a fact of life but an unpopular thing to say because it means there's an extra few million in contracting costs tacked on to every OPLAN. But, like many of the supposed cost-saving measures we adopt in strategic planning a modest 'savings' up-front just pushes the costs to be massive down the line. Wimpy would be proud.
I also think it aligns with one of the major tactical missteps (with strategic consequences) we ran into in Iraq. Fair warning, I come from the camp that believes that war - and wars like it are winnable with vastly different strategic, operational, and tactical decisions. There's definitely a strong argument out there to say the only way to win those types of wars is not to play. Anyways, one of the major missteps was our lack of language/cultural experts. The Free Iraqi Army was a bunch of worthless carpetbagging expatriates and we were woefully short of interpreters and linguists. What it created was a golden opportunity for entrepreneurs with any English speaking capabilities. Unit after unit would end up conducting raids through the information provided by their interpreters - when their interpreters had essentially turned themselves into racketeers. Interpreters would 'bring the Americans down' on their enemies, people who refused to pay them protection money, or others to their benefit. Nothing helped more to turn Iraqis against the US - and more importantly allow them to see US forces as weak in the area of intelligence - than those actions.
