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The ballroom of the Salt Lake City Hyatt Regency resembled a veritable hive of activity as hundreds of Military Intelligence professionals swarmed the Beehive State for the DOD’s Best Linguist Competition in the first week of February. Best Linguist, also known as BLING, has become a multinational event hosting more than 100 organizations from the national security enterprise. The competition attracts linguists of the highest caliber and has captured the attention of leaders throughout the DOD because of its innovative mission: preparing military linguists for future conflicts.
“This competition is the most relevant to our business,” said Lexi Casey, President of ICA Language Services, a Virginia-based language academy that partners primarily with the Defense Language Institutes in Virginia and Monterey, California.
“We go to a lot of language conferences, but our company focuses on military language training. This event provides many resources, and we find a lot of our top recruits here,” she said.
“It provides a great opportunity for us to not only offer our own services to assist with the DOD mission, but also we are able to hire language enabled personnel to administer our courses,” she added.
Since its inception seven years ago, BLING has become the premiere language training event of the DOD. Intentionally designed to be both extremely challenging and blatantly unfair, it has been compared to the Olympics for linguists —both on a linguistic and technical level—and leaders send the best linguists they have to represent their organization and test the worth of their training efforts.
Originally known as the Polyglot Games, BLING began in 2018 as an event for the 300th Military Intelligence Brigade (Linguists). It was originally hosted at the Utah National Guard headquarters in Draper, UT and was a brigade-level language competition. The Polyglot Games nearly disappeared after the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. People were unable to congregate en masse, which rendered the original premise of the games untenable. That year, the 300th hosted the Polyglot Games virtually, and by then it was only a fraction of what it had been originally.
Over the next couple of years, leaders of the 300th empowered their staff to revamp the games and increase marketing of the event. In February 2023, the brigade launched the overhauled competition to include personnel from across the intelligence spectrum and the games became a major success. Competitors took the news home, and organizations across the U.S. gained new interest in the since renamed Best Linguist Competition.
“There is nothing like this in the Department of Defense,” said Staff Sgt. Curtis Starr, a BLING Gamemaster from the 2024 competition.
“There are other language competitions, but they don’t have the same level of prestige that the BLING Competition has ascended to.” he said.
In 2025, 280 competitors from over 100 different organizations, including military, government civilian agencies, and local universities took part in the competition. The expansion over time from a guard-specific language exercise to a multi-faceted, multi-agency intelligence gathering competition has added tremendous value to not only the DOD, but the state of Utah.
“This conference is stellar. I’ve never done anything like this,” explained William Freedman, a university student majoring in National Security Studies at Utah Valley University.
“Being able to bring every intelligence collection agency together like this provides the full picture.” he added.
Freedman said working with multiple agencies was an eye-opening experience for him and his involvement in the competition has given him a clearer view of his career aspirations.
“I think intelligence is the most important component of public policy, military action, and everything in between. It keeps the government running and our troops safe.”
He continued “This competition has proved that to me. There’s nothing better than fighting for what you believe. (It) engages you physically, mentally, emotionally. I would recommend this competition to anyone following me, 100 percent.”
Freedman, who is fluent in French, competed on a multi-agency team filled with experts from multiple intelligence disciplines and organizations. Teams rotated through timed events, each activity coinciding with the five steps of the intelligence cycle, beginning with a road-to-war in-brief and ending with a commander’s brief. Competitors must gleam intelligence products from indicators placed throughout the competition and inform their command on what they find.
“We’re honing in on the skills that intelligence professionals need in a peer-to-peer combat environment,” said 1st Sgt. Michael Baker, a proctor of the site exploitation event in the 2025 BLING games. Baker said that the competition is intended to sharpen the skills of military intelligence service members.
“If anything were to happen, we need to make sure that our Soldiers are trained to the level where they can execute the mission at hand,” he said.
Baker mentioned that having multiple components, such as DOD civilians, active-duty military, reservists, and guard members in the competition enhances readiness of the total force.
“What it does is creates a synergistic environment where we are not only competing, but also honing our skills together,” he said.
Teams are evaluated in voice Interception, site exploitation, document exploitation, open-source collection, operational analysis, and commander’s brief. In addition, individuals compete against each other in their target language, challenging their proficiency as premiere linguist experts. Site exploitation was one of the most challenging events of the competition. Teams had 10 minutes to enter a dark room with night vision goggles, scour through vehicles and simulated casualties to find mounds of papers, electronics, and random items in various languages, and decide which materials had high intelligence value based on information gathered. In addition to total darkness, the room was also filled with the sounds of explosions and gunfire.
Within the events, intelligence Soldiers were tested on skills they don’t get to exercise everyday, said Spc. Leslie Knaus, an active duty human intelligence collector assigned to the 524th Military Intelligence Battalion, stationed in South Korea. “I’m a French linguist, but in South Korea, I don’t get to use my language,” she explained. “It was fun to be able to work with my language and encounter new stuff, new vocabulary — and it was interesting because they introduced memes this year. So after all the headache, we had a good laugh at the end.”
Knaus said her unit traveled from Seoul to Salt Lake City to pair with Soldiers from the Utah National Guard’s 142nd Military Intelligence Battalion. The two Army units combined Soldiers to create an 8-person team, with 4 Soldiers from each unit, to build interoperability between service components. In this case, the combined components were Active Duty Army and Army National Guard.
“Gaps happen when people do not understand each other’s jobs,” said Chief Warrant Officer 3 Zachary Sibio, command language program manager for the competition.
“When we bring different branches of service, government agencies, and the academic community together in this environment, everyone sees one another’s value, which is an amazing thing to watch.”
While BLING challenges individual skill sets, the heart of the event is building teammates’ diversity in strengths and abilities rather than the individual ability to translate a language. It also serves as an opportunity to practice in a controlled environment, with a diverse group with lots of differing viewpoints and skill sets.
“I think the real benefit is having people train here in a safe environment,” said Tech Sgt. Stephanie Battle, a language instructor assigned to the 314th Training Squadron in Monterey, California. “Bringing in our young linguists and our seasoned veterans here gives them a taste of what’s to come, and also they can share what they have experienced in their careers so far.”
Networking and building cohesiveness are the major objectives of the BLING competition, however people traveled to Utah to compete. This year, participants were graded in multiple categories such as best linguist, best enlisted service member, best officer, best civilian, and total team performance.
A team from Naval Information Forces won first place in the competition, with Language Enabled Airmen and Air Force Culture and Language Center placing second, and a mixed-service group of military service members titled the “Misfits” took third.
| Date Taken: | 02.06.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 02.18.2025 18:56 |
| Story ID: | 490981 |
| Location: | SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH, US |
| Web Views: | 73 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, BLING BLING: Top Linguists shine in Salt Lake City at the DOD’s Premier Language Competition, by SFC Tim Beery, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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