The origins of the Arabic language training program of Foreign Service Institute (FSI) were in the wartime Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP), which was created in 1943 to provide a high-speed pipeline to get university-educated technical specialists into the American military. The ASTP trained young men in two dozen languages, including Arabic, and a variety of engineering and scientific fields.

In Scholars in Foxholes: The Story of the Army Specialized Training Program in World War II, historian Louis Keefer describes the testing and selection of the brightest candidates who might successfully withstand the pressure to complete 4 years of education in 18 months. From the outside the program appeared to be an easy way to avoid the fight, but Secretary of War Henry Stimson had established it to provide the expertise the army needed not only during the war but afterward in shaping the postwar world. Nevertheless the students marched to a series of humorous drill songs, including “Take down your service flag mother, Your son's in the ASTP, He'll never get hit by a bullet, While taking the square root of three”. At its peak 200,000 soldier-students were in uniform, drilling and at their studies all day on 227 campuses. But the army repeatedly ordered the universities to release groups of ASTP students prior to graduation to meet their manpower needs.

The ASTP became a laboratory for developing new methods of rapidly training Americans in the hard languages, especially in Arabic. When the ASTP was shuttered at the war's end, most of its Arabic staff were hired by the State Department to establish the new Middle East Area Program (MEAP). In addition, an estimated 80 percent of the ASTP students who survived the war used the GI Bill to return to universities. Both ASTP graduates and other veterans with language skills were targeted for recruitment into the State Department's MEAP.

The experience of one ASTP Arabic language student illustrates the challenges many of them faced and the impact of the military's manpower demands. Curtis Jones left Bowdoin College to volunteer to fight in World War II, and by early 1943 he was an army private enduring “the obstacle course, close-order drill, Neanderthal platoon sergeants, mind-deadening KP, and 5 a.m. sprints through the snows of Fort Devens”.