As the 40th Infantry Division's primary wartime trace was to the Eighth United States Army and the defense of South Korea, the 140th Military Intelligence Battalion was configured to specialize in the Korean and Mandarin Chinese languages.
Modest gains were made with the Army Reserve's institution of the Military Intelligence Special Training Element (MISTE, pronounced "misty") program, in which military intelligence units, including the 140th, were assigned language-qualified, MOS-qualified reserve soldiers (primarily those with prior active duty service) residing hundreds or thousands of miles away.