The Tactical Language and Culture Training System (TLCTS) teaches foreign language and culture using a task-based approach. Four trainers have been developed so far, for Iraqi Arabic, Pashto, French and Levantine Arabic. The Tactical Iraqi system has been used to train thousands of users in the U.S. military. In this paper, we describe recent work we undertook to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the process of authoring new content for our system. The first improvement is the introduction of utterance templates, which combine two previously separate components of the system (ASR grammar specification, and user input mapping), and improve system flexibility. Secondly, we consolidated the knowledge into centrally managed object libraries in order to enable scaling up to more complex and extensive lesson content. Finally, we created dedicated object editors to facilitate lesson authoring and simplify the production of authored content into a running system.