National Review - Boots to Suits: Reforming the State Department

The National Review's The Corner hosted a recent article by Jim Hanson (of Blackfive fame) and Brad Patty ruffled a few feathers among my colleagues.

Money quote(s):

"The State Department needs people who know how to do direct diplomacy under fire, and who are comfortable in muddy boots."

How much national-level diplomacy can actually be accomplished "under fire," as it were?  Read on.

"Tillerson is right to take a hard look at the culture of the institution. For more than a decade, State has failed to address cultural challenges its leadership has acknowledged. 

The two of us have seen this cultural failure in the field. Jim was a Special Forces weapons sergeant in First Group. Brad spent long parts of three consecutive years in Iraq, including working closely with “State Department” Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs). We put that in scare quotes because almost all State employees stayed in the embassy. Aside from a handful of Provincial Reconstruction Team leaders, State sent contractors out to the field in boots. The PRTs and the USAID presence were both made up almost exclusively of contractors because State simply could not get its people to volunteer for such hazardous and unpleasant duty."

We heard about something called "expeditionary diplomacy" for awhile.  Was that before (or after) "transformational diplomacy"?

(Buzzwords make CAA's head hurt.)

Why might, do you suppose, a federal agency engage contractors to fill positions on Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRT)?  Might it be because the particular hard skill needed on that team was one not maintained in any abundance on-the-shelf at that agency?  DOS team leaders, unless I'm wrong, on PRTs were full-time "Direct Hires" in most cases, whereas specialists of various sorts on those teams might represent skill-sets outside the scope of traditional diplomacy but which State nonetheless was responsible for staffing.

And as for the "almost all State employees stayed in the embassy" crack, that might just have something to do with travel and security restrictions imposed on them by risk averse chiefs-of-mission and by Diplomatic Security representatives, no matter what personal preferences might have been.

"The State Department traditionally hires academically inclined people who come from a fairly narrow collection of universities and think tanks. This makes sense as many of the skills and knowledge necessary to be a successful Foreign Service officer are nurtured in these circles. The department, however, could also use the kind of people who know how to do direct diplomacy under fire, and who are comfortable in muddy boots. A perfect collection of those have served in U.S. Army Special Forces."

Like much of the federal government, there's a hiring preference for veterans with the result that a higher percentage of the Foreign Service (just like the Civil Service) are veterans than are present in the general population.  These days that means in most cases that they are veterans of combat deployments to one or multiple theaters of operations.

Unfortunately, with current FSO hiring almost entirely coming from Pickering and Rangel fellows due to the self-imposed hiring freeze, I expect those percentages to slip steadily.  I have yet to meet a Pickering or Rangel fellow who was a combat veteran.  I would be very happy to learn that I am wrong in my sense that nearly all of these highly-credentialed folks have taken an academic career track that completely avoided military service.

Might State be well-served to recruit (once it resumes a recruiting effort that involves actual hiring) highly-qualified ex-SF personnel?  Certainly.  There was a pilot "mustang" program not that long ago open to non-State federal personnel not so many years ago that could be revived to good effect.