Slate - How worried should we be about the military’s takeover of American foreign policy?

Isaac Chotiner at Slate ("a daily magazine on the web") interviewed a military scholar.

Money quote(s):

"The sort of substantive throughline is that we barely have a foreign policy. This gets closer to my book’s themes. We essentially have a military policy. The military policy is being carried out with reasonable consistency and coherence in a sort of technocratic sense.

But we don’t have much other than military policy because the State Department under Trump and Secretary Tillerson is all but paralyzed by a combination of hiring freezes, threatened budget cuts, lack of personnel in key positions, and the fact that the White House fairly consistently shuts them out of anything important. Much of the sort of traditional U.S. diplomacy is either on hold or has sort of pulled back."

This is certainly what one would understand from major media reporting; from the inside it's not quite so drastic although there is at least partial truths for each of these listed factors.

"I think there’s a really strong sense in the Defense Department that, in an ideal world, the State Department is a vital counterpart to the military. I think there’s an equally strong sense in the military at the moment that there is nobody home in the State Department, and that’s been to some extent true for the last decade or more but now dramatically exacerbated in the Trump–Tillerson era.

I think you will continue to hear people like Jim Mattis and the service chiefs say very strongly that diplomacy is important. Development is important. Our job, you know, we can’t do our job without those things. I think you’ll continue to hear that, but there’s only a limited degree to which the actors at the Pentagon have any ability to create that out of thin air or to get Donald Trump to create it."

The "nobody home in the State Department" seems more true nowadays due to the number of "acting" officials throughout the Department, but the interviewee conflates this lower-level rudderlessness with the previous Administrations focus on international irrelevancies.

"The oft-cited line that there are more members in the military marching bands than there are foreign service officers is in fact true, even though I always thought it had to be apocryphal. This was a huge issue in Afghanistan during the Obama years, that the constant promises of a civilian surge just never materialized because the personnel just weren’t there."

There simply is not and has never been deployment-ready diplomatic brigade sitting on a stateside base awaiting orders to go nation-build somewhere.  Sec. Powell tried to bake some surge-capacity into the cake with the Diplomatic Readiness Initiative (DRI) but increases in worldwide workload have eaten away at that for years.  And with the continuing hiring-freeze, hollowing-out, and possible 30 percent downsizing, it only gets worse going forward.

"It’s also important to remember that Mattis and Kelly have retired. They are civilians now. They are not active. McMaster is the exception. He is obviously still active-duty military, but I don’t quite get the fixation on oh my God the military has taken over."

Politico - Interest in U.S. diplomatic corps tumbles in early months of Trump

Daniel Lipplman and Nahal Toosi at Politico ("We reach the most influential people in the country") discussed plunging recruitment numbers.

"This June, the number of Americans who took the Foreign Service exam to start the process of joining the prestigious State Department ranks fell 26 percent from the same month a year earlier to 2,730, according to data obtained by POLITICO. The June tally marked the lowest number of test-takers in nearly a decade."

That's a big dip.  Unfortunately the article doesn't specify when the previous low-point, sometime about 10 years ago, was. Arithmetic suggests that it was during Pres. Obama's first term, which is interesting given this next set of figures.

"Since 9/11, annual hiring for FSOs has ranged from about 300 to just above 700.

The exam is usually given three times a year. The number of applicants spiked to almost 9,000 in June 2009 and was mostly around 4,000 to 7,000 for tests during the Obama years."

Reading between the lines, there was a big influx of exam-takers just after Pres. Obama took office and then, sometime not too long after, the lowest number of applicants until this latest figure.  At a guess, there was a lot of enthusiasm and interest so more people took the exam early in Obama's first term, which left a smaller pool of potential applicants just afterwards, since test-takers have to wait 12 months to re-take the examination.

About a quarter to a fifth of test-takers are selected to move forward in the selection process from this first hurdle.

" “The Foreign Service is like the military — if you don’t bring in lieutenants now, you don’t have the majors you need in 10 years and don’t have the colonels you need in 20,” said Ronald E. Neumann, president of the American Academy of Diplomacy"

Preach it.  The Foreign Service suffered for years from the lack of hiring under the Clinton administration (when there were years the FS exam wasn't even offered).  Several hiring initiatives, beginning under Sec. Powell's "Diplomatic Readiness Initiative," have turned that around over the past decade or so.

"(T)he secretary of state, has already suspended the use of prestigious fellowship programs and otherwise severely restricted hiring as he ponders ways to reorganize the department, a process that could take many more months to complete."

This is troublesome.  It's particularly galling to see a Republican administration repeat a Democratic administration's mistakes in hiring new officers at below the rate of attrition.

"14,000 Foreign Service employees carry out U.S. diplomacy around the world, interacting with people from other countries while helping Americans overseas."

We interact with foreigners so you don't have to.  And helping Americans overseas is one of the most worthwhile and satisfying functions of a U.S. consular officer.

"Devika Ranjan, president of the student Academic Council of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service this past year, said many of her recent fellow graduates, who earlier would have followed a storied tradition of the school’s grads going into State, are choosing to focus their attention instead on think tanks, nonprofits and further education. “They’re concerned about representing the United States abroad when they don’t necessarily agree with the decisions of the administration,” she said.

There are still more than enough applications to fill the limited number of open slots in the Foreign Service, an intensely competitive program in which only 1.8% of Foreign Service applicants get hired. The State Department expects to hire 222 new Foreign Service officers by the end of fiscal year 2017, according to a State Department official. "

Two-hundred plus officers is barely two (perhaps three) orientation or "A-100" intake classes.  That's better than nothing but what perhaps explains the drop in test-takers is that that number means nearly all of the new-hires will be from one of the special hiring tracks like Rangel or Pickering fellows.

This means only a handful will be from the normal accession channels, i.e., taking the Foreign Service exam.  In other words, test-takers opting out of the process at this time are being perfectly rational, since only a literal handful or dozen of them will get a job offer, rather than several hundred.

Harrumph.  This too shall pass but at what cost?

re: "Foreign Service Staffing Gaps, and Oh, Diplomacy 3.0 Hiring Initiative to Conclude in FY2023"

Domani Spero at Diplopundit ("an obsessive compulsive observer, diplomatic watcher, and opinionator who monitors the goings on at ‘Foggy-Bottom’ (i.e. the State Department) and the “worldwide available” universe from Albania to Zimbabwe") went over Diplomacy 3.0 point-by-point.

Money quote(s):

"State created new positions under Diplomacy 3.0, all midlevel positions. Instead of hiring midlevel personnel to fill those positions, it continued to hire entry level personnel."

Midlevel ranks are where the shortages currently exist.

The FS cohorts hired under the first two initiatives (beginning with Sec. Powell's Diplomatic Readiness Initiative or "DRI") are already in the midlevel ranks, some even at the highest midlevel rank (FS-01: Foreign Service Officer, Class One), the equivalent of a colonel (or a Navy or Coast Guard captain).

Which is one reason State is so resistant to hiring directly into the midlevel grades. No one (or hardly anyone) in living memory has suggested that the military and naval services hire their field grade officeers (majors, lieutenant colonels, and colonels; lieutenant commanders, commanders, and captains) directly off the street.

Even special service officers such as medical doctors don't enter the medical corps above the rank of captain (O-3, equivalent to FS-04, the highest FS entry-level grade).

7/17

re: "Good News for Hopeful FSOs"

The Hegemonist ("a personal weblog touching on international relations, foreign policy, and diplomacy") has big news for prospective FSOs.

Money quote(s):

"A cable went out today to All Diplomatic and Consular channels announcing some big increases in hiring. Calling it "Diplomacy 3.0: Diplomacy, Development, and Defense," State announced that it expects to hire 2,300 employees this year, meaning that, factoring attrition, 1200-1500 new positions are being created. According to the cable, "this hiring represents the first significant infusion of positions since the end of the Diplomatic Readiness Initiative (DRI) in 2004...." "

&

"If you haven't yet taken or passed the test, go back and review my unofficial Guide to the Foreign Service Exam now! "

And what about Botswana?

There were one or two points I meant (but in my haste neglected) to address in my last post.

First: worldwide assignments availability.

As Mr. Brose put it:

"The thought that some military officer would move laterally into a mid-career diplomatic or civilian post in the State Department, jumping ahead of Foreign Service officers who had served their time
stamping visas in Botswana or someplace, was a non-starter for the institutional Foreign Service. And needless to say, no military officer worth a damn would retire after a decade or so in uniform to stamp visas in Botswana with 24-year-olds fresh out of their A-100 class."

When the Department was just starting the selection process to staff the new (temporary) embassy there (the CPA was still in business), the sheer numbers of planned FSO staffing, combined with one-year assignments, convinced me that Iraq and Afghanistan would, sooner rather than later, become the tails wagging State's personnel "dog."

This, more or less, has happened.

Nonetheless, State still has to staff the other 265 (more or less) diplomatic and consular posts around the world. And that includes Botswana. Worsening shortages of FSOs (due to the ongoing multi-administration legacy of hiring-below-attrition, with the Diplomatic Readiness Initiative having provided a welcome pause in that personnel implosion) have meant that some ten percent of open assignments are no longer even put on the "bid lists" of available jobs, since there's no hope of filling them all.

There's a DoD parallel to State's worldwide responsibilities. There are ongoing U.S. military commitments in over a hundred countries globally, not just the obvious ones like Iraq and Afghanistan, Germany and Japan, or even Korea, the U.K., and Italy.

So far the hard choices necessitated by shortages of diplomats (worsened by the Department's commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq), such as deciding which countries no longer "rate" a U.S. diplomatic presence, have been deferred.

But let me move away from the negative for a moment. Easing the hiring of military officers and others with relevant reconstruction experience for service outside the regular FS career paths might make sense, depending upon the new adminstration's priorities. Even providing an avenue for qualified persons to transition or convert to FSO generalist careers wouldn't be an impossibility. But given how little has actually been accomplished in establishing and staffing a cadre dedicated to stability and reconstruction, it doesn't appear to have been at the top of anyone's list of real (as opposed to theoretical) priorities.

Lastly, I seem to recall that there were shortages of Army captains, and that the promotion rate from captain to major was approaching 100 percent. This doesn't suggest to me that there are great numbers of experienced military officers that the DoD can spare, there being a war on and all, nor that those it can spare are necessarily the cream of the crop.