The Hill - 6 ways to know if State Department reform is real or fake

Joseph Cassidy writing at The Hill makes some excellent points.

Money quote(s):

"A real reform plan would mobilize the department to confront the dangers of the 21st century. It would remedy organizational weaknesses and inefficiencies. It would clarify State’s role in formulating foreign policy and define its relationship with other U.S. government agencies. It would provide a sense of purpose to State’s dedicated but downtrodden employees. "

That right there looks like an pretty fair mission statement for departmental reform.

"In recent administrations, the State Department’s structure has been more hourglass than pyramid. Senior officials and their staffer remoras have been over-abundant and have consumed a disproportionate amount of the department’s workload. Real reform would cut senior positions and reduce the number of staff officers who don’t originate work product."

&

"There is widespread agreement that the weedy proliferation of special envoys (not just those with that specific title, but also other powerful single-issue envoys outside State’s regional and functional bureau chains of command) must be pruned. Real reform will substantially reduce their number but also ensure that important responsibilities are incorporated into other parts of the department (double-hatting officials with a special envoy title, when its termination would be politically or diplomatically problematic).

Envoy proliferation has had two pernicious consequences — disempowering regional bureaus (which should rather be reinforced) by removing important diplomatic issues from their control and ensuring regional bureaus don’t in practice follow “special envoy” issues as closely. Real reform will mainstream as well as streamline."

This.  The dozens of special envoys and such duplicating and tromping over the responsibilities of existing embassies and missions is overkill.  Even granting the half-dozen or so (seven?) actually mandated by law, the idea of dual-hatting some of those back into the fold, onto the worthy-brows of the officials already charged with those countries, regions, or issues is one well worth exploiting.

(Gotta love the use of "remoras" to describe the spear-carriers and special assistants attending to extraneous special envoys.)

"Too many otherwise smart people believe diplomacy is something separate from other elements of national power, e.g., that the James Mattis does national defense, the Treasury Department does international finance and sanctions, the Commerce Department helps U.S. business abroad, the Department of Justice does international law and State carries messages back and forth to other governments like an Amazon delivery drone.

Diplomacy without foreign policy content is irrelevant, and there’s no such thing as short-term strategy. Real reform would reassert State’s role as lead strategist and coordinator of U.S. foreign policy, including the current actions of other cabinet agencies and America’s role in the world over the next several decades. "

You can bet that Sec. Mattis knows very well the many aspects of national powers, DIMEFILS and similar mnemonics outlining the instrumentalities and elements of implementing national strategies and grand strategies.  State is a logical place for interagency coordination of national strategy although the National Security Council staff seems to have inherited that mantel of late.

Read the whole thing.

re: "Commodifying the Force"

The recently-departed, late, great Lex at Neptunus Lex ("The unbearable lightness of Lex. Enjoy!") cautioned about the ripple effects of military retirement "reform."

Money quote(s):

"Career-minded active duty military members are no doubt watching the ongoing discussions about military retirement compensation with avid interest. This interest is due to the recommendations of the Defense Business Board, made up of 20 exquisitely educated, very successful and highly paid consultants, CEOs and entrepreneurs. Fully twenty percent of the board’s membership – according to their bios – have actual military experience, and one among them served long enough to be eligible for a military pension. They may not know that much about life in the uniformed services, but they know loads about profit and loss, cutting costs and quarterly shareholder returns.

This makes them experts.

Basically, the board recommends junking the military’s defined pension benefit plan as anachronistic, recommending that DoD instead move to an industry standard 401k style contribution. The 401K system would allow the services to permit first tour enlistees to receive certain benefits after leaving the services – they get none today – and save loads of money on out-year obligations to grizzled warriors far into the future."

Because a military career is just like working at Dunder Mifflin.

"(H)hundreds of thousands of other peoples’ sons and daughters, each of whom will make their own career calculus in their own way, the effect of which will doubtless ripple across the force and at least potentially affect war fighting readiness in ways that are not easy to calculate.

But we’ll save a lot of money."

Wars cost more than money. The precise term is "blood and treasure."

"(E)ventually the worm may turn, as it almost always does. And when it does, we may find that re-writing service retirement regulations and commodifying the force has unintended second and third order consequences which will manifest themselves long after the current crop of four stars have gone on to serve on their own corporate boards."

8/22

JG - Global institutions need reform, says PM

From my archive of press clippings:

Jamaica Gleaner

Global institutions need reform, says PM

published: Sunday May 25, 2008

PRIME MINISTER BRUCE Golding has pointed to an urgent need for a comprehensive analysis of the way global institutions operate, and has underlined his support for the reform of international institutions, whose frameworks were established over 50 years ago.

Read the whole article here.