The Foreign Service Journal, January 2008

The decision to direct assignments is ultimately made by the Secretary, a Cabinet member appointed by our elected president and confirmed by our elected Senate. We are commis- sioned officers of the president, and we took an oath to live up to our obligations to serve. It doesn’t matter, so long as he is obeying our Consti- tution, whether our president sends us to Paris, Haiti, Iraq or Bos- nia. The president has the right to send us where he may, and it is our obligation to serve. That’s why our calling is named the Foreign Service. The appropriate policy protest for an honorable Foreign Service officer is resignation, not histrionics in the halls of our State Department. Every FSO has the right to resign. Dis- cussion of terms of service is a personnel matter, not a policy one, and should be addressed rationally, without emotion. Sure, the DG was wrong to tell the press of directed assignments before he told us, but that’s irrelevant to the treatment he received at the town hall meeting. Let’s quietly debate our terms of service behind closed doors, rational- ly, the way diplomats do, and not like the mobs that throw stones and chant hatred outside our chanceries. Andrew Erickson FSO Embassy Bogota The Power of Resources Service in Iraq is not a death sentence. FSOs have served in war zones before and have succeeded in Iraq and Afghanistan in the face of great odds. The problem today is the challenge to succeed where officers lack resources, training and an environment conducive to diplomatic and public dialog. Dialog is important, but we also need to empower officers with the resources to carry out their mandate. Without a budget, FSOs bring noth- ing to the table where money and resources influence decisions. When adversaries influence local leaders by giving resources to solve problems, but FSOs only bring an admonition to stay the course, hard-pressed leaders make the most expeditious choice, and another district is lost. We have accepted the task of implementing policy in a combat zone, but have not changed how we do business. We have to give our volunteers what they need — flexi- bility, responsibility, resources and training. We can only engage when dialog is possible. If our interlocutors shut down dialog because it en- dangers them and their families, what is our role? If there is no group to engage with, what is our role? It’s not a question of patriotism, but a question of competency: you don’t send a baker into the field to grow wheat; you hand him a bag of flour when the wheat has been harvested. If our volunteers get the resources and training they need and are deployed where they have a role to play and are empowered to carry out that role, and if we acknowledge that our job includes combat and all the responsibilities that implies, then we can be sure FSOs have the capacity to succeed. We will see them at the table as key players. But if we maintain a system that expects results without resources, experts without training and officers without responsibilities, and that out- sources protection, we can only ex- pect to remain marginalized, dis- empowered, walled in and frustra- tingly unsuccessful. Joe Mellott FSO Washington, D.C. Skimming the Surface In the discussion of our collective willingness to serve in Iraq, what we’re really getting at is a much larger problem: namely, the lack of support from management for the Foreign Service. This was recently illustrated by the results of an AFSA poll: 88 per- cent of FSOs do not believe that State management is responsive to staff concerns. Such concerns include the opaque bidding and assignment process, a lack of consultation in personnel decision- making, a lack of openness to feed- back on policy (especially personnel- related) decisions and the career benefits of hardship tours. Real con- cerns that deserve real answers were raised at the town hall meeting. Though the discussion shouldn’t be limited to Iraq, we might start by ask- ing why our mission there is so large and has been allowed to cause strain- ed staffing levels everywhere else. We might also ask that manage- ment be truly open to hearing doubts about the sustainability of our current foreign policy there. And finally, let’s honestly examine a major concern many FSOs continue to articulate: are our skills as diplomatic officers really well-placed in what is essentially a military operation? Of course, all Foreign Service members salute our colleagues who have bravely served in Iraq. But let’s not ignore the larger issues at the heart of many officers’ reluctance to serve there. Until we work those out, the directed assignments debate is just skimming the surface. Matthew V. Cassetta FSO Washington, D.C. Confusing Danger with Dissent My recollection is that when one is sworn into the Foreign Service, one agrees to serve at the pleasure of the president. That means going wher- ever the Secretary of State tells you to go. If it’s dangerous, so be it. We didn’t sign up for duties re- 20 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 8 L E T T E R S