The Foreign Service Journal, January 2009

J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 9 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 19 address at Georgetown University on Jan. 18, 2006. “In the 21st cen- tury, emerging nations like India and China and Brazil and Egypt and Indonesia and South Africa are increasingly shaping the course of history. At the same time, the new front lines of our diplomacy are ap- pearing more clearly, in transitional countries of Africa and of Latin America and of the Mid- dle East. Our current global posture does not really re- flect that fact.” Rice outlined the Global Repositioning Program, designed to shift hundreds of Foreign Service positions from Europe and Washington (primarily) to “emerging nations.” Global repositioning was essentially the bureaucratic expression of transformational diplomacy, a restructuring of State Department staffing aimed at meeting the policy goals of TD. “It is clear today that America must begin to reposition our diplomatic forces around the world,” Sec. Rice said in the same speech. “So over the next few years the United States will begin to shift several hundred of our diplomatic positions to new critical posts for the 21st cen- tury. We will begin this year with a down payment of mov- ing 100 positions from Europe and, yes, from here in Washington, D.C., to countries like China and India and Nigeria and Lebanon, where additional staffing will make an essential difference.” This “down payment” was to be followed by new re- sources. “We are also eager to work more closely with Congress to enhance our global strategy with new re- sources and new positions,” Sec. Rice said. As it happened, however, she would implement the Global Repositioning Program (hereafter called GRP) without new resources, only by shifting positions. Individuals closely involved in the GRP process offered assistance and insights for this assessment. We consulted withmembers of the team that recently completed a world- wide review of the program for the Office of the Inspector General. Approximately 30 FSOs from both gain- ing and losing posts offered their own observations and ex- periences. Though all sources are known to the Journal , and we have identified people wherever possible, much of the information provided was given on background. Scribbles on the Back of a Napkin The GRP set in motion the first major overhaul of staffing patterns in decades, revealing that many em- bassies were still staffed in much the same way they had been during the Cold War. In Ger- many, there were 200,000 people for every FSO, while India had about 25 million per officer and China 40 mil- lion, a point made often by Sec. Rice and then-Under Sec- retary of State for Political Affairs R. Nicholas Burns in describing the rationale for the GRP. At the same time, the so-called “peace dividend” of the 1990s had been used to cut staff at embassies around the world, and even though the Diplomatic Readiness Initia- tive gave a significant boost to worldwide staffing during Secretary of State Colin Powell’s tenure, those gains were erased by the requirement to fully staff large missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. In December 2005, the mandate came down from the Secretary of State: Create several hundred new transfor- mational diplomacy positions in emerging countries by eliminating positions elsewhere. And do it fast! The first 100 new positions were to be in place and filled by the summer of 2006. With an assignment system based on bidding one to two years out, depending on language and other training, and with just about every embassy and of- fice in dire need of more rather than fewer staff, the task of moving hundreds of positions quickly threatened to be a bureaucratic nightmare. To cut through the inevitable red tape, Sec. Rice tasked U/S Burns and Under Secretary for Management Henri- etta Fore — a strategic pairing of the policy and manage- ment sides of the house. The two under secretaries created a high-level working group of about 10 senior staff who were able to work independently and outside of any one bureau or box. The implementation process was not publicized widely either inside or outside the department, and even the makeup of the group was not widely known. The group had to work quickly; as one participant de- scribed it, the earliest plans were drawn “on the back of a napkin.” The exercise was driven by the Secretary’s insis- tence on quick implementation of her GRP vision, without allowing time for serious consideration of security, physi- F O C U S Former Foreign Service political officer Shawn Dorman is associate editor of the Journal and the editor of AFSA’s best- selling book, Inside a U.S. Embassy. The so-called “peace dividend” of the 1990s had been used to cut staff at embassies around the world.