The Foreign Service Journal, March 2003

Under Secretary for Management Grant Green, and the new E- Diplomacy office headed by Ambassador Jim Holmes. The SMART team has fielded a prelimi- nary prototype version and is busy analyzing the feedback from more than 184 users worldwide. It is also aggressively soliciting employee par- ticipation in the project. Deployment is slated for 2004. Network capacity and availability are, however, crucial to the success of SMART, and this seems to be some- thing of an unknown. Since 2000, the department has increased total enter- prise bandwidth sixfold, and installed backup Virtual Private Network cir- cuits at 74 out of 250 posts, with an additional 56 posts scheduled for installation this year. But until mid- July 2002 there was no official version of the department’s enterprise archi- tecture. At this writing, the Program Management Office is conducting a “red team review” of the department’s telecommunications infrastructure to determine whether existing and planned network capabilities are indeed adequate to the task of support- ing a centralized system by 2004. Meanwhile, in September the department’s own Office of Inspector General declared the Foreign Affairs Systems Integration Project to be in need of redirection, and State’s initia- tive for interagency collaboration was summarily merged into SMART. A month later, the department decided to expand use of the Open Source Information System — a secure net- work developed and managed by the intelligence community since 1994 to exchange sensitive but unclassified information among some 50 federal law enforcement, security, intelli- gence and foreign affairs agencies — as an economical alternative. North Korea: One Click Away North Korea’s apparent decision to enrich uranium and reactivate a plutonium reactor, in spite of a 1994 agreement with the United States to halt the country’s nuclear weapons program, signals a return to nuclear brinkmanship on the Korean Peninsula. It also underscores how difficult it is to find reliable data on things North Korean. But here are some sites that may help. The North Korea Web page of the State Department’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs ( http:// www.state.gov/p/eap/ci/kn/ ) p ro- vides comprehensive — though not M A R C H 2 0 0 3 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 9 C YBERNOTES 50 Years Ago As I read the files, I was frankly impressed with the number of officers of high quality, their devotion and loyalty, their sense of responsibility and their tremendous capacity for work. I think too, in time, the American people will recognize and impartially applaud these men and women who represent them abroad. —James S. Thompson, former president and vice-chairman of the McGraw-Hill Book Company, on his service as the public member of a selection board, in “An Outsider Looks at the Foreign Service” ( FSJ , March 1953). T he war on terrorism will not be won through attrition … To win this war, the U.S. must assign to economic and diplomatic capabilities the same strategic priority we assign to military capabilities. What is still missing from American political discourse is support for the painstaking work of foreign policy and the commitment of resources to vital foreign policy objectives that lack a direct political constituency. – Richard G. Lugar, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “Beating Terror,” in the Washington Post , Jan. 27, 2003.