The Foreign Service Journal, May 2009

8 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A Y 2 0 0 9 However, I was dismayed to realize several paragraphs into Walsh’s article that he was speaking only to State De- partment FSOs. Walsh made no men- tion of the U.S. Agency for Inter- national Development, and did not seem to realize that he and his col- leagues work side-by-side with USAID personnel on PRTs in Iraq. How can this be, I thought, hastily scanning to the end of the article to see if he would rectify this oversight. Disappointed, I reread the article line by line, only to find that Walsh in- deed wrote three pages on cooperation between the military and the Foreign Service in priority countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq, without ever mentioning USAID. This omission seems even more glaring coming on the heels of retired Ambassador David Passage’s Speaking Out column in the same issue, which persuasively argues that “the primary executive agency for international de- velopment should always be USAID, not DOD.” I’m not sure what Walsh’s oversight says about USAID-military relations, but it certainly suggests to me that we could do more to educate our military partners about our agency’s role in crit- ical countries such as these. Perhaps there’s a brief synopsis of USAID that we could recommend to CaptainWalsh and his colleagues, similar to Schading’s A Civilian’s Guide to the Military , which Walsh recommends all FSOs read? Alyssa Wilson Leggoe USAID FSO Embassy Moscow Global Repositioning: Déjà Vu Again Reading Shawn Dorman’s analysis in your January issue of the problems besetting the Global Repositioning Program at the heart of former Secre- tary Rice’s Transformational Diplo- macy initiative (“Global Repositioning in Perspective”), I was struck by the remarkable parallels to the effort in the late 1990s to broaden U.S. envi- ronmental diplomacy by creating a global network of regional “Environ- mental Hub” offices under the Bureau of Oceans and International Environ- mental and Scientific Affairs. That, too, began as the bright idea of a senior political appointee, Under Secretary Timothy Wirth — one that was saluted with little counteranalysis by a compliant bureaucracy that then did its best to carry it out despite little support from the top for obtaining the needed additional resources. As a result, the hubs, at least in their initial years, were financially orphaned by OES and dependent on the willing- ness of their host geographic posts and bureaus (already pinched by the post–Cold War “peace dividend”) to pick up the freight. That support, in turn, depended on the interest of sen- ior post leadership, which varied widely and at my post was nil. As the environment, science and technology counselor in Brasilia, charged with lay- ing the groundwork to establish a hub to be staffed by a new officer on the way, I spun my wheels for nine months simply trying to get additional office space. Once established, the Environmen- tal Hubs faced constraints in what they could do without programmoney, a sit- uation that tended to reduce many of them to modestly useful hosts for transnational conferences and net- working. If they ever received serious programmatic or project budgets (I re- tired before that day came), they cer- tainly lacked the manpower and train- ing to administer them and were un- dertaking tasks to which USAID was far better suited — if only that agency had not been gutted by personnel re- ductions. I offer three lessons from that expe- rience. Bright ideas for major restruc- turing emanating from on high still require critical analysis from the career bureaucracy, even at some professional risk. Even if cogently planned, such initiatives will be severely hobbled if they amount to slogans without dollars. Finally, if we want to carry out pro- grams or do nationbuilding, the place to start is by rebuilding our USAID component. ■ Marc E. Nicholson FSO, retired Washington, D.C. L E T T E R S