The Foreign Service Journal, May 2010

24 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 1 0 F O C U S O N T H E F U T U R E O F T H E F O R E I G N S E R V I C E D IPLOMACY 3.0: A P ROGRESS R EPORT iplomacy 3.0 is not like Word 7.0 — it’s not the third iteration of the American diplomatic program. As Cathy Hurst in State’s Bureau of Human Resources explains, “It’s not that we tried it twice before and it didn’t work.” Rather, the name comes from a speech in which Secretary of State Hillary RodhamClin- ton called for a major hiring initiative. (Hurst is one of sev- eral State Department officers who helped the FSJ get a sense of how the hiring push is going.) “We needed a name for it,” Hurst continues. “People were calling it ‘the surge.’ What we wanted to convey was that it was a well-thought-out plan for building the For- eign Service of the future. The Secretary said in her speech that diplomacy, development and defense were the three pillars she wanted to focus on.” Hence, Diplomacy 3.0, though officials in HR usually refer to it as “D 3.0” or simply “3.0.” The reason the initiative was necessary, recalls Philippe Lussier, head of the Resource Management and Analysis Division within HR, was that by 2008 State was facing a large staffing gap. Despite demand for diplomatic expert- ise in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the department had not increased its hiring since the Diplomatic Readiness Initiative ended in 2004. Says Lussier, “We tried to meet all those demands from within, 10 positions here, 20 positions there. Basically, we were robbing Peter to pay Paul. At the end of 2008, we had a 16-percent vacancy rate. We were not able to keep up with mission demands — that’s the bottom line.” Margaret Dean, of HR’s Office of Recruitment, Exam- ination and Employment, points out that this latest push for more people started under Secretary of State Con- doleezza Rice, in the last year of the George W. Bush ad- ministration. In addition, says Katelyn Choe, a senior adviser in the HR Office of Career Development and Assignments, Diplomacy 3.0 is coordinated with the new Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, a major planning exercise Sec. Clinton also initiated last year. The QDDR, modeled on the Defense Department’s better-known Quadrennial Defense Review, is still under way. Its goal is to develop long-term strategies and plans for the conduct of U.S. foreign affairs, including, of course, the work-force component. Some Adjustments Necessary The startup of Diplomacy 3.0 required State’s HR divi- sion to quickly shift gears. “Before it,” says Dean, “we were processing people to keep the register [hiring list] low be- U NLIKE THE D IPLOMATIC R EADINESS I NITIATIVE , D IPLOMACY 3.0 IS ENVISIONED AS A LONG - TERM APPROACH TO FS HIRING NEEDS . B Y B OB G ULDIN D Bob Guldin, a Washington writer, was editor of the For- eign Service Journal from 1998 to 2001.