The Foreign Service Journal, May 2017

8 MAY 2017 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL We need to build on the new 2 FAM 030 risk management policy and the Vital Presence Validation Process to put in place a comprehensive risk manage- ment framework that extends to the operational and tactical decisions made at post by Emergency Action Commit- tees. If you missed Greg Starr’s interview, watch it on AFSA’s YouTube channel, and give careful thought to the oppor- tunities the political transition presents to move our organization to a firmer risk management footing. Doing so will help ensure that the Foreign Service team can be where we need to be, any- where in the world, to defend America’s people, interests and values. Let’s refocus on core diplomatic work. For all of you who have lamented (quite rightly) that the profusion of special envoys and the proliferation of priorities have weakened our effective- ness—when everything is a priority, nothing is a priority—I say to you that we now have an opportunity to stream- line and create the conditions for a more effective and focused American foreign policy. We must take care during such reorganizing to preserve core diplomatic capability, and I expect high-quality, informed debates over the coming months about what makes the cut, and what does not. There is no one better than seasoned, experienced members of the Foreign Service to shape that debate. Let’s reintroduce the Foreign Ser- vice. As a quick glance at AFSA’s daily media digest shows, there is great inte r- est now in the well-being of the Foreign Service, certainly more than I have ever seen in my career. We need to make the most of this interest to achieve a long- sought goal: increased awareness of and appreciation for the Foreign Service. This is a chance to shed some false narratives, including the one about members of the Foreign Service being unwilling to serve in Iraq a decade ago during the height of the war. I regret that we did not do a better job then of explaining to the American people that we did fill every one of those Iraq posi- tions, but at a cost. We met our Iraq surge obligations by moving Foreign Service personnel, and then positions, from other impor- tant posts, sustaining vacancy rates of more than 25 percent at posts around the world to meet those obligations. Despite perceptions that took hold, the problem was never lack of courage and patriotism, but rather lack of numbers. Then, as now, Foreign Service num- bers were minuscule compared to those of the U.S. Department of Defense. With just over 16,000 total members—8,000 State FSOs, 6,000 FS specialists, 1,850 USAID FSOs, 255 Foreign Commercial Service officers, 175 FSOs from Agri- culture, and a dozen from BBG—the Foreign Service is completely dwarfed by the Department of Defense’s 750,000 civilian workforce and the nearly two million members of the uniformed military (1.4 million on active duty plus 580,000 in the reserves). The number of American diplomats is not much big- ger than the number of people in U.S. military bands. Though not as dramatic, compari- sons with other diplomatic services show that the U.S. Foreign Service is dis- tinctly modest in size. Take the United Kingdom, for example, which has about one-fifth the population of the United States, and a military roughly one-tenth the size of ours. The U.K.’s Department for International Development reports staff of 2,700, more than the total num- ber of FSOs at USAID; and the Foreign Office reports about 5,000 diplomats, not vastly smaller than the 8,000 FSOs at State—and U.S. numbers, in contrast to U.K. numbers, include those adjudicat- ing visas. Despite our small size, much is expected of the highly skilled, dedicated and flexible U.S. Foreign Service—and long may that be so. We are, I would argue, exactly the right national security tool for the moment: a Service designed to be regularly redeployed around the world in pursuit of U.S. foreign policy objectives. With our up-or-out system, we have a built-in reduction in force (RIF) that removes 300 of our colleagues from the Service each year—ensuring that it is high-performing, accountable and responsive to new priorities. I urge each of you to give your best effort to making the most of the opportunities presented by this tran- sition to make the Foreign Service stronger, in fact and in reputation, so that we can do our part to sustain the global leadership Americans want and the world needs. n I propose that we seize the opportunities presented by this transition tomake the Foreign Service stronger as a key instrument of American global leadership.