The Foreign Service Journal, June 2017

40 JUNE 2017 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL having to find qualified FSOs as team leads, we needed special- ized skill sets, such as municipal water engineers or local gov- ernment budget specialists, that don’t exist within State; and we needed time and help in recruiting them from the outside. The obvious source for that assistance was the department’s Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS, now the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Opera- tions). Even though the White House had put out a directive that every agency would pitch in, S/CRS leadership claimed it was unable to assist as it was too busy elsewhere. The solu- tion was to ask the Defense Department to provide the initial tranche of 129 experts from the ranks of the National Guard or active Reserve, pending replacements. When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice briefed Congress on this on Feb. 7, 2007, the Pentagon went ballistic. At weekly NSC Deputies Committee meetings, I was beat up by DOD counterparts for not being able to replace those persons fast enough. In the end, we managed to provide the staffing because the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs Executive Directorate staff stepped up to the challenge by shifting Human Resources per- sonnel over to the Iraq effort and recruiting the needed skilled personnel via USA Jobs. But the demand only increased. Even as the civilian component of the “surge” in Iraq started flowing, we were struggling to recruit the replacements for the embassy and other PRTs for summer 2008, at a time when AFSA leader- ship and others were openly negative about the risks and per- ceived burdens of service in Iraq. In addition, pulling positions from around the world to fill Iraq jobs was putting a strain on embassies in all regions. This culminated in the disastrous Oct. 30, 2007, town hall meeting convened by the Director General on the topic of directed assignments, which made headlines (when one attendee called Iraq service “a potential death sentence”) and cemented the military’s perception of a Foreign Service lacking the commitment and discipline to serve in hard and danger- ous places. Even though there were no directed assignments because enough volunteers did, in fact, come forward, if one were to identify one single event that caused the U.S. military to look at the Foreign Service as unwilling and absent partners, it was that town hall. The Foreign Service’s Finest Hour By the end of that very difficult year, the State Depart- ment had recovered some status with the military because it deployed the additional provincial reconstruction teams, FSO- led and staffed by a mix of military and USAID/civilian experts, embedded within U.S. Army brigade combat teams, plus dozens of POLADs serving in military units in Iraq over the course of the conflict. This was the Foreign Service at its finest. Those FSOs and Civil Service professionals serving alongside division and brigade command staffs generated high regard for American diplomats among their comrades in uniform. At the same time, the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs oversaw a dramatic expansion of the POLAD program—from about two dozen, mostly former chief-of-mission FSOs, to nearly 90, ranging from mid- to senior-ranked FSOs represent- ing all functional cones. The result was that the U.S. military started to get used to seeing FSOs, and not just when serving in or visiting embassies or maybe in combat operations. The tide of foreign policy militarization was turning as more and more FSOs learned how to leverage military assets to State’s benefit. If there was any downside to this, it is that the Foreign Service was drawing not on a talent pool of capable officers but a puddle—something Ambassador Jim Jeffrey alluded to in his March 3 Foreign Policy article. Not every FSO POLAD could bring the desired experience, knowledge or interpersonal skills Life is not an on-and-off switch. You do not need to have a military that is either in hard combat or is in the barracks. I would argue life is a rheostat. You have to dial it in. And as I think about how we create security in the 21st century, there will be times when we will apply hard power in true war and crisis. But there will be many instances…where our militaries can be part of creating 21st-century security: international, interagency, private-public, connected with competent communication. —Admiral James G. Stavridis, in his Accidental Admiral: A Sailor Takes Command at NATO (2014)