THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JUNE 2025 89 of two or three decades of service. Members of the military grapple with the same issues we do—schools for our children, employment for our spouses, elder care from continents away. Senior leaders must prioritize our people to enable both warfighters and diplomats to perform their duties effectively. The Full Range of Challenges Both institutions work within three common environments. First, we both operate in a resource-constrained environment. Again, I acknowledge the tremendous funding disparity between State and DoD, but neither organization receives enough taxpayer money to do all the things it is asked to do by policymakers. Trade-offs are unavoidToday’s geopolitical environment in which diplomacy and defense operate is depicted in this U.S. Army graphic. U.S. ARMY able; it isn’t possible to do everything, everywhere, all at once. Second, both organizations operate in the same challenging global arena for the same ends: protecting our nation and promoting our national interests and ideals. U.S. Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence Lieutenant General Anthony Hale created a slide to illustrate the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment in which the Army works (see above). Diplomats address these same challenges. They are at work in volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous physical and policy environments around the world, routinely dealing with hardship and danger. Finally, and most important, diplomacy and the military are tools used by and subordinate to elected policymakers. The American people elect a president who appoints the Secretaries of State and Defense, and we are obligated to implement their decisions, whatever we may think. At the State Department, we don’t have a phrase like “best military advice” (a phrase disliked by some in the military, I know), but we should. At least, that’s what we practice. We provide best diplomatic advice to elected and appointed leaders, who make decisions that we then execute, not always happily or comfortably, but professionally. I rejoined State with increased admiration for the U.S. Army and a strong belief that we are on the same team, striving to achieve the same goals for our great nation. n
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