The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2006

is one we strongly dispute. Today’s Foreign Service is a tough way to make a life and our people deserve to be taken care of.” Rice, meanwhile, has laid out a vision of transforma- tional diplomacy that projects placing Foreign Service officers in even more difficult environments on the front lines of the war on terrorism. She has proposed, for example, Provincial Reconstruction Teams, staffed with diplomats, to work outside the secured Green Zone in Baghdad in provinces throughout Iraq, as State has already done to some extent in Afghanistan. (Creation of the teams has been delayed because of slow recruiting and bickering with the military over security for the teams.) She’s also upped the ante for promotion to the Senior Foreign Service, with officers now required to be expert in at least two regions and fluent in at at least one foreign language. In addition, officers will have to serve in danger-pay and hardship posts (not just bid on them) in order to advance to the Senior Foreign Service. In response, officers interviewed for this article say they can’t help but be a little offended by some of Rice’s pronouncements — that, for example, they need to get out from behind their desks and onto the streets. That’s exactly what most officers say they’ve already been doing for years, sometimes at great personal risk. And if they are to take on greater program management roles, as Rice has requested, officers say she must follow through on her commitment to improve the quality of program management training available, and provide employees with the time to make use of it. The department has, to its credit, worked to refine its own processes. It has, for instance, taken a welcome step to improve efficiency in the assignment process by refin- ing the EP-Plus program, in which officers have volun- tarily entered biographical information about their work experience and skills. The program, which the National Aeronautics and Space Administration invented for its own engineering staff and State refined for use with Foreign Service officers, allowed the department to quickly find staff with experience in South Asia after the C O V E R S T O R Y J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 6 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 27