The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2015 33 A Serious Error of Omission A s an AFSA member and Foreign Service member for five years and in my third overseas tour, I am committed to American diplomacy and take the need for change seriously. It is demoralizing, though, to realize that I am not important enough to be included in the AAD project that resulted in this report. As a specialist, I am part of the 42 percent who make up the Foreign Service—the same Foreign Service that the report says is in trouble and needs immediate strengthening. Omit- ting the specialist corps from this project creates more trouble and weakens the clarity, unification and esprit de corps that the report seeks. I want to call attention to page 11 of the report: “America’s security interests and international goals require top-quality diplomacy, consistent with the letter and spirit of the [1980 Foreign Service] Act. We need to reduce politicization and re- address education, training and the professional formation of the Foreign Service from top to bottom. The time has come to address both the parallel and differing problems that undercut top-quality Foreign and Civil Services and clearly define the respective roles of all involved in diplomacy. While we rec- ognize and respect the vital role of the career Foreign Service specialist corps, the parameters of this project do not permit an exploration of its contributions, roles and needs.” I can only hope that AFSA will ask AAD to address this faux pas in the near future, perhaps even with a conversation about doing away with generalist and specialist categories/titles and creating one unified Foreign Service with position-specific titles. Despite my disappointment, I do agree with the overall recommendations made in the report. I see four, in particu- lar, as priorities: 2d, specifications for nomination of chiefs of mission; 3a, capping the percentage of politically appointed ambassadors at 10 percent; 12a, developing a supervisory- mentoring module for mid-level management; and 18, conducting a comprehensive review of the department’s entire system of human resources management, including recruit- ment, position creation and classification methodology, as well as staffing, assignment and promotion. —Janie James-High Assistant Attaché/Office Manager Office of the Deputy Chief of Mission Embassy Ljubljana Important Obstacles to Getting the Job Done I read the AAD report with interest, and I think it makes many good points. At the same time, a few of the assertions struck me as bizarre, such as the assertion that the department deserves applause for “upgrading” facilities overseas. Upgrad- ing? Since many of the authors seem to be drawn from the ranks of long-retired former ambassadors, I wonder how many of these facilities they've personally visited. “Upgraded” overseas facilities are often poorly located on the fringes of towns, feature security precautions that most people would associate more readily with a military fort or a maximum security prison than with a beacon of liberty. Staff are crammed into ever-tinier office spaces or the euphemistically titled “open space” cubicles. While these buildings are probably a lot safer from car bombs, that’s about the only sense in which most of them can be viewed as an improvement. The conversation that the report seeks to open is valuable. However, in my view, the report overlooked some of the biggest problems the Foreign Service faces. One is the increasing over- centralization of authority and decision-making in Washington. Another is the increasing forced diversion of overseas staff away from the most interesting and valuable aspects of the job (i.e., interacting with the people of the country and getting out and about as much as possible) and into the writing, rewriting, clear- ing, discussing and negotiating of an endlessly escalating and frequently overlapping number of studies, reports, plans, strate- gies, reviews and other internal documents. A third is the huge escalation in time-consuming but largely nonproductive labor. The three phenomena—hypercentralization in Washington, extreme proliferation of report production for Washington and the sharp increase in workload—are, of course, inter-related. The ever-growing stream of plans, studies, reviews, strategies and “Omitting the specialist corps from this project creates more trouble and weakens the clarity, unification and esprit de corps that the report seeks.” —Janie James-High