The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2016

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2016 17 Reforming Entry-Level Assignments BY ANDREW KE L LY I n April’s President’s Views column “Building the Deep Bench,” Ambas- sador Barbara Stephenson brought up the challenge that surging demand for consular adjudicators poses to the career development of entry-level officers. With increasing frequency, non-con- sular coned officers are being called on to serve consecutive assignments out of cone. This has resulted in more officers entering the mid-level ranks without any in-cone experience. As Amb. Stephenson pointed out, most officers can expect 90 percent of their career development to come from assignments and mentoring. The consequences of officers never serving in their assigned cone at the entry level are real, both for individual officers seeking to learn their craft and for the overall health of a Service that depends on well- rounded generalists. Lately there has been much discus- sion about reforming the assignments process to make it easier for newly minted mid-level officers to gain in- cone experience. New positions have been created and existing positions have been re-graded. Both changes may prove helpful in the short term, but are Band-Aids on the larger issue of how we handle consular adjudicator assign- ments. As long as our career development model is so heavily slanted toward on-the-job training, ELO assignments should be viewed as just that—training—and not simply as encumbered positions. Andrew Kelly is an FSO vice consul inManila, where he also served as the ambas- sador’s staff aide. Previously he held the rule-of-law portfolio in Sofia. Prior to join- ing the Foreign Service he served two tours in Iraq with the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division. He joined the Foreign Service in 2010 and is a member of the 157th A-100 class. SPEAKING OUT A Model for Handling Structural Imbalance I propose that the manner in which the U.S. Army handles a similar struc- tural imbalance within its officer ranks may offer a model for how to reform entry-level assignments in our own Service. I joined the Foreign Service in late 2010 following four years as an active- duty Army officer. At the time, there was a one-year consular service require- ment, though most officers could expect to spend a full two years adjudicating visas. My first impression of the way the Foreign Service assigns entry-level offi- cers (ELOs) to vice-consul positions was that it was similar to the Army program of branch detailing junior officers. I have since learned that while there are many similarities, there are also impor- tant differences. Every year the Army commissions more than 5,000 second lieutenants. As in our own Service, those officers are assigned to a specific “branch” in which most will spend their entire career. However, different branches have different entry-level staffing require- ments. For example, the infantry requires a high proportion of lieuten- ants to more senior officers, a situation that is reversed in the military intelli- gence branch. To address this imbalance the Army often details newly commissioned intelligence officers to the infantry for the first three years of their career. Prior to arriving at their unit, these officers attend the Infantry Basic Officer Lead- ers Course while their non-detailed col - leagues go on to the intelligence version of the same school. It is important to note that branch details almost always involve detail- ing an officer from a combat support branch into one of the three combat arms (infantry, armor, field artillery) and almost never the reverse.