The Foreign Service Journal, September 2018

30 SEPTEMBER 2018 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL The committee recommended that FSI be “revitalized” and “elevated to the level of the war colleges” by revising its cur- riculum and strengthening its faculty. Under Secretary of State Charles Saltzman, a committee member, said that the Foreign Service needs a “deliberate career training plan” and called on FSI to develop one. Placing FSI “on a level with the various war colleges,” said The Foreign Service Journal , “received the full support of Secretary [John Foster] Dulles.” The department instituted a mid-career course and expanded opportunities for coursework outside FSI. Fast-forward to 1968. FSI is still not “on a level” with the war colleges, and long-term training remains sketchy. Such training, said the reform-minded FSOs who wrote “Toward a Modern Diplomacy,” should occupy about 10 percent of a Foreign Service career and should be a “virtual prerequisite” for promotion. No steps were taken tomake that a reality. The authors of the Foreign Service Act of 1980 found it necessary to include a legislative instruction to the Sec- retary to establish a professional development program. In 1986, the department convened a committee (chaired by FSO Ray Ewing, then dean of the language school at FSI) that found in-service training “either non-existent or irrelevant.” The training involved inexperienced teachers and course material that was “outdated or patently not germane to the professional development of the students,” stated the committee. In 1989, two studies of the Foreign Service personnel system, one commissioned by Congress and one by the department, called for more training time for FSOs. The departmental study recommended adding 50 positions to FSI and giving monetary incentives to encourage training. “Every- one,” said the under secretary for management, “believes there has to be more training” that is “tied in with assignments … not just for general character building.” “Everyone” still believed that in 1993, when the department released another study, the excellent State 2000: A New Model for Managing Foreign Affairs . This study found a “mismatch between what we want to do and the skills of those we expect to do it” and recommended three steps to address the problem: workforce planning to identify future needs, a “requirements- based hiring system” to recruit to needs that have been iden- tified, and long-term training to develop professionals with “functional/area expertise and managerial competence.” But as Foreign Service numbers fell under the budget-cutting policies of the 1990s (the end of the Cold War’s so-called “peace dividend”), training was sacrificed to operational demands. Two 1999 studies, McKinsey & Company’s “The War for Talent” and ‘It’s Hard to Tend the Tree…’ S ince the end of WorldWar II, “reform”—which is to say, change, for better or worse—has been a permanent feature of the Foreign Service landscape. About every decade a major reform has been pro- posed and implemented. Between those initiatives, a plethora of committees, commissions and study groups have kept the State Department and the other foreign affairs agencies under scrutiny, with the threat of further change ever present. As the great Foreign Service direc- tor general, Nathaniel Davis, once noted, “It’s hard to tend the tree when every couple of years someone pulls it out of the ground to see if the roots are growing.” Ambassador Davis makes a cogent point. Who among us has not thought, “Why don’t ‘they’ just leave us alone and let us get on with it?”Well, there is one very good reason why “they” won’t leave us alone. Contexts change over time, so all institutions, public or private, must reinvent themselves to deal with new realities—or perish. In the commercial sector the list of iconic companies (think RCA) that have disappeared is long. The list of corporations successfully reinventing themselves (IBM) is much shorter. The Foreign Service and State Department face the same imperative: adapt or disappear. The reality of the continuing need for reform is directly linked to the rapidly changing world of the 20th and 21st centuries. —From “The ‘Reform’ of Foreign Service Reform” by Thomas D. Boyatt, FSJ , May 2010. The Foreign Service Act of 1946 established the Foreign Service Institute to provide a “continuous program of in-service training … directed by a strong central authority.” FSI immediately fell short. In 1954, the Wriston Committee found FSI to be “almost paralyzed: it exists on crumbs that fall from the Air Force table. Career planning is conspicuous by its absence.”The Service, said the committee, was “critically deficient in various technical specialties—notably economic, labor, agriculture, commercial promotion, area-language and administrative—that have become indispensable to the successful practice of diplomacy.”