The Foreign Service Journal, October 2007

72 F OR E I GN S E R V I C E J OU R N A L / OC T OB E R 2 0 0 7 nificant increase in the State Department budget is needed in order to reverse that trend. This past April, Gingrich had this to say: “You have to have about a 50-percent bigger budget for the StateDepartment. ... The StateDepartment is too small to have the training programand the secondment of personnel needed togrowa genuinepro- fessional institution. It is impossible for the current Foreign Service to get the level of education it needs. They recruit really smart people [but] they grossly underin- vest in training them. It’s a very signifi- cant problem… The reason I became a convert to the fundamental transformation of the State Department is you want to move things away from defense that it’s currently doing. ... You do not want [the] uniformed military having to do all sorts of things that youwant to, frankly, give to other agencies if you could count on them doing it.” Value Added What, then, are the knowledge, skills and abilities that our 21st-century Foreign Service currently does not have to a suffi- cient degree, but could obtain with expanded education and training? To answer that question, it is necessary to first identify what diplomats uniquely should be able to bring to the table. The Foreign Service exists to provide the president with a worldwide-available corps of professionals with unique abili- ties that are essential to successful foreign policy development and implementa- tion. Those abilities include: keen knowl- edge of thehistory, politics, economics, cul- tures and languages of other countries; skill at employing that body of knowledge to keepWashington informed of the realities on the ground in the host country; the abil- ity to influence foreign governments and publics; skill at managing programs and projects assigned to foreignaffairs agencies; masteryof the interagencyprocess at home; and the ability to coordinate and integrate the efforts of other country-teammembers in the host country. To live up to that definition, Foreign Service members must possess a range of knowledge, skills and abilities. Those include: foreign-language fluency, ad- vanced area knowledge (including histo- ry, culture, politics and economics), lead- ership andmanagement skills, negotiating skills, public diplomacy skills, project management skills and job-specific func- tional expertise. Unfortunately, the Foreign Service exhibits shortcomings in each of these areas. For example: • An August 2006 Government Ac- countability Office report found that 29 percent of overseas language-designated positionswerenot filledwith language pro- ficient staff. The report said that this sit- uation “can adversely impact State’s abil- ity to communicatewith foreign audiences and execute critical tasks.” • Most Foreign Service members — including ambassadors, deputy chiefs of mission and principal officers—who do not go to their newassignment via language training do not receive up-to-date area studies training. • While one might expect that every U.S. diplomat would receive training in how to negotiate, only about 50 Foreign Service members take FSI’s introductory negotiating course each year. Given that rate of instruction, less than 15 percent of current U.S. diplomats have received even basic instruction innegotiating tech- niques. • Despite the current “transformational diplomacy” focus on shaping outcomes and running programs, few Foreign Service members receive training in pro- grammanagement. Squaring the Circle Two major obstacles stand in the way of providingForeignServicememberswith the knowledge, skills and abilities that are essential to successful foreignpolicy devel- opment and implementation: lack of time andunderstaffing/under-resourcing. The first obstacle is time. Currently, the typical FSI course runs for one to five days. Fewnon-language courses last longer than three weeks. The reason for such short courses is that, after new-hire training, the only opportunities that most Foreign Servicemembers have for non-foreign lan- guage classroomtraining are during a brief windowof availability every fewyearswhile between assignments orwhile leaving their in-boxes untended during infrequent domestic tours. Even over a 30-year-long career, taking a fewshort courses every cou- ple of years adds up to less than10months of non-language training during an entire career—one-thirdof what the typicalU.S. Army officer receives. As previously mentioned, the Army avoids such time constraints by perma- nently reassigning officers to long-term training three times during their first 20 years of service for six to 12 months each time. By making training a permanent- change-of-station assignment, the Army takes officers fully offline for the academ- ic year that is needed tomaster the course material. To emulate the Army’s provenmodel, the StateDepartment could implement at least one long-term professional training course to be taken by all Foreign Service members. One suggestion is to create a nine-month “career course” tobe takenby newly tenured employees. That course could offer a common core curriculum comprised of existing FSI courses (for example, negotiations, public diplomacy basics, global issues,Washington tradecraft, congressional relations and various infor- mation-technology, leadership andman- agement courses) alongwith newly creat- ed segments (for example, national secu- rity strategy, instruments of national power, diplomatic history and first- responder training). Participants could A F S A N E W S To emulate the Army’s proven model, the State Department could implement at least one long-term professional training course to be taken by all Foreign Service members.