THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2025 21 • Expeditionary Operations: putting the right civilians in the right place, at the right time, with the right preparation for the job. • Operational Planning: making sure the people deployed have a feasible and well-understood mission. • Flexible Funding: making sure the people deployed have the right resources to fulfill the plan. An Expeditionary Mindset and State’s Culture When the State Department struggled to establish a diplomatic mission in Kosovo in 1999, I was a new FSO who had recently worked for a humanitarian agency in Kosovo. I was amazed the U.S. government could not manage to do a better job of opening a mission than my old NGO could. Five years later, I was further astounded to learn the department had no standard plan to prepare me for deployment to an Afghan provincial reconstruction team (PRT), even though the Vietnam Civil Operations and Rural Development Support program (CORDS) was within living memory. State does not like “expeditionary” operations. Countless Foreign Service officers have taken great risks abroad, but the Service as a whole does not do so systematically, and careerism encourages the department’s leaders to defer to security rather than to the needs of the mission— or rather, bakes security into the main need of the mission, which is paradoxical. Diplomatic Security, meanwhile, premises its operations on every diplomat being a “principal” who must be protected as a dignitary. Diplomats certainly are not cannon fodder, but they cannot perform their jobs if they are all treated as dignitaries who ought not to take risks overseas. CSO’s and S/CRS’s best work in- volved putting diplomats far forward Speaking Out is the Journal’s opinion forum, a place for lively discussion of issues affecting the U.S. Foreign Service and American diplomacy. The views expressed are those of the author; their publication here does not imply endorsement by the American Foreign Service Association. Responses are welcome; send them to journal@afsa.org.
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