22 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2025 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL into hazardous places and providing them with extensive—and expensive—training and equipment that, pre-Benghazi, allowed them to do things other State personnel were not permitted to do. Benghazi ended policymakers’ willingness to support such missions, but the department never liked them in the first place. State’s disdain for such challenges will not make them go away, and we cannot pretend State is at its most effective and influential in the places it is not present. The George W. Bush–era leadership that created S/CRS spoke as if every diplomat needed to be able to serve on a PRT, but such a Foreign Service would be illsuited to the work on most issues in most countries. For example, skills that make a diplomat successful on a PRT may not help as much when working through trade treaties or child custody disputes. State needs a cadre of personnel ready for high-threat environments, but a “conflict cone” of FSOs will not do, because larger conflict missions need conflictready public diplomacy, consular, management, and other types of FSOs, while conflict-cone officers need “normal” jobs to sustain a career path, not to mention a stable family life. Long before having a “Ranger Regiment” of elite light infantry, the Army had a “Ranger School” to teach elite tactics to a small group of soldiers who would carry those skills back to their own units. A three- to four-week “Expeditionary Skills” course over and above the Foreign Affairs Counter Threat (FACT) course could prepare 5 to 10 percent of the Foreign Service and select civil servants for tough missions and unexpected contingencies and see to it such officers were distributed evenly around the department. The Navy and Air Force have similar courses for personnel who must be ready for combat even though it is not their job. These personnel would be trained to protect their own facilities and movements under DS oversight, with regulations and policy adjusted to recognize their missions as different from the Foreign Service’s preferred operating model. Each regional bureau could manage its own “stable” of expeditionary-trained personnel and mobilize them from across the bureau as needed. The course should be mandatory for assignment to high-threat posts. Regular exercises connected to military exercises could maintain this capability to deploy individuals with the military or larger teams into high-threat environments at short notice. Operational Planning and Diplomacy Putting people in harm’s way obligates the department to give them clear and feasible goals so they know when to end the mission or “normalize” it. Operational planning is a core State Department weakness, one that CSO played an outsized role in filling, even in missions where it had no field role and was only an adviser. DS has an excellent planning process for establishing or securing a hazardous mission, but it is grounded purely in force protection and the logistics requirements that flow from it. For example, when the department instructed DS to establish a mission in one African country several years back, DS examined available facilities and risks and determined the mission would require 50 DS and military personnel to secure, leaving room to accommodate just four “substantive” personnel, including the chief of mission. This process, however, does not circle back to policy to understand what these few substantive personnel might accomplish that would justify risking many more DS and military personnel, if the hazards really require them. It also does little for existing posts where the challenge is to keep engaged in certain unstable areas within a country without expecting or absorbing much additional logistical support. The inevitable result is an unwieldy and costly mission unlikely to achieve the hoped-for goals. A better policyled planning process, combined with trained “expeditionary” diplomats, could promote a relatively secure, yet more effective, diplomatic mission in a high-threat locale. From 2020 until this year, CSO’s work implementing the GFA involved developing just such a policy-centered planning process for 10 GFA-designated countries, involving data analysis, defined and complementary diplomatic and assistance goals, and reliable indicators of effectiveness. These GFA planning efforts, however, never combined, or even consulted with, nonassistance resource, staffing, and security planning for these posts—a gaping flaw in its implementation. A planning cell of 20-25 personnel, ideally based in the Office of the Under Secretary for Political Affairs, could combine M, DS, and CSO planning capabilities to support embassies and regional bureaus with the kind of rigorous and integrated planning needed for effective stabilization responses. Flexible Funding Fills Gaps A common complaint about CSO among less-imaginative State counterparts was that the bureau was “unpredictable,” often proposing to do things in country X that were totally different from what it was recommending in country Y. Many State personnel preferred dealing
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