The Foreign Service Journal, December 2007

D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 7 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 33 n a memorable Sidney Harris car- toon, a scientist fills a blackboard with equations, in the middle of which he writes, “Then a miracle occurs.” A second scientist examining the work responds, “I think you need to be more explicit here in step two.” This cartoon came back to me vividly and repeatedly during lectures at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., where I was privileged to spend a year in 2000. In discussing various scenarios, an instructor or student would often refer to a process diagram to describe organ- izational interactions and responsibilities in operational situations. At some critical point, the presenter would point to a subprocess, and confidently state, “The Department of State steps in here and takes care of it.” Such expectations of the State Department and the Foreign Service increasingly caused me concern. To provide a little more perspective, I prepared a force analysis of the Foreign Service for my classmates. While most of my fellow students had never encountered a real, live FSO, they were very familiar with problems of staffing and force analysis, and confidently expected that the State Department had done its homework, too. My presentation, however, did little to support the expectation of a miracle regarding the State Depart- ment’s part in the process diagrams. Indeed, filling posi- tions in the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan has become a major challenge for the Department of State. While these new requirements have strained State’s human resources, they are not themselves the source of the current staffing crisis. In fact, the Foreign Service has been critically understaffed for more than two decades: this is an entrenched liability that the demands of Iraq and Afghanistan have simply exacerbated. Some measures can be taken to more effectively leverage the existing inadequate numbers of personnel. But even in the optimal scenario —where Congress and the administration drastically increase hiring — the staffing deficit will continue to limit the effectiveness of U.S. foreign policy long after Iraq moves from the head- lines to the history books. A Snowballing Deficit The Department of State’s funding in real terms in 2000 was about 50 percent of what it had been in 1985. On the personnel side, the picture was even bleaker. From 1990 to 1997, State hired at below attrition levels, resulting in a shortfall of about 700 Foreign Service F O C U S O N C O U N T R Y T E A M M A N A G E M E N T O NE H AND C LAPPING : T HE S OUND OF S TAFFING THE F OREIGN S ERVICE T HE F OREIGN S ERVICE HAS BEEN CRITICALLY UNDERSTAFFED FOR MORE THAN TWO DECADES . B Y M ARK J OHNSEN I Mark Johnsen joined the Foreign Service in 1993, and has served in Bonn, Kuala Lumpur, Islamabad, Hamburg, Hong Kong and Washington, D.C. He is a graduate of the Naval War College.