Journalist Nicholas Kralev (Financial Times, Washington Times) has published America’s Other Army: The U.S. Foreign Service and 21st Century Diplomacy. Kralev, who visited more than fifty embassies and conducted some 600 interviews, profiles of foreign service officers and specialists to illuminate and demystify the work of American diplomacy in a dangerous world. Learn more at americasotherarmy.com.

The full appropriations committees in the House and Senate have now reported out their recommendations for State and Foreign Operations for fiscal year 2013. Here is a quick summary (amounts are in billions of dollars):

* overseas contingency operations, including Afghanistan and Iraq

Neither committee approved funds for foreign service comparability pay — that is, funds to allow base salaries paid to foreign service personnel abroad to be set at the same level as salaries paid to foreign service personnel in Washington. (Pay in Washington is above the published scale, to compensate for the higher cost of living in the Washington area.)

The House report did not eliminate funding for comparability pay but says that ”the authority to grant overseas comparability pay is a matter within the jurisdiction of the authorization committee and should be considered in the context of legislation addressing the authorities and compensation rules governing the Foreign Service.”

The House report does not include the requested funds for new foreign service hires above attrition.

The Senate report was especially critical of State budget work. The report said that State’s “spend plans” lacked useful information. “Rather than plans,” said the report, “these documents would be more aptly described as cursory recitations of broadly stated goals” that leave “the reader to wonder how funds will be used to achieve specific objectives.”

Kori N. Schake, a Defense Department, National Security Council, and State Department official in the George W. Bush administration, has written a short, strong critique of the culture, leadership, management, and skills of the Department of State. Ms. Schake directs much of her criticism at the career foreign service, which she says is individualistic and lacks the unity of purpose that drives the military. She faults State for lack of planning and an unwillingness to analyze its own performance. She connects these institutional weaknesses to State’s problems in developing a strongly justified budget and building a larger constituency in Congress. Few of her criticisms are new, but the lack of novelty may only be a sign that State’s weaknesses have long been evident and uncorrected. Many of her proposed solutions are variations on “do as the Pentagon does,” but she is clear and concise in her presentation.

Provocatively, Ms. Schake urges State to make protecting Americans its primary goal, and consular work its most important function. She argues that the Foreign Service attracts too many candidates and has too high a rate of retention. She recommends cutting Foreign Service pay and hiring a large number of mid-grade officers outside the examination system.

State of Disrepair: Fixing the Culture and Practices of the State Department is a publication of the press of the Hoover Institution, where Schake is a research fellow.