State, Defense agree on personnel exchanges

Posted on January 19, 2012 by HWK

The Departments of State and Defense have reached a formal agreement — a memorandum of understanding (MOU) — on exchanges of personnel between the two agencies. Under the agreement, State will provide almost 90 foreign policy advisors (POLADs) to the Department of Defense and will send almost 30 foreign service and civil service personnel for training and education at the military academies, the war colleges, and other DOD academic institutions. The Department of Defense will increase thenumber of its personnel at State from 50 to 98.

State’s press release is here.

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Foreign Ag Service Closes Posts

Posted on January 10, 2012 by HWK

The Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) will close its posts in Stockholm and Damascus to save money. The closings are a small part of a much larger cost-cutting plan that Secretary Vilsack announced on January 10, 2012, under the name Blueprint for a Stronger Service. Other agencies may follow USDA’s lead.

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State, USAID Receive Appropriations for FY 2012

Posted on December 20, 2011 by HWK

Appropriations for State and USAID for fiscal year 2012 were included in the omnibus spending bill that Congress passed on December 17. Total appropriations for State and Foreign Operations were $42.1 billion, about 12.5 percent below FY 2011 and 17 percent below the administration’s request.

Hiring: The Congress specifically rejected the administration’s request for funds to create new positions, including foreign service positions, in both agencies, The Congress also assumed a continuation of the pay freeze for all Department of State employees. But the bill cuts no positions, so hiring can continue to replace personnel lost through normal attrition. For the foreign service in the Department of State, normal attrition is about 350 officers and 150 specialists per year.

Funding: The table below gives some key numbers. The full table is at the end of the conference report.

 

Department of State and Foreign Operations Appropriations Act for FY 2012

(amounts in $ billions)
 

FY 2011 enacted

FY 2012 request

FY 2012 agreed bill
State / Foreign Operations

Department of State – Administration of foreign affairs

48.1

11.4

50.8

10.5

42.1

9.0
USAID – Operating Expenses

1.3

1.5

1.1
Bilateral economic assistance

21.2

22.5

18.4
International security assistance

8.1

8.2

7.3
Multilateral assistance

2.3

3.7

2.9
Overseas Contingency Operations (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq)

8.7

11.2

11.2

Reconstruction and stabilization: The conference report on the appropriations bill notes that members are “concerned” with State’s reconstruction and stabilization operations, noting the “minor role” played in Haiti after the earthquake and in Libya during the revolution. Secretary Clinton in November raised the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization to a bureau, but she will need to seek congressional approval to raise the rank of the director to assistant secretary. That request could be the occasion for a more thorough examination of the role of the office and the future of the “expeditionary foreign service.”

Micromangement: The conferees to pains to direct the Secretary of State to “establish a policy to eliminate the unnecessary idling of parked motor vehicles.”

An AFSA report on how the Foreign Service fared in the legislation is posted here.

 

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Economic officers wanted!

Posted on December 1, 2011 by HWK

Secretary Clinton wants to raise the profile of economic diplomacy in American foreign policy, and of economic officers in the foreign service.

She has given a series of four speeches promoting the idea that “economic strength and our global leadership are a package deal,” and that “economic statecraft [is] at the heart of our foreign policy agenda.” You can find these speeches at these links:

— New York Economic Club, October 14, 2011
— Global Leadership Coalition, July 13, 2011 Washington
— Asia Society, Hong Kong, July 25, 2011
— APEC Women and the Economy Summit, San Francisco, September 16, 2011

At the New York Economic Club, the Secretary spoke about the need for a stronger base of economic knowledge in the foreign service. She said “we are trying to up our game” by doing “more to train our diplomats to understand economics, finance, and markets, and more to promote those who do.” The goal, she said, is “universal economic literacy and widespread expertise. We need to be a Department where more people can read both Foreign Affairs and a Bloomberg terminal.”

Of the five foreign service cones, the economic cone and the management cone are the least competitive. In other words, there are more new hires per hundred candidates in the economic and management cones than in the political, public diplomacy, or consular cones.

With hiring down—only about 400 new FSOs are likely to be hired in fiscal year 2012—competition for employment may be even stronger than in the recent past. Candidates who are thinking about which cone to choose should take the Secretary’s commitment to economics into consideration.

Posted in Economic and commercial affairs, Hiring, Promotion | Leave a comment

Curious about the Foreign Service? Want to know what do diplomats do?

Posted on October 12, 2011 by HWK

The Department of State has launched a new website called “Discover Diplomacy.” Pitched mostly at a high school level, the site focuses on people, places, and issues: who American diplomats are, where they work, and what they do. It’s a good lead-in to the (if I say so myself) deeper and more objective account in Career Diplomacy.

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Budgets and staffing

Posted on October 6, 2011 by HWK

October 1 is New Year’s Day, at least for those whose lives are measured in fiscal years. No one at the Department of State is toasting the occasion. The new fiscal year, FY 2012, is certain to bring deep cuts in budgets for the Department and for USAID, although how deep depends on how the cuts are measured.

To understand what may happen in the year just beginning, we need to go back to the fiscal year just ended. Congress, thoroughly gridlocked, failed to enact a budget or to pass appropriations for federal agencies until April 2011, when the year was halfway over. The April deal provided $47.4 billion for State and USAID, about 18 percent below the $57 billion that the administration wanted, but only about 2 percent less than the $49 billion provided in FY 2010.

Gobbledygook alert!
In Washington, the custom is to measure budget “cuts” by the difference between sums requested (or projected to be spent) and sums provided (or projected). That is why it is quite possible for spending to rise while budgets are cut. For example, start with spending at 100: if the administration asks for a 20 percent increase in spending, and Congress funds a 10 percent increase, both sides will claim, and the media will report, that spending has been cut by 8 percent (from 120 to 110), while actual spending rises 10 percent (from 100 to 110). Readers who wonder how the federal government managed to run up a debt of $15 trillion can lay part of the blame on this kind of gobbledygook.

FY 2012 and the core budget
The State Department divided its budget request for FY 2012 into two parts. For overseas contingency operations (OCO), which include “temporary and extraordinary” costs in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, the administration requested $8.7 billion. For what the Department calls its “core” budget, which includes everything else, the request was $47 billion. The total request was almost $56 billion. (The request for foreign operations, which includes money for foreign aid and operating funds for USAID and certain independent agencies, was an additional $36 billion.) If the OCO budget is fully funded, cuts from the administration’s request will come out of the core budget.

The Super Committee
The April budget deal, the Budget Control Act of 2011, established a super committee, the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction. The six senators and six representatives on this committee are charged with developing a plan to cut projected federal spending by at least $1.5 trillion over ten years. Congress will vote on the plan by December 23, under rules that limit debate and prohibit amendments. If the plan is not enacted by January 15, 2012, a program of reductions in projected spending through across-the-board cuts in defense and non-defense spending would come into effect in FY 2013. (Most mandatory spending, like Social Security, Medicare, and federal retirement, is exempt.) Work on the FY 2012 budget and appropriations bills, which of course should have been enacted about six months ago, is in abeyance until the super committee issues its recommendations.

Piñatas
Authorizing and appropriating committees have reportedly been asked to make recommendations to the super committee by mid-October, but the process is not transparent. It seems fairly clear, though, that the State and USAID budget requests will be useful piñatas. The House and Senate appropriators who deal with with State and foreign operations proposed in another context cuts of 18 percent and 12 percent respectively in the administration’s combined State/AID budget request for FY 2012, and they are likely to make similar recommendations to the super committee. House appropriators in a draft bill released by the Republican majority specifically proposed to cut the budget request for bringing on new entry-level foreign service officers and included provisions to allow State and USAID to expand the use of limited-term appointments — non-career personnel brought into the service in mid-career or senior grades to serve for limited periods of time. A budget that looks like the House appropriators’ draft bill will bring State’s foreign service hiring down to replacement levels, roughly 400 officers and specialists a year.

For further information, follow these links:
State/AID budget request
FY 2011 budget (go to Title XI)
Deputy Secretary Tom Nides on a unified security budget
House appropriators’ draft FY 2012 bill
Walter Pincus in the Washington Post, October 1 and October 4, 2011
Steven Lee Myers in the New York Times, October 3, 2011

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State and Dissent

Posted on September 30, 2011 by HWK

FSO Peter Van Buren led a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Iraq, didn’t like what he saw, wrote about it, and got slammed. At least that’s how he sees it. His account of “How the State Department Came After Me” was published on the Foreign Policy magazine website on September 29. It’s worth reading.

Posted in Dissent, Stabilization and reconstruction | Leave a comment

Carter Sahib

Posted on August 23, 2011 by HWK

No, not Jimmy Carter. Carter Sahib, writes Rajiv Chandrasekaran in the August 13 edition of the Washington Post, is Carter Malkasian, a civilian contractor to the Department of State who worked as a political advisor to U.S. troops in the Garmser district of southern Afghanistan.

Malkasian was part of the civilian surge that placed more than a thousand employees of State and USAID, including foreign service officers, civil servants (including many from Agriculture, Justice, Commerce, and other agencies), and contractors into the field to work with U.S. forces and in Afghan society.

Chandrasekaran’s story reads like an Officer Evaluation Report (OER) by a boss determined to get his man promoted. The “uncommonly effective” Malkasian played “a critical role” in bring peace to Garmser. He “single-handedly cajoled influential tribal leaders and mullahs” and “won the trust of skeptical residents … persuading them to reject the insurgency and support their government.”

But even after allowances for hyperbole, the story is a remarkable account of what a well-schooled, well-trained, language-proficient civilian can accomplish politically in a zone of conflict. In the most telling paragraphs of the story, Chandrasekaran writes:

[Malkasian] also shaped the Marine campaign here in a way no civilian has in other parts of the country. He served as a counselor to each of the battalion commanders, influencing decisions about when to use force, and helping them calibrate it with a political engagement strategy. He built such credibility with the Marines — the result of spending so much time in Garmser — that if he urged a different course of action, they almost always complied.

“We need a Carter Malkasian in every district of Afghanistan,” said Maj. Gen. Larry Nicholson, a former top Marine commander in Afghanistan. “You can surge troops and equipment, but you can’t surge trust. That has to be earned — and that’s what Carter did,” Nicholson said. “He provided a continuum of trust that was essential in turning around Garmser.”

Malkasian left Afghanistan in August 2011 after two full years in the field. His replacement, says Chandrasekaran, has not been identified. The U.S. is preparing to cut back its military forces in Afghanistan, pulling out and not replacing the troops that were introduced in the military surge of 2010. The future of the civilian surge, which began at the same time, is uncertain.

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How competitive are the cones?

Posted on August 23, 2011 by HWK

Candidates signing up for the foreign service written exam must choose among five fields or cones in which they want to compete. The choices are consular affairs, economic affairs, management, political affairs, and public diplomacy.

According to the director of the board of examiners (BEX), the most competitive cones — the cones with the most candidates per job opening — are political affairs and public diplomacy, with virtually no difference between them. There is also little competitive difference between the consular and economic cones. The management cone is the least competitive.

The competitive order may change as the needs of the service demand more or fewer people in particular cones, and as candidates shift their preferences.

The director of BEX says that many candidates do not understand what economic or management officers do, which may explain the relative lack of applicants in those cones. She says the Department is trying to explain those jobs more clearly on its website and in its recruitment efforts generally. She also says that the competitive differences among the cones are overshadowed by the competition across the board: about 20,000 people take the written exam each year, competing for about 800 jobs.

Successful candidates are hired in the cone they chose when they signed up for the test, and they can expect to serve the bulk of their careers in that cone. Changing cones after hiring is difficult and rarely approved, although out-of-cone assignments are fairly common. The standard (and sound) advice to candidates is to choose a cone in which you want to work, regardless of the competition.

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Austerity, bumper stickers, and the Foreign Service

Posted on August 13, 2011 by HWK

Michael Mandelbaum, in an August 9 postscript in Foreign Affairs, argues persuasively that “the recent deal over the debt ceiling guarantees that the U.S. government will reduce its spending on foreign affairs.” No surprise there, but Mandelbaum moves to the more debatable conclusion that lower spending means lowered ambitions, a much greater reluctance to engage in military intervention, and a consequent retreat from the kind of nation-building that the U.S. has pursued in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Haiti. Nation-building, he says, is unpopular, does not build nations, and contributes little to U.S. well-being.

Mandelbaum, the Christian A. Herter Professor and Director of American Foreign Policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is certainly correct that military intervention and nation-building have become unpopular. That 2003 bumper sticker, “World Peace through Military Victory,” has gone the way of the Hummer on whose bumper it was stuck. But the argument that U.S. nation-building efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan brought more benefit to those countries than to the U.S. may not apply in less costly and less violent situations: in Haiti, Congo, Sudan, or the former Yugoslavia.

No president may be willing to launch another pre-emptive war or war of choice for many years. But when a deteriorating political situation or power vacuum in a strategically important region threatens to create opportunities for hostile elements to gain new material, psychological, or diplomatic assets, U.S. policy makers will look for ways to affect the course of events. A trained and rapidly deployable civilian or civilian-military cadre, like the Civilian Response Corps that is under construction in the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization in the Department of State, will be a desirable – and inexpensive – tool of U.S. policy. Whether Congress will be sufficiently farsighted, and the administration sufficiently determined, to fund and staff this force is an open question. The record so far (see Chapter 10 of Career Diplomacy) is not especially encouraging.

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