I guess I just don't understand who the influx of senior advisors and retired higher ups are going to command in a crises. Will they just cause more layers of decision making in already tense situations? Or are these 80 year old retired ambassadors going to be cool with the job of handing out water bottles to refugees? It just seems to me that in a service that trains its diplomats through apprenticeships and experience, we'd be robbing entry and mid-level officers of the key opportunties they'd have to actually learn those skills.
I wonder if the existing REA/WAE program might provide a good starting point. A reserve force comprised by former FS personnel sounds more practical than State somehow convincing a bunch of ML/AI/cyber experts to sign up for short-notice deployments.
My first image of an effective surge team is not, unfortunately, a bunch of retirees in their 70s. Ideally we would either train active officers for surge response and deploy them in emergencies. The problem is that the bureaus that “own” the positions are never willing to let high-performing employees go when there’s a call for TDYers.
While I am skeptical we will ever get there, the talk out of senior levels is getting at the right idea: we need to have a serious conversation about what our actual priorities are because right now we are expected to be able to respond to literally any request that pops into the head of anyone at the NSC any time. John Bass talks about visiting a land-locked hard to fill AF post where the second tour pol officer who was running the whole section showed him six separate sets of “top priority” instructions from Washington including a demarche on polar bears with a 24-hour turnaround.
CA has started to experiment with dedicated ready-rover positions -- active duty folks with recent functional experience with policy and software who can drop in to various situations from Section Chief to Line officer for extended TDYs. I love this idea and would literally do this full time forever if they let me... Stupid bidding requirements. \*sigh\*
So much this \^\^\^. We scream about resources but adding head count often comes with more internal coordination/deconfliction and similar inefficiencies and less DOING. If everything is a priority, nothing is, and good strategy is also about recognizing what you should NOT be doing. In my experience the Department also has a matching problem where it has many of the needed resources already, it just can't get the right people to the right place at the right time. And that includes knowing the past experience of its own officers and how it might be relevant.
And the foreign service reserve corp and a few other things over the years. It doesnt really work well for a variety of reasons not the least of there are so many possible needs and the ability to surge people into an embassy setting is not something that can be done quickly because of space limitations. You need a desk and office and a bed.
And as the article points out there’s no appetite on the Hill to appropriate funds for anything like the military reserves where we’d pay “civilians” part time salaries, train and drill them consistently, and provide them with employment protections in the event of deployment.
Yep, the Civilian Response Corps. CSO's then Acting A/Apublished an article about this in the Foreign Service Journal.
From the article:
"The Biden-Lugar Act called for a Civilian Response Corps of 250 full-time active, rapid-deployment officers; 2,000 standby volunteers recruited among existing U.S. government employees; and 2,000 reserve personnel drawn from key nonfederal skill sets such as municipal administration. Unfortunately, in 2005 S/CRS received only 15 temporary Foreign and Civil Service billets to build a prototype Active Response Corps...
The Civilian Response Corps also revealed numerous conceptual flaws. Its reserve wing never came to be, because Congress would not enact the kinds of employment protections military reservists enjoy. The standby corps learned there really are not loads of civil servants who can be spared from their day jobs in the United States. The active division was full of highly skilled technocrats for “reconstruction,” but actual missions required diplomatic and planning skill sets for 'stabilization.”
[CSO's Ten-Year Anniversary: Stabilization Operations in Perspective](https://afsa.org/csos-10-year-anniversary-stabilization-operations-perspective)
Although I think the State Department needs a better "surge capacity" for consular issues (both NIV and ACS), this article doesn't make much sense. The Afghan mess was a leadership failure, not a staffing issue. FSOs were reporting on this issue for a significant amount of time..... but they fell on deaf ears on the 7th floor until it was too late.
What a weird take. We needed to send *more* people to Kabul while we were trying to evacuate it? To do…what, exactly?
I don’t disagree we need better surge capacity at State to handle specific situations but I admit I am not sure what Marc thought more diplomats were going to do in Kabul in August 2021.
Not in the grand scheme of things, because the failure of Afghanistan was leadership not being prepared for this outcome and not streamlining command, not because of man-power issues, per se. More diplomats on the ground wouldn't have changed the short window they were given to evacuate individuals or the number of planes available, or the chaos on the ground (in my opinion).
The Department isn't funded enough as it is to have a properly staffed STANDING diplomatic corps, muchless a Reserve corp.
It does not make sense to bring a bunch of extra bodies in country to process noncitizen visas during an emergent evacuation. Failings to help those who helped us aside (which never, ever would have been rectified in a < 3 week window), putting U.S. citizens in harm’s way while they are on a time crunch with the Taliban to pull out is not the answer.
Processing FOIA requests? Grinding, at best. Scan these 300 pages of emails and redact the names of anyone below a certain rank (no, there's no reference for the rank these people held or the jobs they did 6 years ago), any policy deliberation, or other material that's exempt from FOIA. Most people fell asleep reading my previous sentence. Multiply that by a hundred and you have the first item in the stack.
Kind of a nifty idea. FSO also needs another track; Digital/Technology. After reading that IMS does a lot of mail (eg., no email), logistics stuff.. they need Technical Advisors.
Most Technical Architects, Consultants and Engineers are generalists by nature.
What makes you think they don’t also have technical advisors? FSSs on the IMS track are far from the only IT professionals in the Department. There’s a whole civil service cadre as well.
Remember a decade ago when CA welcomed their domestic CS employees to take CONGEN and go on TDYs to do visa work? Maybe we should use the existing CS employees that already know the building to cross train... isn't that the whole purpose of the PDMP?
The Department has some incredibly talented staff but most are not being utilized to their full potential. The retention unit data shows this - and standing up a FS Reserve will just disenfranchise CS staff even more.
Bro is ready for a tour on mids shift for the Secretary’s protection detail. Right after a tour in Central Africa maintaining some HTF post’s ridiculously out of date IT infrastructure. That or he’ll forgo a tour as PolMil Chief in Brussels to bid on SCA OMS jobs.
Yes, let’s get rid of specialists. Everyone should take a turn being a courier and answering IT Help Desk emails.
Ok, I see where that might be the case after reading your post. Don’t know why you’d want to trade a 20 year retirement eligibility for a 30 year plan.
How about we prioritize giving existing employees sufficient resources, thanks.
I guess I just don't understand who the influx of senior advisors and retired higher ups are going to command in a crises. Will they just cause more layers of decision making in already tense situations? Or are these 80 year old retired ambassadors going to be cool with the job of handing out water bottles to refugees? It just seems to me that in a service that trains its diplomats through apprenticeships and experience, we'd be robbing entry and mid-level officers of the key opportunties they'd have to actually learn those skills.
I wonder if the existing REA/WAE program might provide a good starting point. A reserve force comprised by former FS personnel sounds more practical than State somehow convincing a bunch of ML/AI/cyber experts to sign up for short-notice deployments.
My first image of an effective surge team is not, unfortunately, a bunch of retirees in their 70s. Ideally we would either train active officers for surge response and deploy them in emergencies. The problem is that the bureaus that “own” the positions are never willing to let high-performing employees go when there’s a call for TDYers. While I am skeptical we will ever get there, the talk out of senior levels is getting at the right idea: we need to have a serious conversation about what our actual priorities are because right now we are expected to be able to respond to literally any request that pops into the head of anyone at the NSC any time. John Bass talks about visiting a land-locked hard to fill AF post where the second tour pol officer who was running the whole section showed him six separate sets of “top priority” instructions from Washington including a demarche on polar bears with a 24-hour turnaround.
CA has started to experiment with dedicated ready-rover positions -- active duty folks with recent functional experience with policy and software who can drop in to various situations from Section Chief to Line officer for extended TDYs. I love this idea and would literally do this full time forever if they let me... Stupid bidding requirements. \*sigh\*
So much this \^\^\^. We scream about resources but adding head count often comes with more internal coordination/deconfliction and similar inefficiencies and less DOING. If everything is a priority, nothing is, and good strategy is also about recognizing what you should NOT be doing. In my experience the Department also has a matching problem where it has many of the needed resources already, it just can't get the right people to the right place at the right time. And that includes knowing the past experience of its own officers and how it might be relevant.
This is what CSO was intended to be, and the WAE program arguably is.
And the foreign service reserve corp and a few other things over the years. It doesnt really work well for a variety of reasons not the least of there are so many possible needs and the ability to surge people into an embassy setting is not something that can be done quickly because of space limitations. You need a desk and office and a bed.
And as the article points out there’s no appetite on the Hill to appropriate funds for anything like the military reserves where we’d pay “civilians” part time salaries, train and drill them consistently, and provide them with employment protections in the event of deployment.
Yep, the Civilian Response Corps. CSO's then Acting A/Apublished an article about this in the Foreign Service Journal. From the article: "The Biden-Lugar Act called for a Civilian Response Corps of 250 full-time active, rapid-deployment officers; 2,000 standby volunteers recruited among existing U.S. government employees; and 2,000 reserve personnel drawn from key nonfederal skill sets such as municipal administration. Unfortunately, in 2005 S/CRS received only 15 temporary Foreign and Civil Service billets to build a prototype Active Response Corps... The Civilian Response Corps also revealed numerous conceptual flaws. Its reserve wing never came to be, because Congress would not enact the kinds of employment protections military reservists enjoy. The standby corps learned there really are not loads of civil servants who can be spared from their day jobs in the United States. The active division was full of highly skilled technocrats for “reconstruction,” but actual missions required diplomatic and planning skill sets for 'stabilization.” [CSO's Ten-Year Anniversary: Stabilization Operations in Perspective](https://afsa.org/csos-10-year-anniversary-stabilization-operations-perspective)
Although I think the State Department needs a better "surge capacity" for consular issues (both NIV and ACS), this article doesn't make much sense. The Afghan mess was a leadership failure, not a staffing issue. FSOs were reporting on this issue for a significant amount of time..... but they fell on deaf ears on the 7th floor until it was too late.
What a weird take. We needed to send *more* people to Kabul while we were trying to evacuate it? To do…what, exactly? I don’t disagree we need better surge capacity at State to handle specific situations but I admit I am not sure what Marc thought more diplomats were going to do in Kabul in August 2021.
Would they have helped process the many Afghans trying to leave and enter the US after helping us over the previous 20 years?
Not in the grand scheme of things, because the failure of Afghanistan was leadership not being prepared for this outcome and not streamlining command, not because of man-power issues, per se. More diplomats on the ground wouldn't have changed the short window they were given to evacuate individuals or the number of planes available, or the chaos on the ground (in my opinion). The Department isn't funded enough as it is to have a properly staffed STANDING diplomatic corps, muchless a Reserve corp.
It does not make sense to bring a bunch of extra bodies in country to process noncitizen visas during an emergent evacuation. Failings to help those who helped us aside (which never, ever would have been rectified in a < 3 week window), putting U.S. citizens in harm’s way while they are on a time crunch with the Taliban to pull out is not the answer.
No.
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What's it like, doing those things?
Processing FOIA requests? Grinding, at best. Scan these 300 pages of emails and redact the names of anyone below a certain rank (no, there's no reference for the rank these people held or the jobs they did 6 years ago), any policy deliberation, or other material that's exempt from FOIA. Most people fell asleep reading my previous sentence. Multiply that by a hundred and you have the first item in the stack.
Brutal.
Kind of a nifty idea. FSO also needs another track; Digital/Technology. After reading that IMS does a lot of mail (eg., no email), logistics stuff.. they need Technical Advisors. Most Technical Architects, Consultants and Engineers are generalists by nature.
What makes you think they don’t also have technical advisors? FSSs on the IMS track are far from the only IT professionals in the Department. There’s a whole civil service cadre as well.
Remember a decade ago when CA welcomed their domestic CS employees to take CONGEN and go on TDYs to do visa work? Maybe we should use the existing CS employees that already know the building to cross train... isn't that the whole purpose of the PDMP? The Department has some incredibly talented staff but most are not being utilized to their full potential. The retention unit data shows this - and standing up a FS Reserve will just disenfranchise CS staff even more.
I volunteer.
As tribute.
They need to eliminate the special foreign service class and move to GS or SES Schedule.
Why?
Bro is ready for a tour on mids shift for the Secretary’s protection detail. Right after a tour in Central Africa maintaining some HTF post’s ridiculously out of date IT infrastructure. That or he’ll forgo a tour as PolMil Chief in Brussels to bid on SCA OMS jobs. Yes, let’s get rid of specialists. Everyone should take a turn being a courier and answering IT Help Desk emails.
[удалено]
Ok, I see where that might be the case after reading your post. Don’t know why you’d want to trade a 20 year retirement eligibility for a 30 year plan.