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Why Does the State Department Struggle to Protect its Budget? Blame Organizational Culture
I received a note last week from a former USAID administrator lamenting the fact that while the U.S. Department of Defense annual budget remains comfortably north of $700 billion, the U.S. Department of State struggles to keep its measly $58 billion per year. There are a lot of reasons why it's easier to pass a mammoth defense budget than to protect money reserved for foreign aid and diplomatic operations. If U.S. foreign service officers were constructed in as many congressional districts as the F-22, for example, I suspect we would have a lot more congressmen fighting to increase their ranks.
But in their excellent book Buying National Security: How America Plans and Pays for Its Global Role and Safety at Home
The State Department's dominant culture -- the Foreign Service -- takes pride in [the department's] traditional role as the home of US diplomacy. Diplomats represent the United States overseas, negotiate with foreign countries, and report on events and developments. Diplomats, from this perspective, are not foreign assistance providers, program developers, or managers. As a result, State did not organize itself internally to plan, budget, manage, or implement the broader range of US global engagement ... State department culture focuses on diplomacy, not planning, program development and implementation.
They go on to lament that "Foreign Service Officers increasingly have responsibility for program planning, budgeting, and implementation, tasks for which they receive minimal training."
There are a number of ways in which military organizational culture changes, and the literature on the subject is extensive. (For an introduction, you can hardly do better than Theo Farrell and Terry Terriff's The Sources of Military Change: Culture, Politics, Technology
*There is, of course, a much larger body of "rationalist" explanations for military change and innovation, starting with this book
AM:
You might want to check out Dima Adamsky's new book. I confess I haven't read it yet, but it looks intriguing.
IIRC, while one might term "Sources" rationalist, in that the international system forces states to *rationalize* their military doctrines, a lot of it focuses on how organizational culture hinders rational military doctrine (which then needs to be "rationalized" and "integrated," in part by civilian leaders, to meet coming threats).
Similarly, IIRC, "Winning" is arguably organizational, in that it focuses on the need to grant "legitimacy," when a service needs a new branch, by appointing a leader from an established service branch.
Neither of my snippets captures the whole story - how could two-line "summaries" do justice to entire (and good) books? - but I do think there's a fair amount of organizational culture within each book; FWIW, I'd say "Sources" is more rationalist than "Winning," because "Sources" attempts to meld itself into Waltz's "Theory" which, of course, posits rational unitary actors, including, of course, nation states.
ADTS
AM:
You might want to check Daniel Drezner's piece in the AJPS on organizational politics in the State Department (I think it's about ideas, so, admittedly, file it under the "non-rationalist" category).
ADTS
Oh, we FSOs are made in many states - we just haven't managed to convince our Congressfolks to give business incentive tax breaks to our parents yet! ;-)
You weren't hanging out with my boys at USMTM were you? I spent way more time than I ever wanted to at Eskan Village...
Uhm, AM, I hate to be the one to point this out. But the primary reason that State can't get funding is because the only program that almost all polls show support for cutting is foreign aid. Really, if you can, check out some of the available polling. There are two trends, 1. the public vastly overstates the amount of money spent on foreign aid and 2. the public really, really wants to see foreign aid cut. The State Department could be run by administrative ninjas with the world's best pr firm and there would still be minimal support in Congress for increased funding.
Here's an example if you're interested: http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/04/how-politically-feasi...
That's a flawed argument, NHDemocrat. Those same polls also reveal that most Americans believe that Foreign Aid comprises an enormous percentage of our national expenditures - which, if it were even close to being true, would more than justify the sorts of cuts that Americans consequently endorse. (What's really interesting is that if you ask them what the foreign aid budget should be, they'll give you a percentage figure that's an order of magnitude larger than what we actually spend - thinking that they're cutting what they're in fact proposing to expand.) Moreover, there's an important distinction between foreign aid and the foreign service. Just as most Americans are hesitant to ship billions in military equipment overseas but adamantly support spending the money on our own troops, I suspect that many don't want to shower riches on foreign shores but would be happy to pay for a real foreign service.
I think Abu M is somewhat closer to the mark. The dominant FSO culture focuses on the interactions between bureaucracies. It's not a culture that prizes innovation or initiative; it rewards, on the whole, the construction of steady, stable, and mutually beneficial relations between our bureaucrats and theirs. And that's actually fine. I have no problem with that.
The trouble is that this is hardly the only mission of our State Department. It's a little bit like having only the US Army, and charging it with defense at air and sea. Just as Army officers tend to believe that wars are ultimately won on the land, FSOs tend to believe that diplomacy is the most effective means of advancing the national interest. The creative, adventurous FSOs who accept postings to remote and dangerous areas, who work actively to construct and engage with civil society abroad, who build partnerships with other government agencies in the furtherance of their missions, who develop expertise in program administration, who focus on foreign assistance and development - these are not the ones who tend to climb the ladder most swiftly. I want to see such functions housed within the State Department, but it's shear folly to think that the Foreign Service can train one set of FSOs, and deploy them both to the Quai D'Orsay and Kandahar.
The solution, I think, is the creation of two Services within the State Department. (If we can have four within DoD, surely we can manage to cope with two at State.) One would be the Foreign Service, fulfilling the traditional roles and functions of consulates and embassies. The other would be something like an International Service - those who plan and run American programs abroad, principally through USAID, but also through other facets of the Department. When stationed abroad, they'd report through an integrated command structure - ambassadors and other senior embassy officials could be drawn from either service. But creating separate career tracks, separate promotion and evaluation criteria, and separate cultures for these two extremely different sets of functions seems like a vital imperative. Even in the unlikely event that we could reorient the Foreign Service to focus on such tasks, something very important would be lost in the process as it abandons its present focus. We'd be much better off taking the existing quasi-separate USAID track within State (it has its own hiring authority, and uses slightly different criteria) and elevating it to a co-equal status as a path to the top.
Sorry, AM, but have to agree with NHD that the situation mostly reflects the politics, not DoS lobbying failures. I work with a lot of DoD people and get frustrated hearing so many officers say that "State needs to get itself the resources it takes to do the job". That just totally misses the degree of antipathy to foreign aid and to DoS in Congress. NHD is right about polling data. You might also read Steve Kull's, "Misreading the Public" from the late 1990s, where he shows that as limited as public support is, interviews with Congressional staffers and Reps showed that Congress was convinced that public opinion was far *worse* than it actually is, since the opponents tend to be far more vocal -- sending letters and faxes, showing up at town halls, donating to other candidates, etc. The incentives all point against supporting DoS funding and better internal organization at State will only make a small difference. Consider the Conflict Reconstruction & Stabilization initiative (S/CRS, Carlos Pascual's thing) in 2005-06. Important and timely program, well organized, cheap ($250 million), and directly supported by Sec Rice and the White House. Yet, they could not get it through a Congress controlled by their own party! They did however get money transfered from DoD to cover it instead.
Fundamental lesson that military / DoD types need to understand about the interagency: agencies can not magically increase their budgets just by writing a strategy, listing requirements and asking Congress, "more, please". Even DoD is about to discover limits.
That's an interesting idea, Cynic, but it will NEVER fly in Congress. As I mentioned, State *did* try to get something like that off the ground already, albeit at a small level, and that effort had very visible Secretary-level and White House backing. And it went absolutely _nowhere_ in Congress.
Also keep in mind that State doesn't always help itself. For example, the FSO union doesn't want to give hazard pay to those serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
http://shadow.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/05/07/a_modern_greek_tragedy
ADTS - Adamsky's stuff is pretty interesting. Here's a link to the book for others interested: http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Military-Innovation-Cultural-Revolution/dp.... It's narrow in some ways but makes some great points. Dima is also a sharp guy.
Cynic:
As always, your post is thorough and thought-provoking. I wish I could say something more profound, and lengthier, than what I'm about to write, but, you might want to take a look (if a short one) at the Drezner piece I cited above, and - far more to the point - both "Winning the Next War" (Stephen Rosen) and "Bureaucracy" (James Q. Wilson). The latter is a magnum opus (and quite readable), and deals with organizational culture quite explicityly. It actually uses the Foreign Service and the State Department as an example (I think, for one thing, Wilson makes the point that embassies break-ins occurred because the Foreign Service did not consider embassy security to be their primary task, although less trivial examples, not always directly involving the Foreign Service but nevertheless related to it.) As noted above, Rosen (as does Drezner with regard to the State Department) discusses how one establishes a new branch within an existing bureaucracy - namely, at the top, staff it with someone senior who already possesses legitimacy with his or her peers.
ADTS
Cynic:
I'd also take a look at Dana Priest's "The Mission," in which senior military officers (or at least one) say cuts to State's budget are criminal. More generally, it argues (somewhat implicitly) that there is a resource asymmetry: State is so understaffed and underresourced that the military naturally fills the void of tasks which State should, but cannot perform. A great anecdote IMO that underscores Priest's point is one of the times when Petraeus and Crocker flew to DC to brief (or be grilled by, depending on your perspective) Congress, Petraeus had his own plane in which to fly; Crocker was happy that he met the State Department criteria for flying business class.
ADTS
Actually, when I think about it, I wonder if the title to the Comment is misleading. James Q. Wilson places organizational culture in *opposition* to larger budgets (at least at times). Everything being equal, State would want more money and the maintenance of its organizational culture. But since everything is not equal, State might prefer to maintain its organizational culture rather than accept more money. In other words, organizational culture and a preference for more money might be oppositional.
ADTS
I think ADTS is on to something. This is a case where "signaling" a shift in organizational culture might lead to more funding, but for internal bureaucratic/political reasons, State is resistant.
If you look at how that State Department budget is spent, you find that it's a pretty lucrative cash cow for various private contractors:
BearingPoint Statement on $218 Million USAID Afghanistan Contract Award. (March 2007)
This new contract complements BearingPoint's 15 year history in providing a full range of economic governance, training, management, and technology consulting services to developed and developing economies, including projects in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cyprus, Egypt, Kosovo, Montenegro and Poland.
It might be a good idea if all federal agencies were required to maintain a current public list of their private contracts, and of the percentage of their budgets that flow to private contractors - as well as performance records on those contracts. Why?
The report - titled "DOD Obligations and Expenditures of Funds Provided to the Department of State for the Training and Mentoring of the Afghan National Police" (.pdf) - says that the U.S. State Department has completely failed to do any serious oversight of the private contractors [Dyncorp] to whom they paid 1.6 billion dollars to provide police training at dozens of sites around Afghanistan.
http://www.dodig.mil/Audit/reports/fy10/10-042.pdf
Overall, the private contractors are doing pretty well off these prolonged wars - why end a good thing? There's enough for everyone to get a piece of the pie, isn't there?
DynCorp has emerged as one of the big winners of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which now generate 53% of DynCorp's $3.1 billion of annual revenue...
Logcap has meant big revenues for KBR, which earned an estimated $700 million of income (before interest and taxes) on $31.4 billion of revenues off of the program, mostly in Iraq, but been dogged by accusations of overbilling and negligence.
In July the Pentagon announced that it planned on having DynCorp and Fluor take over KBR's work in Afghanistan under Logcap, doing everything from providing laundry to food and fuel.
http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/30/dyncorp-kbr-afghanistan-business-logistics-dyncorp.html
Take the money and run!
Gunboat Diplomat:
I'd argue that the State outsourcing might undermine AM's contention that State receives less money than Defense because it lacks the legislative backing which, say, massive weapons programs do. However, I'd also argue that said outsourcing reinforces the idea of State organizational culture: State would rather outsource tasks it does not consider to be congruent with its "organizational essence" than perform them itself.
ADTS
Gunboat Diplomat:
I agree with ADTS. State seems to have a very strong sense of its core competency or critical task as an organization. Outsourcing might definitely represent an attempt to reinforce that by making sure "other" tasks don't creep in. . . .
@ Scott Wedman - one might assume that Foreign Policy is a reliable source of information, but remember that blogs are opinion and therefore not subject to fact checking. The State Department has hardship differentials and danger pay - which are very different concepts. About two thirds of overseas posts are hardship posts, but only a few qualify for danger pay. Previous leadership had proposed that service in a warzone ought to be a positive factor in evaluating personnel for promotion. The union argued that since the general principle is that promotions are based not exactly on performance, but on demonstrated capacity to take on greater responsibility, simply riding around in a Stryker doesn't demonstrate that capacity. The compromise is that credible performance in a warzone is a considered a positive factor in evaluating for promotion. (I don't remember the exact wording, but the point is just going to Iraq shouldn't help you get promoted; going and being effective should.)
@ AM - I can't cite any sources beyond my own experience, but I think that you are right that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have not affected the organizational culture of the Foreign Service to the same extent that they have the military for a couple reasons. First, whereas the military is more or less defined by war, the diplomatic corps is not - one can say that our missions in Iraq and Afghanistan (and Pakistan - and for those in USAID Sudan as well) are our most important missions without suggesting that we ought to change the way we are doing things in Paris or Ougadougou. Second, and not unrelated, a good percentage of the State personnel in Iraq (and increasingly in Afghanistan) - and this is especially true on the PRTs - are not career employees. There are good reasons for this: State didn't have the personnel, nor the personnel with some specific skill sets, but it also means that the people with experience taking those lessons learned back, aren't taking that experience back to State.
I can remember end of the day discussions about whose role post-conflict nation-building ought to be - State or DoD's. Neither organization was really prepared for nation building (alright "reconstruction and stabilization") in the 20th century. The lesson State has drawn is to develop S/CRS to provide a capacity to ramp up in response to crises, but reconstruction and stabilization is still not State's primary mission. Nor should it be - a world in which that is our primary diplomatic mission would be a dystopian world.
It must be "worry about DoD taking over State" day!
Over at Stimson Budget project - more analysis on the risks
http://budgetinsight.wordpress.com/2010/05/13/relying-on-the-kindness-of...
I just wrote my senior thesis about the state department's organization and culture, and I concluded that they are very much to blame for State's lackluster performance in the war on terror. I rely a lot on wilson for the theoretical grounding for my policy recommendations.
Cynic has the right idea. The Foreign service already has several separate career tracks for jobs like consular affairs, management, or political affairs. USAID needs to be made formally part of the State Department (right now it's an independent agency that reports to the Secretary of State) have it's own cone (say, development affairs). The state department also needs serious reorganization, that it's organization runs parallel to that of the defense department, but that's a whole other post.
Oh, and ADTS has it exactly right about the state department's under resourcing and staffing. The military has been taking over foreign affairs because it has the most money and bodies, with pernicious affects on our ability to carry them out successfully.
Cassander (and Cynic):
I'm struck by the parallels between restructuring the State Department and restructuring the Intelligence Community. Perhaps some problems are so intractable that any form of restructuring will still fail to solve the problem. Intelligence failures will occur, for example, whether there is a DNI or not; whether a DNI lessens the likelihood or severity of intelligence failure is probably an unanswerable question. And besides the fact that the new organization might be equally optimal at best, or perhaps even less optimal, there are also the disruption costs of organizational change to consider as well.
ADTS
AM et al,
The situation is complex and Gordon and Cindy's comment on the operational design of State can explain several shortcomings in State's ability to execute and shapes how the department engages Congress and other departments. There are, however, many other issues that must be considered, including, but not limited to,
* State's failure to engage Congress through formal channels
* State's failure to engage Congress through informal channels
* Failure of Congress to engage State
* Silence from State's oversight Congressional committees
* Lack of interdisciplinary knowledge in Congress
* Absence of Serious Outside Advisory Capacity
Details can be found at my blog: http://mountainrunner.us/2010/05/understanding_states_budget_wo.html
Phenomenally educational thread for some of us: thanks ADTS, Cynic et al....
How do you change an institutional culture? Incentives, I suppose?
Madhu:
I don't know *too* much about organizational theory per se, although I would certainly recommend Wilson's "Bureaucracy" for anyone seeking to do so (and Google "Organizational Behavior Syllabus" to see what you find?). But I'll offer a perhaps plausible example using the work of Stephen Rosen, "Winning the Next War." He argues that to introduce a new branch into the military, one must utilize officers who have "legitimacy" with their peers. Let's substitute, now, for a new branch in the military, a new doctrine in the military, e.g., FM 3-24. One could argue that if Petraeus was successful in doing so - and I'm suggesting this as something merely plausible, not definitive - it was because he possessed said legitimacy. Ricks, "The Gamble," somewhat waffles on Petraeus's legitimacy - on the one hand, for example, he was "a PT stud" among other things; on the other hand, he talked to reporters - but I think one can at least *make the case* that Petraeus possessed legitimacy within the military. Hence, the line of reasoning would proceed, it was easier for him to promulgate FM 3-24 than it would have been for others, because he possessed legitimacy. Abstracting from this case, if one chooses to accept it as I have written it, then one way to change an organizational culture might be to take someone within that organization who has legitimacy and have them implement said change(s).
ADTS
@Motwor: Here's the key question. Suppose you have two people that have served equally effectively. One in Afghanistan and one in Costa Rica. Who gets promoted first? Seems like if the State Dept promotion process doesn't immediately say "Afghanistan", that's a problem. Since you seem expert on this (legitimately), what's the truth?
There are a lot of comments here that appear to address the idea of the Foreign Service, or the State Department, reforming itself. I understand the arguments being made on this thread and believe some have merit, but a lot of organizations find the task of reform without strong external pressure, forceful leadership or both quite beyond them.
I may have missed one or two mentions through carelessness, but I don't think anyone on this thread has even mentioned a recent Secretary of State. That can't be a coincidence. Bear in mind that the modern State Department (also the modern Foreign Service) was the product of reform forced on the institution from the top down, by a new Secretary of State whose relationship with both his President and Congress was strong enough to permit him to drive through fundamental changes in a relatively short period of time. He was succeeded by another very strong Secretary, allowing the changes to become part of the institution.
Leaving aside for the moment precisely what changes are necessary at State, the last really strong Secretary the department had served nearly 20 years ago. Under those circumstances, why wouldn't one expect inertia to overawe advocates of reform?
A 5-10 year "cooling off" period for all State Department employees before they are allowed to take a job with any private government contractor might be a good idea... (and not just for State, either). Why?
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 22, 2006
www.usaid.gov
WASHINGTON, D.C. - The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has awarded the Afghanistan Infrastructure and Rehabilitation Program (AIRP) contract to the joint venture of The Louis Berger Group, Inc. and Black & Veatch Special Projects Corp. for rehabilitation and construction of vital energy, water and transportation infrastructure across Afghanistan. The AIRP total contract value is $1.4 billion and extends through 2011.
What kind of projects are they pushing through? Take a look at the progress made by Black & Veatch in Kabul, Nov 2009:
But much, so far, has not gone according to plan. The 280-million-dollar a year cost to run the power plant full tilt is more than a third of total tax revenues for the entire country; the plant would supply electricity to less than two percent of the population; and the plant's cost - already more than 300 million dollars - is roughly three times that of any similar plant in the region.
State pushed this, and Karzai loyally instructed his own finance ministry to back it as well - but why build a fossil fuel-powered plant in a remote region that will be too expensive to operate?
McChrystal's idea of giving small diesel generators to villages made more sense, even if those villagers don't have any reliable fuel supplies either - but it's still a poor choice. Why they aren't doing the obvious thing and giving them small-scale solar photovoltaic systems for lighting and water pumps is beyond me.
Compare USAID to the Asian Development Bank Central Asian solar initiative:
Mr. Nag noted the significance of the ASEI launch taking place in Central Asia, a region that is particularly reliant on carbon-intensive energy sources but well-suited to solar energy development. "Given Central Asia’s growing demand for electricity, the availability of desert land for large- scale solar energy development, and their stated commitment to offset high carbon emissions, several countries in the region are excellent candidates for ADB support through this initiative," Mr. Nag said.
USAID, in contrast, chooses expensive inappropriate projects that seem aimed at pleasing their private contractors more than the local population - and all that does is piss the locals off and make the soldier's job that much harder.
The point is well taken, but the ADB initiative isn't about the local population either. It's about someone from outside Afghanistan guessing about what would work there, based on the suitability of the land for space-intensive solar collectors.
That doesn't make it wrong; I like the idea. I doubt that either people in the State Department or contractors outside of it know enough about solar power generation in an environment like Afghanistan to feel confident about making that the focus of their efforts to bring electricity to the country. That they chose instead to attempt the kind of project they are familiar with may not speak highly of their understanding of the country or of the strategic direction they were given, but it doesn't appear relevant to the point about State Department employees working for private contractors.
Is anyone here looking at the National Debt, our deficits, our monetary base growth (hint = Weimar), the implosion of the EU fantasy and the Euro, the fact that your house is on fire and you are getting cost estimates for the new kitchen?
And BTW your wife is scrogging your brother, and that kid who reminds you of him..there's a reason. That giggling behind your back? Your shrink's wrong. They are laughing at you...
OK I made the last part up. They actually feel sorry for you.
Guys we and our allies are over our eyeballs in debt, you have a military that apparently thinks it's running local relations with Hermann over upcoming REFORGER exercises, grunts that will soon get medals for not shooting (does that include the ones that refrained out of fear of jail?) and a culture in Washington - perfectly exemplified here - that acts as if we still have endless money to spend. Sorry. Running the printing press does not make you wealthier.
You really are like Enron just before the lights came on. The smartest guys in the room looking at carpet patterns for the Corporate Jet. Even Lehman had more of a clue where they stood than DC and the rest of the Federal Sector. The State govt's get it BTW. They have to, they can't print their own money.
Moving forward, and getting on with the people's business: who are you going to pick to be the CFO (Chief Financial Officer - the Villain)? I'm betting it's another Jew - Ben Bernanke? Greenspan was a good sport about doing what the Pols wanted him to do and then mostly staying quiet about getting all the blame.
Of course no one in DC was involved. Nope. Not us. It's these money men (not that we don't pull the strings and give them whatever they ask for).
Wonder if it'll work again?
ADTS> I agree absolutely about the failure of intelligence reform, but the efforts there were really half-assed. They just added a box to the org chart and hoped it would fix all the problems, which is foolish, but has the virtue of not disrupting anyone's turf. But we already have 17 intelligence agencies, we need fewer of them, not more. Ditto at State. The department is enormously top heavy and poorly organized. Most of the bureaus in DC should simply be eliminated and rebuilt from scratch on a regional basis. State should be organized like the Defense Department, with strong regional ambassadors responsible for operations and the Department in DC responsible for training, allocating resources, and logistical support.
that last post was me
Cassander:
My thinking was influenced by “Analysis, War, and Decision: Why Intelligence Failures Are
Inevitable" (Richard Betts, World Politics). IIRC, he presents skepticism (pessimism?) that any nominal solution to better "handle" the intelligence function possesses (perhaps) benefits and costs; any organizational arrangement entails tradeoffs. I did not write a senior thesis on State, so you know more than I do, and a lot of what you write makes sense. Still, the parallels make me question whether any redesign would simply create new problems, even if it (hopefully) solves existing ones. No organization or organizational arrangement is perfect, in other words; they each contain flaws. What problems would reorganizing State fix, and without factoring in costs inherent in the disruption of the existing organization, what problems might be *created* were State to be restructured, either as you or others have suggested? In other words, I suppose I wonder about the potential for unintended consequences, and the tendency to see the world's problems, and not content oneself with the observation that this might be "as good as it gets."
Incidentally, what you wrote about earlier - the genesis of State - might (would? is?) be an example of organizational "imprinting" according to Wilson (Bureaucracy). And your point about the absence of a strong leader at State gels nicely with work on principal-agent problems, and whether workers choose whether or not to comply with their nominal boss (eg, work versus shirk). (Apologies if I'm telling you what you already know.)
Finally, Madhu et al, I've been trying to think: are we talking about organizational *behavior,* or organizational *culture*? The latter implies an ideational entity or phenomenon, to me. Furthermore, I wonder if we're conflating culture with irrationality: whether by having a dominant (hegemonic?) world view an organization ceases to be rational - an arguably exceedingly hard concept to pluck out of the ether, in my opinion - is to me an open question. Rational in what sense, and by what and whose standards? To me, changing organizational behavior is hard, but can be done, and depends on many factors, but one can *possibly* (depending on, say, legislative or corporate governance oversight) achieve it (by, say, altering incentive structures). To change something ideational seems far more difficult, and I don't know how one accomplishes it. I have some ideas - eg, force people from inside the organization to have exposure and interaction with people from outside the organization - but nothing really concrete.
I'm guessing that management consultants might have some ideas (or proffer them, at least, to make large sums of money), and so too the organizational behavior theorists who teach them in business school, before sending them on their way so the students can make far more money than their former teachers within nanoseconds. Then again, it's not like business school professors don't consult - see David Maister - so maybe there's some justice in the world after all.
(Boy, do I sound bitter. And for the record, I'm not a business school student or graduate.)
ADTS
Forgot to add: Nor a business school faculty member.
ADTS
You're definitely right that all organizational structures involve tradeoffs, and the state department (like intelligence) has an inherently difficult and hard to measure task assigned to it. Wilson actually wrote in an earlier article "it's a shame every nation must have a foreign office, since none can have a good one."
That said, I think we can definitely do better than we're doing now. Right now, the state department lacks any coherent organizational structure. The department is out of control, not because it's gone rogue, but because literally no one is in charge, despite being bloated and top heavy. It's also mostly incapable of cooperating with the Defense department on a coherent basis and, perhaps more importantly, has no interest in such cooperation. The history of defense unification is really relevant here. Inter-service rivalry hasn't gone away, but It's a lot less bad post Goldwater Nichols than it was before. Seemingly minor changes to the command structure at the top resulted in a great deal of change in how the military functioned as a whole. I think the same thing can be done at State, with similar structural changes.
And you're right that changing culture is basically impossible. When Steve Jobs took over apple, he laid off whole divisions and rebuilt them from scratch rather than try to change how they worked. That said, if you change behavior, it will eventually alter the culture, and the best way to change behavior is to change incentives. If you change what people have to do to get promoted, you can change behavior in the face of culture. Imagine how quickly, say, the Air Force would change if you declared that fighter pilots would no longer be promoted past 0-6. IF we create well funded career paths that require the sorts of behaviors we want, people will drift towards them.
nuts
Cassander, I like your layoff idea? How do we fire AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE from today's State Department? :D
Du4 & cassander
If you take a look at what happened in 2004/05, when Colin P. was in office, he essentially re-engineered the organization and made leadership / management training mandatory. Also, CP friend's at the WH / Pentagon / NSA identified and carried-out a re-engineering of the Office of Non-Proliferation and the Office of Arms Reduction, which the Pentagon essentially pulled the strings on, since the OAR is run by a Commissioned U.S. Military Officer and not a FSO. There are a few other important offices in DOS that had incidents like this occur as well. Many GS Employees who were specialists lost their jobs. This in turn didn't effect very many FSOs. Only domestic operations saw cuts and the flood gates were opened on hiring FSO and overseas specialists when the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan started. Over the last decade, there have been some positive changes in how DOS operates, but there are still major hurdles that have to be overcome.
The Pentagon is a hungry animal and wants total control of everything around it. If your agency has power and DoD can't monitor or control your organization, it will eat / destroy you. That's the mindset of many who work in DoD, when asked about DOS. In all... DoD has a record of not playing well with other's, not having the ability to get access to certain people or organizations and not having the education and specialized skills to get certain types of work accomplished. This is probably why the Department of War was split back in the old days, to get different kinds of world accomplished in separate organizations..... among many other reasons.
I have to agree with AM when he says the rank’s in DoD need to be thinned. Perhaps they also require a couple GLTG FSO's in charge at the Pentagon, so they know how "it feels" to have someone "different" in charge. :-)
Du4 & cassander
If you take a look at what happened in 2004/05, when Colin P. was in office, he essentially re-engineered the organization and made leadership / management training mandatory. Also, CP friend's at the WH / Pentagon / NSA identified and carried-out a re-engineering of the Office of Non-Proliferation and the Office of Arms Reduction, which the Pentagon essentially pulled the strings on, since the OAR is run by a Commissioned U.S. Military Officer and not a FSO. There are a few other important offices in DOS that had incidents like this occur as well. Many GS Employees who were specialists lost their jobs. This in turn didn't effect very many FSOs. Only domestic operations saw cuts and the flood gates were opened on hiring FSO and overseas specialists when the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan started. Over the last decade, there have been some positive changes in how DOS operates, but there are still major hurdles that have to be overcome.
The Pentagon is a hungry animal and wants total control of everything around it. If your agency has power and DoD can't monitor or control your organization, it will eat / destroy you. That's the mindset of many who work in DoD, when asked about DOS. In all... DoD has a record of not playing well with other's, not having the ability to get access to certain people or organizations and not having the education and specialized skills to get certain types of work accomplished. This is probably why the Department of War was split back in the old days, to get different kinds of work accomplished in separate organizations..... among many other reasons.
I have to agree with AM when he says the rank’s in DoD need to be thinned. Perhaps they also require a couple GLTG FSO's in charge at the Pentagon, so they know how "it feels" to have someone "different" in charge. :-)
Du4> Well, they're government employees, so we can;t fire most of them. But we can reassign them. The truth is the State Department has a lot of really capable people, they just get used in really stupid ways. Though, since I want to work for them, I admit being somewhat biased.
Look at a state department org chart, and It's insane. There are more than 50 people at the rank of assistant secretary or higher, about 10 times the number relative to the size of the department that other agencies have. Briefly, what, I want to get rid of every under or assistant secretary and their respective bureaus except for the regional bureaus. Then I want to promote the secretaries of the regional bureaus to undersecretary level, have them report directly to the Secretary of State, basically turning them into the state department equivalent of combatant commanders, then have them work directly with their counterparts at Defense. The paper, of course, is a lot longer and more detailed. If anyone is interested, I'd be happy to send it to them.
Visitor> From what I've read, Colin Powell's tenure has been largely forgotten. His changes didn't really stick, or if they didn't. they didn't actually change much.
I think a lot of you, even in trying to be sympathetic to State's needs, are approaching it from a very military (or militarist) perspective. You assume that State should be trying to fulfill a fairly realist, interventionist mandate. I don't disagree - I'm not using those words as the judgments they sometimes are as much as excuses for labels when I'm writing casually - but it colors your conclusions.
USAID, for instance, isn't integrated as well into State as you might think not for the sake of bureaucratic inefficiency, but so that there's a distinct break. USAID staffers view the FSO corps and the Secretary as short-term thinkers focused on politics and immediate gratification: they, by contrast, are supposed to be investing in the long view and building up countries so they can be useful partners in the world community and not the STD-ridden whores of international diplomacy.
The kind of rampant imperialism that DOD so often demonstrates is leavened by its one talent: it's fairly good at letting different approaches boil away in its different cauldrons. Special forces have very different doctrine and thought than armor commanders, and them again from the fighter-pilot mafia, but all of these cultures exist with DOD in some vague approximation of harmony. The National Security Council does this too, though not as well.
But there's not other places in government where you really see this. Treasury, Commerce, and Interior, under a DOD model, could all fit in under the same secretary and everyone would be terrified of the Hexagon or whatever massive building they had. They have very different cultures and approaches, though, and they don't get mixed. And not for no reason: the last time people tried to combine departments and services for synergy, the monstrous result was DHS, which is still trying to figure out what the fuck is going on nine years later.
So caution is advisable in trying to take structural and organizational solutions to problems at the State Department. As much as we can point figures at their cultural disconnect from the Pentagon - which is obnoxious in both directions, why the hell do we need Blackwater guarding State, and why the hell did State think it warranted special forces for protection in Iraw? - I think the biggest problems lie in their schedules.
Almost every FSO handles a schedule as full of meetings, powerpoints, urgent paperwork, and sudden crises to make Petraeus and McChrystal seem like peers. The imbalance between the obligations and demands placed upon the State Department and the number of FSOs and staffers they have to throw at those problems is massive, and not weighted in the favor of the department. The cultural response has been to embrace endurance, brilliance, and constant improvisation. They make it work, largely - over the short term. It's to their credit.
But as anyone who's worked for a while in Washington knows, it's easy to get caught up in the adrenaline highs and lows of a packed schedule and think that you must be accomplishing something with so much work being done. The truth, though, is that everyone - particularly people handling, y'know, foreign relations - need to take time to step back and look at the big picture and what's being accomplished.
Everyone falls prey to this - a famous articulation of this problem was given to one of our last chairmen of the joint chiefs when he asked a friend how he was doing on the job. I think that it particularly affects State.
Very useful threads; and painfully common themes; but the challenge is - who is going to fix this?
The Problems;
Every internal and external review of State Department organization and operations always reaches the same conclusion; State still manages to recruit and hire extraordinary people; gives them incredible professional challenges all over the world at an early age. But, State is so underfunded, understaffed, and distracted by the explosion of new tasks and bureaucratic petty foggery - that little gets done, and the best and brightest leave the Service.
The Frustrations;
And, the daily personal frustrations of overseas life, petty bureaucratic obstacles, family unfriendly assignments, punitive HR policies; and inferior pay and benefits - compared to GS civil service status - or other agencies and NGOs - will take their ultimately toll on an officer and their family. My A-100 instructor on the first day in the Service said: "If you're smart enough to be in this FSO class; you're are smart enough to get a much better job, and a far better career. So decide why you're here, and why you should stay"
The Mission Crisis;
The latest crisis at State is the quiet growth of the security services. Diplomatic Security now controls the largest bureau budget and largest number of employees and contractors. Absurd for State to be in the global security business; when the World's Best Security is already provided by the Marine Diplomatic Security operations. This should be handed back to the Marines tomorrow. At Post in a failed State; who do you want on the other end of the phone when things go badly? Some unknown contractor, hired at the cheapest price, with unknown capability, training or support; or the United States Marines....
The USAID Crisis;
The USAID budget and Congressional support crisis is never ending. State USAID remains one of the worst manged US government programs; according to every independent review. The current SIGAR and OIG inspection evaluations on Afghanistan programs are instructive; and typical of USAID programs generally. If USAID were a global corporation, the leadership and management would be terminated for failure. Instead of yet another peace corps / social service / soft culture head - focused on process.... it would be instructive to hire the CEO of Federal Express or some other global service corporation; and focus on field performance and financial management; and not soft and fuzzy process metrics.
The Colonial Service Crisis:
The lasted challenge is resisting some new form of British Colonial Administration Service - to take over and operate failed states after our military interventions. State is a policy and diplomatic mission; the FSO community has no training or experience in operations management. Running a meeting is different than operating an operations business. Most FSOs have never managed more than a junior staff or secretary. AND HR actively resists any management or MBA or corporate ops training or assignments. Building and running operations on the ground; in a failed state with no infrastructure - is an overwhelming challenge for an experienced ops manger.
The Budget Crisis:
The budget crisis is not a real issue; the State and USAID budget is more than adequate to achieve the appropriate missions. The problem is acquiring new missions; that do not belong to State. And, not acquiring the budgets and political support. A useful sanity check is to read State Department phone book, and ask how many of these people and these tasks really belong at State. Or could be shut down, transferred to other agencies, NGOs, or outsourced. The first step is a serious ops budget review with both expense and capital accounts.
The Coke-State Comparison:
Coke and State operations are about the same size; in budgets, people, assets, real estate and global locations. The comparison in costs, performance and management systems is fascinating. And instructive - as an example of how well State could run.
The Leadership Crisis:
Not clear when we will see a Secretary, and 7th floor leadership that understand how valuable and fragile the State Department officer corps and foreign service national community is. And, not clear who will take active, positive, long term steps to reform and protect the Service.
Bright Lights:
The only bright light in this is Pat Kennedy; who has been running the back office for years. And, knows the service well, and struggles daily to make it work better. But the Undersecretary role has now been handed to another short term political appointee.
Dim Lights:
Senior leadership and operations management have always been the fundamental weakness at State. When the Congress decides to address these 2 core problems, then we might see some changes. But there are no bright lights in Congress.
First Steps:
The first step is to hire a serious leader with Congressional and popular support; to take over as Director General of the Foreign Service. Time to recruit someone like Jim Leach, former FSO and Iowa Congressional Representative; or Paul Bremer, to take over the State Department HR policies and FSO culture.....
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I think the fundamental issue here is much simpler. The institutional culture of the Department of State does not view itself as an agent for the realist raw self-interest of the United States. Rather, I feel far too many FSOs and their cronies, especially the younger generation, see themselves as global emissaries for good will, peace, love and happiness. When I envision wht State should be it is an organization of men and women who possess an agressive notion of "America First" whose job it is to go throughout the world and get America what it wants. We do not do development for developments sake. The primary motivation of any foreign aid ought to be (again my opinion) solely executed to make Americans safer and richer, whether directly or indirectly.
We need to be careful about the institutional culture and message at State; there are many voices, and many positions.
At the street level; the sanity check is any FSO or Foreign Service National at the end of a 12 hour day; in an isolated post at a failed state. You will find them much more focused on fixing the immediate disaster in their cable traffic and outside the front gate; (and wasting time managing the Congressional Policy and Shopping delegation); and not on spreading good will, peace, love and happiness.
USAID is another story; and the corporate culture is very much about process rather than performance; and much less willing to advance American cultural, policy or ecoomic interests and values. Much has been written about the cultural and process at USAID that hinders development.
The global development industry; both government and NGOs; is remarkably self-sustaining; even after billions of dollars spent and continuing failures. It is instructive that the greatest innovation in development is micro-finance - which came from outside the developing industry and culture. And, is still not supported by USAID.
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