I am not convinced that our troops have been pushed to their breaking point, as you say in the editorial. On the contrary, the surge has worked, and we’re far from breaking, as organizations such as Vets for Freedom and Freedom’s Watch point out. The U.S. is winning the war in Iraq.

Recently, State Department officers in Iraq wanted to quit because they feared for their lives. Excuse me, but don’t all soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines fear for their lives when under fire? If they quit, suck their thumb or crawl away from the enemy, they face court-martial as well as humiliation and disgust from fellow service members.

I’m all for “less guns and steel and more soft power,” but let’s put people in the State Department who belong in Iraq and are not whiners.

Thomas Patrick Folan

Stony Brook, N.Y.

STATISTICS PERSPECTIVE
Navy Times’ Web site ran an Associated Press version of a story by The New York Times that reported that 121 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have committed or been charged with killings since they returned to the U.S. [“Report: 121 vets charged in deaths after tours,” NavyTimes.com, Jan. 15].

The story should have been accompanied by the information that the percentage of crimes and accidents are actually less for service members returning home than for the U.S. population at large. Shame on you.

Capt. David Tuma (ret.)

Arlington, Va.

Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

Anton Van Dalen

THE State Department has announced that it will force 50 foreign service officers to go to Iraq, whether they want to or not. This is the biggest use of “directed assignments” since the Vietnam War, and it represents a long-overdue response to complaints that diplomats aren’t pulling their weight in Iraq and Afghanistan.

However welcome, this is only a baby step toward a larger objective: to reorient the department and the government as a whole for the global war on Islamic terrorism. Yes, this is a war, but it’s a very different war from conventional conflicts like World War II or the Civil War. It is, in essence, a global counterinsurgency, and few counterinsurgencies have ever been won by force alone.

While maintaining military power remains important, even more crucial goals are aiding moderate Muslims, countering enemy propaganda, promoting economic growth, flexing our political and diplomatic muscles to achieve vital objectives peacefully, gathering intelligence, promoting international cooperation, and building the rule of law in ungoverned lands.

The government developed expertise in many of these areas during the cold war, but those skills were lost as budgets were slashed and jobs eliminated during the “peace dividend” decade of the 1990s. Because civilian capacity has been so anemic, an undue burden has fallen on the military — something that soldiers understandably resent.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recognizes the problem and has tried to reorient the State Department. She has, among other steps, moved diplomats out of Western Europe and into the developing world, set up a “war room” where Arabic-speaking diplomats can address the Middle Eastern press, and fostered a clumsily named Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization to plan for nation-building assignments.

Such efforts, however, are unlikely to succeed because they run counter to centuries of State Department tradition that emphasizes liaison work with established governments rather than creating governments from scratch or communicating with foreign citizens over the heads of their leaders.

Modern management theory holds that small, tightly focused organizations are likely to be more effective than large conglomerates that try to do a million different things. If we apply that insight to the State Department, it would make sense to undo some ruinous consolidations that occurred after the cold war, when the United States Agency for International Development was placed within the State Department’s sphere of influence and the United States Information Agency was folded into the department outright. No wonder our capacities in nation-building and strategic communications have withered — their practitioners are second-class citizens behind traditional foreign service officers.

The information and development agencies should be made independent again, and their resources expanded. The Agency for International Development, in particular, has seen a precipitous decline in personnel. In the 1960s, it had 1,900 officers in South Vietnam alone. Today it has only 1,200 to cover the entire world, forcing it to rely mainly on contractors. If we expand its ranks, it could become our lead nation-building agency, sort of a global FEMA, marshaling the kind of resources that have been lacking in Iraq and Afghanistan.

To buttress the growing corps of government reconstruction experts, we should have civilian reservists on call who could be summoned by the Agency for International Development in an emergency like military reservists. They could bring expertise in municipal administration, sewage treatment, banking, electricity generation, and countless other disciplines needed to rebuild a war-torn country. President Bush endorsed this notion in his last State of the Union address, but too little has been done to turn it into reality.

One of the most important shortages we have faced in Iraq and Afghanistan is in experienced police officers who can train local counterparts. Much of the job has fallen on the military police, whose troops are too few in number, and on civilian contractors, who are of uneven quality. We need to fill the vacuum by creating a federal constabulary force — a uniformed counterpart to the F.B.I. that, like the Italian carabinieri, could be deployed abroad

Its efforts could be supplemented by municipal policemen if we pass a law allowing the federal government to call up local police officers without loss of pay or seniority and to compensate hometown police departments for their absence. Along with these police officers, we need a deployable corps of lawyers, judges and prison guards who could set up functioning legal and penal systems abroad.

Even with increased participation from civilian branches of government, the armed forces will still have a major role to play in what President Bush calls the “Long War.” But not necessarily a kinetic role. If we can train and advise foreign militaries, they can fight our battles for us. This model was demonstrated as long ago as the 1950s when Edward Lansdale and other advisers helped the Philippines put down a Marxist uprising, and has been repeated more recently in Somalia and the Phillipines.

Yet, important as it is, the United States military has not put enough emphasis on training and promoting experts in foreign military assistance. Such duty has traditionally been seen as a hindrance to promotion, which has made it tough to attract the best officers.

Lt. Col. John Nagl, a counterinsurgency expert, has suggested setting up an “adviser corps” of 20,000 soldiers. His idea would make advisory service not a career detour but a career in itself, equal, at least in theory, to infantry, armor and other traditional specialties. Some advisers, in turn, could be deployed as part of the “country team” at American embassies — something that happened routinely in the 1950s and ’60s but has since fallen into disuse.

Along with pushing advisory expertise, the armed forces also need to promote linguistic and cultural knowledge. Such skills are to be found primarily in Foreign Area Officers, but that is another career field whose practitioners are traditionally expected to commit career suicide. The military needs to increase the ranks of Foreign Area Officers and to provide more rewards for their much-needed service. We will have a hard time prevailing in today’s war as long as fewer than one-half of 1 percent of all service members have any grasp of Arabic.

Even while expanding governmental capacity, we also need to improve coordination among various branches of government, and between the government and nongovernmental and international organizations. That type of unified action has been in short supply in Iraq and Afghanistan, leading to nonstop complaints about how broken the “interagency” process has become.

James R. Locher, a former Congressional aide who helped draft the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act that brought greater coordination among the different branches of the military, is now leading a nonpartisan consortium of Washington policy and research groups that is trying to devise legislation to enhance the “unity of effort” among different branches of the government. Ideas under consideration include forcing civilian bureaucrats to serve a “joint tour” in a different agency and creating regional diplomatic coordinators who would marshal civilian agencies in the same way that the Pentagon’s Central Command and Pacific Command coordinate military units abroad. A partial prototype of this concept may be tested with the Defense Department’s new Africa Command, which is going to have a larger civilian component than the other combat commands.

Mr. Locher’s goal is to write a bill that would update the legendary National Security Act of 1947, which created the bureaucratic instruments (the C.I.A., Defense Department, National Security Council and the like) used to win the cold war. He hopes to have legislation ready in time for a new president in 2009. That’s an ambitious objective, but it’s one worth striving for if we’re going to adjust to the post-9/11 era of American foreign policy.

Some will no doubt object that to build up these capacities will encourage reckless “imperialism” or “militarism.” But improving our abilities in nation-building, strategic communications, security advising and related disciplines will actually lessen the chances that we will need to mount a major military intervention such as the one in Iraq. Our goal should be not just to deal with the aftermath of wars (Phase IV, in military parlance) but to solve problems before they grow into full-blown wars. In other words, to win Phase Zero.

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Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of “War Made New: Weapons, Warriors and the Making of the Modern World.”

REBEL DIPLOMATS
THE STATE DEPT.’S IRAQ DISGRACE
By FRED GEDRICH
November 8, 2007 — JUST when things seem to be im proving in Iraq, a cabal of State De partment Foreign Service officers rebelled at the prospect of being forced to serve at the most important U.S. diplomatic mission in the world. This disgraceful behavior undermines U.S. policy – and also apparently violates a chief condition of their employment: FSOs are required to serve anywhere, regardless of work difficulty, hardship or danger.

The 6,500 career FSOs are the bulwark of U.S. diplomatic activity. Two-thirds of them serve at U.S. embassies, consulates and missions to international organizations in 180 countries; most of the rest are assigned to the greater D.C. area.

The U.S. mission in Iraq is America’s largest overseas diplomatic deployment, with a complement of 250 FSOs. During one-year assignments in Iraq, they perform vital duties such as helping the fledgling Iraq government reconcile complex sectarian and ethnic political differences, collecting intelligence and engaging in public diplomacy efforts. The State Department has staffed the mission with volunteers, including civil service and Foreign Service retirees, since it opened in 2003.

But in the most recent staffing cycle, not enough experienced volunteers applied. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, at the urging of America’s top diplomat in Iraq, Ryan Crocker, announced plans to “direct” up to 48 highly experienced FSOs to fill the vacancies – setting off a firestorm within the FSO community.

The American Foreign Service Association – the sole bargaining union for 26,000 active and retired FSOs – screamed: “Directed assignments of unarmed Foreign Service members into the Iraq war zone would be detrimental to the individual, to the post and the Foreign Service as a whole.” The union then produced a poll suggesting 68 percent of FSOs “oppose directed assignments to Iraq.”

And veteran diplomat Jack Croddy, speaking at a recent department town-hall meeting, labeled forced assignments to Iraq as a “potential death sentence.”

AFSA, Croddy and like-minded FSOs don’t let facts get in the way of their agenda. The reality is that one State Department diplomat and two diplomatic-security specialists have died in Iraq since the mission was opened – far fewer than the number of American diplomats killed in the bombings of U.S. embassies in Lebanon in 1983 and Kenya in 1998.

Of course, directed assignments are contentious and rare. The union and many FSOs have always resisted forced assignments to State’s 170-plus hardship posts, even when those outposts suffer serious staffing shortfalls. Indeed, State’s 30-year-old volunteer-assignment system is built around FSO preferences – rather than department needs.

Reports from the Government Accountability Office and State’s inspector general over the last two decades show that hardship posts – such as China, Russia and Saudi Arabia – typically experience serious staffing shortfalls. Not so the missions in Paris, Rome and Berlin.

How far has the department indulged its workers? One IG report disclosed that more than half of State’s nearly 2,000 language-designated positions weren’t staffed with qualified linguists – even though the department had abundant numbers of properly trained personnel, deployed elsewhere.

In the last few years, a host of serious critics have called for major reforms to improve FSO discipline and make State better organized and staffed. But, as a Foreign Affairs Council report aptly noted, “Countless reports have been produced to make the department perform its diplomatic missions more effectively, but these reports have been duly filed and forgotten.”

The department can, and needs to, do better. A good start would be to:

* Overhaul, or scrap, the current FSO-assignment system, which places employee preferences over department needs;

* Dismiss any FSO who refuses to abide by the condition of employment to serve anywhere. Foreign Service jobs are the most sought-after in the federal government. Each year, State appoints (hires) only a few hundred out of 15,000 applicants.

* Determine if AFSA inappropriately encouraged FSOs to resist the legitimate policy direction of the president and secretary of State, interfering with the president’s constitutional authority to conduct foreign policy.

The State Department plays a unique and much-needed role in defending American values and promoting American interests – at least, it should.

It certainly has in the past. Throughout its history, the United States has been blessed with dedicated and daring diplomats. Reforming State to undo the current disgrace, to again help the nation face the enormous challenges of a dangerous and unfriendly world, would be a great tribute to their memory – to say nothing of a tremendous benefit to our nation’s security.

Fred Gedrich, a foreign-policy and national-security analyst, served in the U.S. Department of State from 1988 to 1997 and traveled to more than 50 U.S. foreign missions on official assignments

from Today’s Washington Times

Halfhearted at State?
John E. Carey
November 7, 2007
For the first time since the Vietnam War, the State Department has notified career diplomats, or Foreign Service Officers (FSO), that they may be required to accept overseas postings not of their choosing. The order from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was necessary to fill 50 or fewer posts in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

FSOs immediately began to express outrage that they might have to leave cushier assignments for tasks in what could be a danger zone. So Miss Rice convened State’s version of a venting session they call a “Town Hall Meeting.”

A 36-year veteran of the diplomatic corps, Jack Crotty, came to the microphone to say: “It’s one thing if someone believes in what’s going on over there and volunteers, but it’s another thing to send someone over there on a forced assignment. I’m sorry, but basically that’s a potential death sentence and you know it. Who will raise our children if we are dead or seriously wounded?” According to reporters, many of Mr. Crotty’s colleagues applauded.

Outraged military personnel, too disciplined to express anger to the media, contacted several retired military people like myself to ask, “What about our service? What about our children? And why are the elite of the State Department allowed to pick and choose their assignments without repercussions? Didn’t we all take the same oath?”

The fact is that the oath FSOs, and everyone of any importance at the State Department, takes is the same oath military personnel take. But there is a vast difference in the way that oath is respected, apparently.

Military people know they face the Uniform Code of Military Justice if they refuse orders. They know they may wind up standing before a court martial. State Department people, it seems, feel completely within their right to defy the secretary of state and their president. Herein lies the dilemma.

After the tragedy of September 11, 2001, the president of the United States declared a war on terror and the Defense Department mobilized for war. At Foggy Bottom, many career diplomats yawned. What started as apathy has morphed into defiance. And our military men and women know this.

But it wasn’t just the active duty military who took Mr. Crotty’s remarks and his colleagues’ apparent approval as a serious affront: Retired military and Foreign Service officers began to buzz on the Internet.
Mike Benge is a retired FSO who should know something about duty, honor and respect for those who serve and abide by their oath.

Mike was in the Marine Corps before he joined what is now the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). In Vietnam, he served as a Foreign Service officer doing what is now termed “nation-building.”

In 1968, Mike was captured by the North Vietnamese communists and held hostage for more than five years, most of it in the infamous Hanoi Hilton. But since Mike was not a uniformed member of the armed forces, he was not a prisoner of war (POW), so he was held in isolation.

After his release in 1973, Mike again returned to Vietnam as a volunteer and continued his work until the communist takeover in 1975.

Mike, along with many of his colleagues who view service much differently from the current crowd at State, expressed outrage beyond belief that senior State Department officers today are not aware of — or have so little respect for — their oath and their distinguished lineage.

Mike sent us this message: “We had many fine Foreign Service officers who served in Vietnam, quite a few from the State Department who served in various capacities including in danger zones out in the provinces. The closest thing to a ‘green zone’ perhaps was service in Saigon — which was sometimes dangerous,” Mike wrote.

“Every one of these dedicated State Department officers in Vietnam did an excellent job, and many gave the ultimate sacrifice of their lives in service of their country — 27 State Department officials gave the final sacrifice for their countrymen, I believe. Many more from USAID and other government agencies lost their lives, and some like me, were taken prisoner,” wrote Mr. Mike Benge.

Now, is the United States of America mobilized for and fighting a “Global War Against Terror” or not? Knowing that senior State Department officers can choose not to participate without any repercussions makes one wonder.

John E. Carey is a retired career military officer, former president of International Defense Consultants Inc. and a frequent contributor to The Washington Times.

Posted: 11/06/2007

The ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee has called on the President to fire State Department personnel who refused to be deployed to Iraq and replace them with wounded veterans at Walter Reed and Bethesda Hospitals.

“We have a lot of wounded warriors at the [military] hospitals — a pool of great talent,” Rep. Duncan Hunter (R.-Cal.), the last Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and now a candidate for his party’s presidential nomination in ’08, told me outside the White House last week. Hunter was going to a meeting with President Bush as well as former Sen. Bob Dole (R.-Ka.), former Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, and other members of the panel recommending reforms of hospital for veterans.

An angry Hunter was responding to recent front page stories — including one on Page One of the Washington Post November 1st — reporting how diplomats were challenging senior State Department officials about having to serve in Baghdad. The Post reported a town hall meeting in the State Department’s main auditorium attended by hundreds of Foreign Service officers in which complalints about the safety of conditions in Iraq were discussed and one participant characterized service in Iraq as a “potential death sentence.”

In Hunter’s words, “It’s a sad day for the State Department when you can’t get 45 voulunteers to go into Iraq — and even into the ‘Green Zone’, which is fortified — and the U.S. Marine Corps is 180,000 strong and all volunteers.” Among those serving in the Marines, Hunter proudly pointed out, is his son Duncan D. Hunter, now completing his third tour of duty. (The younger Hunter, who has served in Iraq, will shortly complete his latest tour in Afghanistan and return home to compete for the House seat his father is relinquishing after twenty-eight years.)

The San Diego-area congressman took particular exception to a Post report of a woman Foreign Service officer who said she returned from a tour in Basra with post-traumatic stress disorder and discovered that the State Department would not authorize medical treatment.

“I haven’t seen any facts” showing how civilian employees can acquire PTSD, Hunter said, adding that “when one only wants to serve when they have an easy assignment, it has to be resented by the thousands of Americans who have had a loved one who served in the military in Iraq.”

As he prepared to go into the Oval Office, Hunter told me he was going to hand-deliver a his letter of complaint about the State Department to the President personally and that he had also discussed the matter with David Chu, under secretary of defense for personnel.

A few hours later that day, I spoke to Hunter about his meeting with the President. Sure enough, he did hand the letter to the President and “he told me he would look into it,” the congressman from the San Diego-area told me. He also planned to bring up his own Wounded Warrior Bill, which he plans to attach to the Defense Appropriations bill, with the President’s nominee to be secretary of veterans affairs, retired Gen. James Peake.

“And if I have to go out and recruit the veterans [to replace the reluctant State Department officers], I’ll do it myself!” he promised.

OUR OPINION: FOREIGN SERVICE OFFICERS HAVE AN OBLIGATION TO FULFILL

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is right to insist that U.S. Foreign Service officers have an obligation to serve in Iraq, even if they don’t do so voluntarily. An order telling U.S. diplomats that if they are called to serve and refuse will result in dismissal from the Foreign Service has prompted a mini-revolt among U.S. diplomats, but Secretary Rice should stand her ground.

It’s no secret that the war in Iraq is unpopular in some sectors of the government. Nor is there any secret that, when the war began, diplomats who actually knew something about the region were rudely shoved aside by civilian minions of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. They wound up botching the job completely, but that’s not a sufficient reason for U.S. diplomats to refuse an assignment to Baghdad.

It is hard to see how Iraq will ever get back on its feet, but as long as the mission in Iraq remains a national priority, our best diplomats should be there to try to get the job done. Already, as Secretary Rice pointed out, 1,500 Foreign Service officers have voluntarily served in Iraq, and now it’s time for others to step up.

In a heated meeting in Washington last week, several hundred employees of the State Department complained about the call-up. One likened it to a ”potential death sentence.” Agreed — it’s a dangerous posting, but, unfortunately, that’s part of the job. Foreign Service officers occasionally have been sent on ”directed assignments” to remote or dangerous parts of the world. It happened in Vietnam and it will no doubt happen again.

It’s not up to the Foreign Service officers to decide if they like the policy or the way the administration is implementing it. Extra danger pay, leave time and preference on next assignments have been offered as incentives. They signed up to do a job and they should serve.

What is more important?