Category: State Department

Foreign Affairs for the 21st Century by Bill Kiehl

~ Matt Armstrong

Friend Bill Kiehl offers a remodel of the State Department at Layalina, Foreign Affairs for the 21st Century:

To re-right the balance in America’s national security structure, the Department of State must be broadened into a true Department of Foreign Affairs (the original name by the way) and like the Department of Defense should be restructured to accommodate the many roles it must play. Within the Department of Foreign Affairs there could be semi-independent sub-departments, similar to the departments of the individual services in the Defense Department, to deal with traditional diplomacy (i.e. state-to-state relations), public diplomacy (similar to the former USIA), foreign assistance (USAID), foreign trade (USTR, FCS, FAS etc.), stabilization and reconstruction (in league with DoD). These Departments within the Department of Foreign Affairs could function as the Department of Diplomacy, the Department of Public Diplomacy, the Department of International Development, the Department of International Trade, etc.

Read the whole thing here.

See also:

  • A Proposal for Reorganization at Foggy Bottom – my proposal to reorganize State
  • Hitting Bottom at Foggy Bottom at FP.com
  • Reorganizing Government to meet hybrid threats at the Stimson Center

Leader for State’s Bureau of International Information Programs to remain a “Coordinator”

~ Matt Armstrong ~ 2 Comments

For reasons that are beyond me, I heard a rumor that the leadership of State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP) will remain a “Coordinator” and not be an Assistant Secretary. In 2008, then-Under Secretary Jim Glassman successfully created the new position, but as of yet, it has remained unoccupied. (Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Support to Public Diplomacy Mike Doran was nominated but never confirmed.) The move was to put IIP on equal footing with the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and the geographic bureaus, all of which are headed by assistant secretaries.

Perhaps this decision will be explained in the yet-to-be-released public diplomacy strategy of Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Judith McHale.

Your thoughts?

One Nation Under Contract – A Book Review Essay by PHK

~ Matt Armstrong ~ 3 Comments

From the first recorded use of mercenaries four thousand years ago, through the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, and until the nineteenth century, mercenaries were regular features of war. It was not Westphalia that disarmed mercenaries, but a confluence of nationalism, technology, and increasing interstate trade that marginalized them. It would be another two hundred years after the birth of the modern state before states would effectively hold each other accountable for the actions of their citizens, started linking the projection of force to a specific geographic territory, and consolidated the decision to personally volunteer and fight in wars away from the people and into the hands of the governments of states that private militaries were “de-legitimized, de-democratized, and territorialized”. The same consolidation seen in privateers was also evident in commercial enterprises as activities from the territory of state was viewed as sanctioned by that government.

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Assistant Secretary for Education and Cultural Affairs

~ Matt Armstrong

According to the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations website, the confirmation hearing for Judith Ann Stock to be Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs will be held Tuesday, February 2, 2010. Testimony will be here (PDF) but it is not yet available (and likely getting polished). (Hat tip to Mark Overmann of the Alliance for International Educational and Cultural Exchange.)

Still no word on a nominee for Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP). Unlike the ECA job, Judith McHale, Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, will get to choose this person. IIP is currently headed by an Acting Coordinator, a very capable retired FSO who just started a six month (maximum) contract. He took over early this month from the previous coordinator, who after retiring as Coordinator mid-2009, opted against renewing his post-retirement six month contract in December.

Perhaps Judith, confirmed in May, wanted to finish her public diplomacy strategy that was briefed to staff Thursday after a long development and a very close hold. The Secretary apparently signed off earlier this month.

Reorganizing State: a comment by Major General Herbert J. McChrystal

~ Matt Armstrong ~ 1 Comment

The State of State: A Proposal for Reorganization at Foggy Bottom and the follow on conversation in the post Department of State and Non-State elicited the following email from veteran public diplomat Yale Richmond (published here with permission):

I knew Gen. McChrystal’s father, Herbert J.  McChrystal, who retired as an Army Major General. We were together 1969-70 in the Senior Seminar in Foreign Policy, a State Department course for senior officers of various government departments and agencies. Herb had served in senior positions at both Defense and State, and I recall him saying once that if we had State’s personnel and Defense’s organization, we would have the perfect government agency.

Yale began his public diplomacy career in Germany after World War II. He is the author of Practicing Public Diplomacy: A Cold War Odyssey, From Nyet to Da: Understanding the New Russia, and other books.


MountainRunner on the Radio

~ Matt Armstrong

My interview with Pete Dominick at StandUp! at XM/Sirius on my policy memo State of State: A Proposal for Reorganization at Foggy Bottom at PPI is available below:

It is no longer accurate to say that State is the foreign policy of the President when the Defense Department owns or dominates so much of the direct and indirect engagement, willfully or not, with global publics and governments. Parity in the organizations is necessary as the two models are not compatible. If the Defense Department were restructured in the mold of the State Department, General McChrystal in Afghanistan would call the shots and General Petraeus, as CENTCOM commander, would no longer directly report to the Secretary of Defense and would be subordinated in rank and responsibilities to McChrystal.

See also:

Department of State and Non-State

~ Matt Armstrong ~ 2 Comments

In The State of State: A Proposal for Reorganization at Foggy Bottom, I intentionally focused on the high-level orientation of the State Department. This is an imperative to make the department relevant and capable today. It is no longer accurate to say that State is the foreign policy of the President when the Defense Department owns or dominates so much of the direct and indirect engagement, willfully or not, with global publics and governments. Parity in the organizations is necessary as the two models are not compatible. If the Defense Department were restructured in the mold of the State Department, General McChrystal in Afghanistan would call the shots and General Petraeus, as CENTCOM commander, would no longer directly report to the Secretary of Defense and would be subordinated in rank and responsibilities to McChrystal.

I knew that shifting the operational focus of the Department from countries to regions, along with the creation of additional under secretaries, would cause significant ripples of changes and require others that may not be immediately apparent. One example is a reader’s recommendation of the need to create specialists, one lost attribute of USIA officers.

The State Department creates Generalists. What it needs are Regionalists. It does the nation little good if its exemplar diplomats are being punted continent to continent.

True.

Recalling History: the rising importance of people and public opinion

~ Matt Armstrong ~ 1 Comment

What today know as the Smith-Mundt Act was originally proposed in October 1945 in the House Foreign Affairs Committee as a key part of the State Department’s reorientation to the changing requirements of the time. Below is testimony to the committee by William Benton, the new assistant secretary of state for public affairs – a position created only the year before as the assistant secretary of state for public and cultural affairs. The legislation, HR 4368, known as the Bloom Bill after the committee’s chairman, it would pass the House in July 1946 but blocked by Senator Taft. At the request of the State Department, it was resurrected in the 80th Congress by a Republican Congressman named Mundt.
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Pentagon wins turf war with State over military aid

~ Matt Armstrong ~ 1 Comment

Josh Rogin writes at FP.com about the expanding realization that State is still not situated to be America’s foreign policy arm.

The Pentagon has won a major internal battle over control of foreign assistance funding, delaying the Obama administration’s pledge to demilitarize foreign policy, multiple sources tell The Cable.

DOD and State have been fighting vigorously over who would be in charge of large swaths of the foreign assistance budget, billions of dollars in total that are used to aid and work with governments all over the world. Both Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have emphasized the need to rebalance national security spending away from the military and toward the diplomatic core, but behind the scenes their offices have struggled to determine where the lines should be drawn. …

Insiders working on the issue also suggested that State didn’t match up bureaucratically inside the fight. The Pentagon just has so many more people and resources to bring to bear, and besides, the State Department’s strategy review, the QDDR, isn’t complete. [emphasis mine] …

The slow pace of rebalancing national security spending and the lack of a comprehensive strategy for guiding that process is the subject of a new book by former OMB national security funding chief Gordon Adams, entitled Buying National Security: How America Plans and Pays for Its Global Role and Safety at Home.

"The tool kit is out of whack," Adams told The Cable. "There’s been a major move over the last 10 years to expand the Defense Department’s agenda, which has been creeping into the foreign-policy agenda in new and expensive ways."

This is not surprising. I wrote back in September that the US Department of Agriculture was asking for $170 million to be reallocated from State, USAID, and DOD to USDA for its work in Afghanistan. We have seen sadly too little support for State’s Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization up to now despite past efforts.

Hopefully the QDDR, State’s own strategy review, the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, will be a blockbuster. This is unlikely because this strategic planning and programming is not in State’s DNA and the only senior person with experience with something like the QDDR is the Secretary, who was exposed as a Senator on the Senate Armed Services Committee. However, I’m eager to see the final QDDR and hope substantial change comes out of both the process and the recommendations.

See also:

  • A Proposal for Reorganization at Foggy Bottom at Progressive Policy Institute
  • Hybrid Threats Require a Hybrid Government at Stimson Center
  • Hitting Bottom at Foggy Bottom at ForeignPolicy.com
  • State Dept Project Signals Foreign Policy Shift at Washington Independent

The State of State: A Proposal for Reorganization at Foggy Bottom

~ Matt Armstrong ~ 2 Comments

See my policy memo entitled “The State of State: A Proposal for Reorganization at Foggy Bottom” published by PPI. (PDF here, 910kb)

“The past decade has seen the U.S. government expand its activities around the globe in response to complex and stateless threats. In the face of these challenges, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen, and members of Congress have all called for increasing the resources and capabilities of the State Department to roll back what Gates has termed the “creeping militarization” of foreign policy. But efforts at reform are hindered by an institutional structure rooted in a 19th-century view of the world.

The days of traditional diplomacy conducted behind closed doors are over. The democratization of information and means of destruction makes a kid with a keyboard is potentially more dangerous than an F-22. Addressing poverty, pandemics, resource security, and terrorism requires multilateral and dynamic partnerships with governments and publics. But the State Department has yet to adapt to the new context of global engagement. The diverse threats that confront the U.S. and our allies cannot be managed through a country-centric approach. For State to be effective and relevant, it needs to evolve and become both a Department of State and Non-State.”

Download the full memo here. Comment here at MountainRunner or there.

The State of State: A Proposal for Reorganization at Foggy Bottom

~ Matt Armstrong

The State of State: A Proposal for Reorganization at Foggy Bottom by Matt Armstrong, 13 January 2010, in ProgressiveFix.com.

The past decade has seen the U.S. government expand its activities around the globe in response to complex and stateless threats. In the face of these challenges, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen, and members of Congress have all called for increasing the resources and capabilities of the State Department to roll back what Gates has termed the “creeping militarization” of foreign policy. But efforts at reform are hindered by an institutional structure rooted in a 19th-century view of the world. …

The State Department’s hierarchy was fine for another era when issues were confined within state borders by local authority, geography, and technology. But in recent years, the structure’s flaws have become conspicuous. The department’s ability to respond to crisis is fragmented and sclerotic. When successes do happen, they tend to be the result of individuals working around or outside the bureaucracy. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has circumvented the current system with crisis-specific czars called Special Representatives. These Special Representatives, like Richard Holbrooke for Afghanistan and Pakistan, operate like super ambassadors with regional powers that should reside – but don’t – in the regional bureaus. …

Realignment will not be easy. It requires the committed support of the president, the secretaries of state and defense, the National Security Council, and Congress. But the potential benefits are considerable. Adjusting the focus of the State Department from country to region would permit the secretary of state to exercise more effective leadership and oversight over the instruments of power. It’s the logical step to take in a new era of stateless challenges, and a demonstration to the world that U.S. power does not always have to wear combat boots.

Recalling history: the 1947 Smith-Mundt CODEL to Europe

~ Matt Armstrong

For two months in the Autumn of 1947, a Congressional delegation (CODEL) traveled Europe. Their purpose was to study America’s current information and educational exchange service, the conditions affecting it, with the goal of formulating recommendations to shape and make more effective US programs which “can fully implement US foreign policy.” Led by Congressman Karl Mundt (R-SD) and Senator H. Alexander Smith (R-NJ), the delegation was sponsored by the special Mundt subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in support of the pending Smith-Mundt Bill.

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Reorganizing Government to meet hybrid threats

~ Matt Armstrong ~ 2 Comments

Read my guest post over at the Stimson Center’s Budget Insight blog titled Hybrid Government:

Nine years ago we went to war with the enemy we had, not the enemy we wanted. For several years after 9/11 we struggled to comprehend how military superiority failed to translate into strategic victory. We created labels like “irregular” and “hybrid” to describe adversaries that did not conform to our structured view of international affairs shaped by the second half of the Cold War. Today, conflict is democratized, not in the sense of bicameral legislatures but strategic influence in the hands of non-state actors empowered by falling barriers to information acquisition, packaging and dissemination as well as easy access to the means of destruction and disruption, physical and virtual.

Calls for “smart power” and a “whole of government” approach has resulted in countless articles, memos, and reports on updating the State Department, the Defense Department, and other agencies to confront the challenges of today and tomorrow. The focus on improving the operational elements of national power, while necessary, ignores a critical national security actor that has received little to no attention or pressure to adapt to the new and emerging requirements: Congress.

Read the whole thing here. Comment there or below.

The Real Psychological Operation for Afghanistan

~ Matt Armstrong ~ 3 Comments

This article is cross-posted at the George C. Marshall Foundation. Also at AOC’s IO Blog.
On December 1, 2009, President Obama announced his Afghanistan strategy and what immediately followed was an expected and unoriginal cacophony of sound bites based on selective memories of the past and shallow and ignorant visions of the present and future. The decline in the public’s support for the struggle is surely a delight for Al Qaeda and the Taliban who, unlike our pundits and some in Congress, understand this is foremost a psychological struggle for the minds of people in “Af-Pak” and around the world to affect their will to act.

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CRS Report: U.S. Public Diplomacy: Background and Current Issues

~ Matt Armstrong

U.S. Public Diplomacy: Background and Current Issues by Kennon H. Nakamura and Matthew C. Weed, 18 December 2009, at Congressional Research Service.

…The attitudes and perceptions of foreign publics created in this new environment are often as important as reality, and sometimes can even trump reality. These attitudes affect the ability of the United States to form and maintain alliances in pursuit of common policy objectives; impact the cost and the effectiveness of military operations; influence local populations to either cooperate, support or be hostile as the United States pursues foreign policy and/or military objectives in that country; affect the ability to secure support on issues of particular concern in multilateral fora; and dampen foreign publics’ enthusiasm for U.S. business services and products.

This report cites Matt Armstrong and his work several times throughout the report.

Public Diplomacy Alumni Association Announces Top Achievers

~ Matt Armstrong

Public Diplomacy is too often misunderstood and more frequently ill-supported. Even within the State Department, stories abound of poor perceptions of the public diplomacy career track from other career tracks (unfortunately named “cones” in State). I particularly liked a recent anecdote where an Econ officer who took a public diplomacy job was disappointed to her he would have to actually work in his new assignment. His expectation of a free ride was the reason he chose a tour in the PD cone.

Stories like that make the recognition from the Public Diplomacy Alumni Association all the more important. Too often successful despite lack of resources and support, State Department public diplomacy officers do excel. Below is from the PDAA:

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