As part of a plan to reshape the diplomatic corps so that it can respond more quickly in times of crisis, the State Department next year will begin requiring Foreign Service officers to serve in hardship posts overseas if they want to be considered for promotion to senior positions.
The department, as part of its plan, also has set up a special office for reconstruction and stabilization to help deal with critical events and has taken steps to identify employees who could be deployed quickly as "first responders" during a crisis or for a sensitive project.
"Basically, what we're trying to do is to create a diplomatic service that will do more in a more dangerous world," Ambassador W. Robert Pearson, director general of the Foreign Service, told a group of reporters this week.
About 7,000 Foreign Service generalists and specialists serve overseas, and a third of them pull duty in what State calls "greater hardship posts," where security and health conditions are difficult. At 15 of those posts, families are not even permitted to accompany diplomats.
The pressures on State have grown sharply since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
To deal with changing global conditions, the department has created its own "Foreign Service Reserve," which is made up of employees with special skills who can be mobilized for duty in other parts of the world, Pearson said.
The department has borrowed a database from NASA that can be used to build an inventory of the skills of Foreign Service and civil service employees at State to get the right people deployed more quickly than in the past.
"This will allow us, in a short period of time . . . to pop out everyone who ever was involved, let's say, with Kosovo, did refugees, speaks Serbo-Croatian. We can do this for any country or any circumstance in the world and very quickly," Pearson said.
State also has stepped up its hiring over the last three years, bringing in the building blocks for a revamped Foreign Service.
The plan for remaking the diplomatic corps includes mandatory leadership and management training for officers and new career requirements aimed at fostering a corps of diplomats with more diverse experience, Pearson said. "This means not only traditional issues, political and economic, but also expertise in environmental issues, maritime issues and scientific issues, narcotics issues," he said.
Diplomats will be encouraged to improve their foreign language skills and, when possible, learn another language, he said.
The goal, Pearson said, is "to broaden the overall experience so we can magnify our strengths."
Under the plan, the department will require Foreign Service officers who have completed five years of service and are being converted to permanent career status to take assignments at one of the "greater hardship posts" or fill a critical position to climb the ladder into the Senior Foreign Service.
In the past, officers were expected to do their fair share of overseas duty, but not necessarily at "greater hardship" posts.
