Foreign Relations Experts Urge U.S. To Beef Up Numbers Of Its Available Diplomats

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Washington — The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have overstretched the U.S. Foreign Service, damaging its morale and threatening its performance around the world, charged a coalition of advocates for diplomats Tuesday.

The Foreign Affairs Council, a group of 11 nonprofit organizations, said in a report that the State Department needs to hire 1,100 foreign service officers simply to restore the capabilities it had when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice took her post at the beginning of 2005.

“The Foreign Service is at the front end of a personnel crisis, and if something isn't done ... we're going to have a very, very serious situation a year or so from now,” Thomas Boyatt, a retired U.S. ambassador and the council's president, said at a news conference.

The council said Rice has required diplomats to carry out a more aggressive mission of “transformational diplomacy” to prod other countries to adhere to democratic principles. But at the same time, they have had to cope with wartime strains, inadequate language and skills training and more overtime work.

In addition, about 750 have been required to take one-year stints in sometimes dangerous postings where they are not allowed to bring their families.

Over the past two years, the Bush administration failed to anticipate the need for foreign service personnel, including in Baghdad, where about 200 Foreign Service Officers work in a 1,000-person embassy, the largest in the world, the council said.

At the same time, Congress has rejected the administration's requests for additional personnel in the past two budgets.

About 200 Foreign Service jobs abroad are unfilled, and about 900 other training slots needed to give diplomats language and other job skills are unavailable. About 9,000 diplomats and others work for the Foreign Service.

Officials of the advocacy group said that the recent shift of diplomats from Europe to the Middle East and elsewhere has left embassy staffs in Europe sometimes unable to get their work done on time.

Despite the morale problems, however, statistics do not indicate that Foreign Service Officers are quitting their jobs at higher rates, Boyatt said.

In the 1990s, with the end of the Cold War, Congress cut the staffing and budget of the Foreign Service by about one-third. In President Bush's first term, then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, alarmed by short staffing of the organization, added about 1,000 officers. But now those have been “vacuumed up” in Iraq, Afghanistan and other new danger spots, Boyatt said.