Full-time deployable specialists wise in the ways of managing faroff states in need (whether they requested it or not) of our administration. Hmmmm. Sounds alot like we're talking about creating our own version of the British Foreign Colonial Office.

As for American civilians' reluctance to sign up for this kind of duty, I am reminded of Captain Blackadder's lament:

“I did like it [soldiering] in the old days, back when the prerequisite of a British campaign was that the enemy should under no circumstances carry guns. Even spears made us think twice.... The kind of people we liked to fight were two feet tall and armed with dried grass.... No, when I joined up, I never imagined anything as awful as this war. I had 15 years of military experience, perfecting the art of ordering a pink gin and mastering the intricacies of propositioning local women in their native tongue, and then, suddenly, a half million Germans hove into view....”

-- Captain Edmund Blackadder MC, mired in a dugout on the Belgian Front during WWI, describing his days with the 19th/45th East African Rifles, while preparing to die pointlessly in a futile “Big Push” against the entrenched Germans.

Administering the natives just isn't much fun when they are shooting back. People don't want to sign up for this kind of thing, even when promised it'll only be for a few months, at most. They just don't believe that.

Americans, at heart, just aren't interested in shipping out to some remote dangerous hellhole to teach the natives democracy, or whatever. They want to live in America. They don't want to ship out to India, Afghanistan, Malaysia, or wherever for 20 years as a civil servant. Or at least not many do in Iraq- style conditions. We are a provincial people, for better or worse.

A telling fact is how few Americans actually have a passport. We aren't much interested in even visiting other countries, let alone living out the rest of our lives there in service of the U.S. government. Those that do are attracted to work like the State Dept.