Dahayun:

At the risk of sounding like a supporter for the Foreign Service, the real problems are structural/organizational. There are some bright and dedicated people in the foreign service, but there is a profound inadequacy of "breadth" of experience and training, and much "making it up as they go."

But the problem, as with the big and never-ending diplomatic review, is the leadership and resource gap extending over the organization from above. How do you successfully take a relatively small group of specialized people trained in a very narrow and constraint organization, then assert their position (without resources and training) into huge and disparate goals?

It's great, for example, that a bunch of senior management should push for responsibility in challenging civ-mil environments, but does no good if the organization, in reality, can't deliver on its end. The hard work of organizational change (to accomplish the bit-off missions) is even further hampered by inter-governmental squabbling for which they have succeeded at little.

The "whole-of-government" thin, for example, is a race horse designed by committee in lieu of an actual Reconstruction/Stabilization Corps which congress would never actually fund for anything more than an unstaffed "coordinative" role. Whether State could ever properly manage such a task or structure (diplomacy AND development), which is the Congressional concern, is really an academic discussion because it was never funded.

In the meantime, the tasks at home are outpacing the willingness to fund ANY further serious commitments overseas, so it will be interesting to watch, but, like KWs' approach of watch what they do, not what they say, that diplomacy, at best, may evolve to marginally different outward appearances, but really isn;t going to change much absent substantial leadership effort. Better to bet that it will rain tomorrow if it is raining today, than to bet that State will become something magically different in any hurry.

Perhaps more effective to attack the training grounds (foreign service education, poli-sci education) and build incremental change, but there is no apparent shift of attitude there now.