Dayahun:

True, the people exist outside the system, but none exist within the self-regenerating system of diplomats hiring diplomats.

In civilian planning, the first thing you learn to do is to understand and interpret the work of many different experts and specialists into any analysis. plan or program.

Core diplomats are not trained to work in multi-specialist environments so they are left to stumble around.

The foreign service is driven by a very rigid annual peer review process that, in so many ways is the core of it's weaknesses. You are not actually going to change anything in the foreign service until those annual peer reviewers understand and appreciate a junior doing something different than what they always did.

Decades ago, the foreign service was a very different thing, and some of those oldsters are some really bright and effective folks who spent their lives (along with their families) deeply embedded in many different communities, but they are they are almost all gone through retirement.

For many different reasons, the current foreign service is primarily drawn from a different well, and creates and perpetuates a very different ethos and culture. Changing that, with them, is the only path to changing the foreign service. There are some breakthrough/breakaway folks, but they don't get to a place to change things.