Richard Feinberg writes a strong op-ed in today’s WaPo, advocating for a more expeditionary foreign service. Citing the problems that fortified embassies and excessive security pose to the work of public diplomacy, intelligence gathering and soft power projection, Feinberg states that DoS simply has to accept more risk if its officers are going to do their jobs.

Yes, it’s a dangerous world, but so is policing our own cities, and we do not suggest that police officers remain barricaded behind their precinct walls. Just the opposite: We now instruct law enforcement officers to walk the streets in their communities, believing that this is the best long-term approach to improving relations with citizens and, ultimately, reducing risk to the officers themselves.

Nor will it ever be possible to eliminate risk for overseas assignments, and attempts to do so become ever more expensive and self-defeating. The only foolproof way to eliminate risk to our diplomats is to bring them home. Better to restore a more considered balance between absolute security and diplomatic effectiveness — and for the nation to recognize that diplomats, no less than soldiers, accept a degree of risk when they enlist.

The comparison to law enforcement officers is apt because it is the one that the military is recognizing. In COIN, law enforcement and stabilization scenarios, force protection is all about personal relationships and understanding the environment. All too often, the term “force protection” seems to be used as a synonym for “body armor,” “barricades,” “mine resistant vehicles,” or “fortifications.” But such forms of protection, as the conflict in Iraq demonstrates, cannot protect against adaptive enemies and can actually impeed other forms of force protection (such as building trusting relationships with local VIPs or learning to feel when things just aren’t right).

Or, Denzel Washington’s character puts it in Training Day,

Alonzo: Roll that window down first.
[Jake rolls down window]
Alonzo: You gotta see the streets. You gotta feel it. You gotta smell it, you gotta taste the streets. How’s your Espanol?
Jake: Uh, mas o menos.
Alonzo: Learn that shit, brother. That shit’ll get you killed. These motherfuckers out there be plotting all types of shit on you.

Alonzo isn’t rolling around LA in an M-1 trying to talk to crackheads through a computer because he doesn’t speak Spanish. This is Feinberg’s point. Doing the job means feeling the streets in foreign and possibly dangerous cities. Since this means that more US diplomats will be killed overseas, he even offers a script for how the secretary of state should respond:

Our professional diplomats are soldiers in the 21st-century battles for information and ideas. They embody our nation’s identity and values. In their service to our country, every day in every major city of the world, they bravely place themselves in harm’s way. We will not let our enemies win by driving us into self-isolation. Those valiant diplomats that fall in the line of duty do so with glory, for honor and the homeland.

The only modification I would make would be to change the tense in the second to last sentence from the future perfect to the simple present: “We do not let our enemies win by driving us into self-isolation.” Maybe more awkward, but I like the implication that we are already not allowing our enemies to drive us into self-isolation and we aren’t about to change that. Gets away from the weakness of bureaucratic prose, where the passive voice and constant assersions of future success dodge the messy questions of who will make those goals reality and how they will do it. It makes clear that the time to do something about the challenge is right now, and that how we deal with this moment can either be a strong reinforcement of our strength or a weak withdrawl towards defeat.

In an article that ties together many of the themes I’ve tracked here at OSD, we get a profile of the USS Peleliu, which is reported to be the first US warship to embark on a purely humanitarian mission.

The amphibious assault ship represents a superior soft-power projection platform. The carrier may have ruled the waves of WWII for force projection in major combat operations at sea, but the amphibious assault ship rules the SysAdmin mission.

Using a government/non-government collaboration to fill the needed skill sets, the Peleiu’s “crew and medical staff [are] drawn partly from civilian charities…such as Project HOPE, the Aloha Medical Mission and dental students from the University of California San Diego.” This crew, combined with the medical capabilities of the Peleiu, will allow the medical staff to treat ten times as many patients as a typical tour would be able to.

While the doctors are treating minor medical ailments, Navy construction battalions will build or repair local clinics and water systems.

While some analysts like Norman Polmar and James Jay Carafano criticize the mission as lacking in military benefit and a waste of activty duty personnel, this use of the Peleiu is a direct result of the reasoning in DoD 3000:

The military’s aid missions didn’t become official policy until Nov. 30, 2005. At the time, acting Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England signed a directive ordering the armed forces to make stability operations – Pentagon lingo for postwar or post-disaster nation-building – a “core mission.”

England largely wanted to make sure that U.S. military forces knew how to plan and carry out reconstruction work of the kind needed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There is military value in building these skills and there is a critical national security need - in addition to the moral imperative - for this capability. That is why having a bureaucratic document like DoDD 3000 is so important: you don’t have to reargue this issue every time an idea like this arises.

And, just as Barnett has said, our military enjoys the SysAdmin mission:

The excitement grew this week as the Peleliu’s sailors loaded supplies for their deployment.

“I prefer to do this kind (of mission),” said Petty Officer 3rd Class Hector Camarino, 26, of Brawley. “It makes you feel good. You get a warm, fuzzy feeling.”