Science and Technology in
United States Foreign Affairs

Copyright © 1999
by Robert G. Morris


CHAPTER 17. Science and Technology in the Foreign Service
 

"...We could make much more use of professionalism in the conduct of foreign policy...However, I am quite prepared to recognize that this runs counter to strong prejudices in sections of our public, particularly in Congress and the press, and that for this reason we are probably condemned to continue relying almost exclusively on what we might call 'diplomacy by dilettantism'."
George Kennan


Introduction and Background
Previous chapters portray the reluctance with which science and technology were integrated into the operations of the State Department: first science adviser 1951-5; science adviser's office 1958; science office 1962; science and technology office 1967; no bureau before 1970; no assistant secretary as bureau head until 1974; and then only at the express direction of Congress.

The early foreign service of the United States, then termed the diplomatic service, was prestigious -- every president from Washington to Jackson served in it -- but it was characterized as well by officers of wealth and judicious contributions to political candidates.  The sister consular service was composed of businessmen appointed to promote U.S. commercial interests abroad.  The modern foreign service dates from the Rogers Act of 1924 that set up the competitive service as known today, merging the consular service into it.  The Foreign Service Acts of 1946 and 1980 have modernized earlier legislation.

The Foreign Service
The United States foreign service is relatively small, with about 12,000 U.S. employees in the 1990s and 9500 foreign nationals at some 265 diplomatic and consular posts in more than 180 countries.  The existence of a small number of multilateral posts should be mentioned: these include U.S. diplomatic missions to the United Nations in New York, Geneva and Vienna; to NATO in Brussels; to OECD in Paris; and to the European Union in Brussels.

The home department for the foreign service is the Department of State, but not all employees of the department are members of the foreign service; many are civil service employees.  The services are separate and the main difference is the assignment process: civil service officers generally accept assignments in the United States; foreign service officers must accept assignments abroad, and possess all the knowledge of language, culture and history that go with making an assignment overseas useful to U.S. government interests.  The director general of the foreign service is a senior foreign service officer within the Department of State.

Admission
Admission to the foreign service is generally by examinations: survivors of a rigorous written test are invited to contend in an oral trial.  Recently 12,000 have taken the written exam in one year.  Entrant FSOs are called up from the list of the successful contestants.  In 1995 only 90 new positions were available, although the number changes from year to year.  New FSOs must choose a nonbinding "cone" or specialty.  The classical cone career tracks are political, economic, consular and administrative.

Their general knowledge and training suit these FSOs for a wide range of assignments in Washington and all over the world where they report and analyze politics, economics and social conditions.  Many have a liberal arts education, with majors in history, languages, economics or political science.  Some have advanced degrees.  With aptitude, knowledge and training in more than one field, such FSOs are examples of generalists.  For all but the most accomplished generalists, however, levels of knowledge in different fields will vary, or even within fields.  Thus one FSO may be more at home in economics than in history, and indeed in monetary policy, while another may excel in history, particularly in the history of Germany.

competent FSOs of course understand economic forces common to institutions in all countries and the inexorable march of world history: for example, how developments in Europe affected Latin America, Africa and Asia.  Thus they very quickly "master" an appointment at a new post.8

The specialist on the other hand is highly trained in one field: law, medicine, science.  Specialists may more rightly be called attorneys, physicians or scientists than generalists be called historians or economists.

Different specialties have arisen from time to time in the foreign service, including those of commercial officers now subsumed in the United States and Foreign Commercial Service of the Department of Commerce, FSO labor officers supported by the Department of Labor and State's information management specialist officers belatedly added to the rosters in Washington and overseas.  Then there were the science officers.

Specialists vs Generalists
Commercial specialists, followed by labor and information management specialists, exemplified a conflict between specialists and generalists in the foreign service.  The science officers, who only arrived on the scene more than a handful at a time in the 1970s, were also specialists.  The foreign service seemed to need them but couldn't quite embrace them or even assimilate them.

The conflict was not so much personal between mainstream and specialist FSOs in Washington and embassies as it was institutional.  Whenever department bureaus needed to cut costs, specialists were often the first to go.  The cost-cutting was not self-inflicted, of course.  With reasonable continued funding the department would not necessarily have slashed the budget for specialists.  But Congress often left the department no choice.
The argument for supporting generalists over specialists is persuasive.  Generalists know what to look for when confronted with a new country.  They move easily from embassy to embassy, issue to issue, language to language.  Science specialists know their field, but have not been formally trained in international affairs in general and the affairs of country X in particular.

Yet the department has indeed benefited from specialists able to assess export cases, transfer of technology, nuclear nonproliferation, environmental issues, Antarctic affairs and science cooperation.  It is a particular benefit that science officers, especially those with science backgrounds, may often gain access to government officials that other embassy officers can't.  This was especially true in Eastern Europe where a large number of officials even in nonscience ministries were themselves scientists.  A visiting science delegation from the United States could smoke out officials who had not been accessible to embassy officers for months.  Another example: in Spain the science minister first became foreign minister, then secretary general of NATO.  In that case the science officer knew more about him than anyone in the embassy.

Science Subcone
The science function or specialty was rather unofficial until science was proposed as a "subcone" of the economics cone in 1987, even though some thought it should be under the political cone.  Promotion of science officers had been spotty and unsystematic.  Creation of the subcone helped make the promotion track for science officers more comparable to that of other FSOs.  Promotions remained few because of servicewide restrictions on all FSOs.  By 1997 it appeared that for budgetary reasons the foreign service would abolish the science subcone as a separate specialty by 2004, assigning science officer duties to FSOs in the economic cone.

Other Agencies
While regular State FSOs and specialists suffered cuts and failed promotion, the numbers of embassy attachÈs supported by other agencies often seemed not to suffer by comparison: those from Commerce, Agriculture, Defense, the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Agency, for example.  The international S&T offices at NSF, the Department of Energy and NASA and even the telecommunications office at State also made forays into embassy science offices and insisted on officers of their own at embassies.  Unfortunately these extra hands didn't always share the work at hand in order to make up for reduced FSO rolls.  The agency officer usually was even more innocent of embassy operations that the greenest science officer.  His main allegiance was to his agency, not the embassy; he sent and received his own messages without approval or even knowledge of the ambassador or anyone else; he spent an inordinate amount of time meeting and squiring about people from his Washington headquarters.  He tended to remain parochial, rarely becoming a team player or helping on any project outside what he perceived to be his own responsibility.9

Agencies that want their own officers abroad may not remember that the foreign service is the foreign service of the United States, not of the State Department.  Every embassy officer represents not just the State Department but the entire government, all the departments and all the agencies and in a sense, all the citizens as well.

Strictly speaking, the ambassador can limit the number of non-State officers at the embassy, but he doesn't always do so.

Training of Science Officers
Early science officers were scientists from the private sector or from S&T agencies, of which the AEC was one of the first.  Recruits were lateral entries starting in the middle or at the top of the professional ladder without the climb up through the FSO ranks.  Most were not designated FSOs at all, but foreign service reserve officers on different career tracks.  Appointments were sometimes made on the basis of personal recommendations outside the normal assignment process, with casual regard to suitability.  After changes in the foreign service in 1980, however, even those entering laterally were designated FSOs and were subject to all its discipline, standards for promotion and rules for selection out, or termination for lack of promotion.

To generalist FSOs who were attracted to the science specialty the Department offered training courses at the Foreign Service Institute and even short-term university training, as it already had done in economics.

To obtain science officers the foreign service has never decided if it was better to recruit science specialists and train them in foreign affairs or train generalist FSOs in science.  The strong bias toward using generalists has usually won out except in cases like those in France, Germany, South Africa, the Soviet Union, Argentina or Brazil, where even the most orthodox FSO might have admitted that some specialized knowledge, especially of nuclear energy, was essential.  For example, most generalist FSOs simply could not decide from the evidence whether their host countries were likely building, or able to build, a nuclear weapon or not.  Or whether specific measures taken to reduce air or water pollution would likely be efficacious.

There were FSO generalists who assumed science officer jobs.  They often had a minimum of scientific interest and literacy, if not special training.  Moreover, these generalists were correct in pointing out that specialists may have known their field but often knew little about how it applied to important science issues in the country where they were assigned.  And with truth, generalists claimed that many science officer tasks or science officer positions had been responsibly filled by FSOs having no scientific interest or literacy, let alone training.

About all that can be concluded is that science jobs and science officer positions are needed and useful because science has become significant in foreign affairs.  Different science jobs and positions require FSOs with different amounts of science knowledge -- some with much, some with little.  How to recruit and train these FSOs is the unresolved question.

In the Embassy
The integrated science FSO today is no longer just a facilitator of science visits, exchanges and conferences.  He is a full member of the country team.  He contributes to the embassy work plan, its reporting plan and the budget, taking into account the science issues pertinent to the host country: nuclear nonproliferation in Pakistan, environmental protection along the border in Mexico, space cooperation with Germany.  If he doesn't already know it (unlikely), he learns the language so he can read it and at least converse socially with his counterparts.  He cultivates his contacts in the government and in the private sector, taking advantage of common scientific interests, common acquaintances, common educational backgrounds.  (So many scientists have studied in the United States!)  He introduces these contacts to the ambassador and his embassy colleagues and to visitors from Washington.

The science officer promotes the U.S. interest in his host country through meetings with officials, and he reports the results of these meetings.  He also describes scientific developments or major changes in science policy to Washington.  He constantly looks for ways in which scientific knowledge or insight might inform embassy policy in all areas.

At the same time he takes his turn as duty officer, control officer for fractious congressional delegations and their demanding spouses and staff, greeter for the ambassador at the Fourth of July party and as warden during fire drills and bomb threats.

There soon becomes no way to tell the science officer apart from any other FSO in the embassy, which is what he and the foreign service wanted all along.

End of chapter 17.


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