Rice blamed for staff shortage, low morale among US diplomats

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Saddled by the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US State Department faces an acute staff shortage amid "worsening morale," according to a study blaming Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for the problem.

The report by the influential Foreign Affairs Council, comprising mostly senior retired US diplomats and ambassadors, said the department faced a shortage of 1,100 staff and that in the "first two years of Secretary Rice's stewardship almost no net new resources have been realized."

Rice took office in January 2005, facing the full impact of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"My own view is that the foreign service is at the front edge of a personnel crisis and if something isn't done about what we have identified here as 'job number one,' we are going to be in a very, very serious situation a year or so from now," the council's president, Thomas Boyatt, told a news conference.

"Job one" is to obtain 1,100 new positions needed "to move the foreign service from where it is to where it needs to be," said the council's report, "Managing Secretary Rice's State Department: An independent assessment."

Reinforcing the view that Rice had to bear responsibility for the crisis, Boyatt said: "Every cabinet level officer has the responsibility of taking care of the institution he or she leads.

"Every secretary of government has responsibility to at least lead that institution as healthy as they found it, if not to improve it," he said.

Boyatt said that the State Department was "more overstretched" than the military.

The manpower shortage had strained staff morale, Boyatt said.

"Morale of course is strongly impacted because we don't have enough people," he said.

Declining morale also stemmed from cuts to basic salaries of nearly 19 percent for junior and mid-level officers leaving Washington for overseas assignments, he said.

"It is also impacted by the fact that it is even more stressful today in the foreign service than it has been in the past ... more dangerous," he said.

Positions envisaged over the past two years for training and to fulfill Rice's so-called "transformational diplomacy" initiative had not been realized, the report said.

Rice's initiative is aimed at shifting hundreds of foreign service positions from Europe and Washington to difficult assignments in the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere in a bid to boost democracy through foreign partnerships.

According to the report, some 200 existing jobs -- mostly overseas -- were unfilled and an additional 900 training slots necessary to provide essential "linguistic and functional" skills "do not exist."......