Barnett’s idea of combining the two is the same fundamental problem raised by Provincial Reconstruction Teams: it ends up crippling the military units, and limiting the diplomats. That’s not to say those don’t work — I think a retasked PRT, with a section of FSOs at the head directing policy and acting as advisors to the local BCT — could be enormously effective. That sort of thing is what the paper addresses, and is how I think State needs to evolve.

The problem I see with State doing all this other work is in the area of providing security.
Somalia and Haiti are two cases where we did intervene, and had to have more security then state could provide.  Those are cases where you can’t trust the locals to provide the security, nor do you necessarily want a large military footprint (because their mandate is to blow things up and capture bad guys.)

You said it yourself, State represents our “soft power.”  DOD is our “hard power.”  What about the middle?  Those places where we are needed but not necessarily invited, like Rwanda, Somalia, Haiti.

I’m all for what ever has the best chance of working.

Just because it doesn’t have the internal werewithal to change doesn’t mean it shouldn’t. Reducing it to just the diplomatic corps would permanently cripple the idea of diplomats, as they would have a severely reduced role in general interstate relations, and the sensitive interagency conflict zone operations we’re discussing here.

It is notable how deeply both Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell have failed in performing any real transformative tasks along these lines. They can’t even be bothered to pretty please ask Congress to stop cutting the budget for foreign service officers, to say nothing of actually changing the Department to reflect the modern world.

DOS should create a Regional Chief of Mission (RCM), responsible for leading and synchronizing interagency capabilities to project the full range of national power elements. This diplomatic post would work in tandem with the geographic combatant commander and ensure a diplomatic face is planted on the region, not just a military one. It would also provide a regional leader for coordinating the non-military elements of national power and take the lead role in integrating interagency approaches to fulfill government objectives.

They don’t have the capacity now to do it, nor have they had the leadership or internal wherewithal to change. That’s why a new department may be the option that gets the ball moving. Take the parts of the DOD and DOS that deal with aid, development and security, and mash them into one. Not that growing the size of the government is the best option, but if doing our best to make the world a better place to live is a goal, we should do our best to do it well.

the proposed new department “would cover the process of getting states from failure to functioning, from instability to stability, from disconnectedness to connectedness, from war to peace, and transition them from what I have dubbed globalization’s ‘non-integrating gap’ (where the wild things are) to its ‘functioning core.’”