The Department of Diplomatic Enforcement (DODE)

How are you actually going to implement this over many years? Everything like that is completely disdained [in traditional government]. It points to a general problem with our system. Everything to do with operations, and management, and actually getting things done, is the lowest status thing in Whitehall [and in Washington]. The highest status thing is nonsense about ‘political strategy’ and media and giving interviews. Everyone wants the word ‘strategy’ in their job title, and it’s practically always nonsense and shouldn’t be in their title, and the job would be improved by removing the word. Nobody wants to be on: logistics, operations, and actually making sure something happens. That is at the core of why so many things in government work the way they do.

You can see it in the whole policy process. The high-status thing is ‘writing the policy and then spinning it to the media’. The low-status thing is: what are the actual implementation details? Has someone already tried to do this in eight different countries in the last four years, and each time it’s been a disaster? No one cares about that. That’s left to much lower status jobs, and none of the senior people will pay attention to it. And they’re actually formally separated. So one of the things that we did in summer 2020 was, we said: the policy people should be brought together and actually physically sit with the management people – which was a completely revolutionary idea. Because that way, when you’re thinking up ideas in the first place, you’re immediately, from the beginning, talking to the people whose job it is to get it to work.

Rather than what happens now which is: these people sit around, they go to nonsense seminars, they talk to journalists and MPs, they publish a paper, it’s actually full of holes, it doesn’t work. That paper then goes off to the implementation people. The policy people then move on to whatever their next thing is. The management and implementation people look at it and go: ‘This is not going to work for the following reasons’ – but it’s their job to make it work. They then have to go back and start arguing. ‘But we already decided that we were going to do this nine months ago.’ ‘Yeah, but it can’t work.’ So our idea was: if you put the two together, then you actually find out on day one, or day four, ‘Oh, actually this is a stupid idea and it won’t work for the following reasons. We’re going to have to do it this way instead.’ No one [in traditional government] cares about that… No one actually cares if it doesn’t work.

This is now accepted – even by those running the Labour government.

The Department of Diplomatic Enforcement should emulate the way Jared Kushner project-managed the US border wall in 2019. Writing in Breaking History:

As the construction ramped up, I held weekly meetings in the Situation Room. I always began with two questions, typical of any construction project: Why is it taking so long? And why is it costing so much? ‘We are right on schedule,’ said Lieutenant General Todd Semonite, the impressive three-star general who ran the Army Corps of Engineers, in one of these weekly meetings. As he listed the construction numbers from the previous week, I opened my manila folder, pulled out the schedule from the week before, and double-checked the projections. ‘With all due respect, General, you’re not on schedule,’ I said. ‘Last week, you said that you’d be at a hundred and seventeen miles, and you’re only at one hundred and fifteen.’

‘General, unlike most of the jobs I have been assigned in government, this is one that I have a bit of experience in… I’ve never had a contractor admit to missing their schedule – they just keep revising the damn schedule. I know how to do this stuff. Every time we meet, I need you to give me an update on where we were the day before, and where we were projected to be. There are a lot of moving parts, and things will go better and worse than we expect. Let’s agree to have a transparent flow of information, and we will solve problems as they arise.’

I created a one-page spreadsheet, with specific tracking and updates to monitor the progress, and tasked one of my top lieutenants, an affable jack-of-all-trades named John Rader, to run point on coordinating the project. We all accepted accountability as a team, and we started to steamroll through the project.

To get it done, I applied a formula similar to the one I’d used for USMCA, the First Step Act, and the Middle East file. I defined success, developed a plan, and built a great team that was creative, agile, and focused intensely on execution.

Diligence of this degree does not exist inside any present diplomatic institution (domestic or international). The Department of Diplomatic Enforcement should create a new standard for monitoring the progress of signed peace agreements – focusing singularly on Ukraine to begin.