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On Oct. 25, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to address the war on terrorism. The matter at hand was urgent, fraught, and riveting, and the addressing of it cast Powell in his matinee-idol role as the face of American foreign policy.

Back in the much gentler days of spring, Powell appeared before Congress to advocate for the Bush Administration's decision to increase State Department funding by some 5 percent. It was a mild countermove to many years' worth of budgets being sliced by the mutually efficient blades of post-Cold War contraction, deficit reduction, public indifference, easy political point-making, and whatever else might materialize to threaten a bureaucracy whose fervent advocates, once you leave the campus of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, are remarkably thin on the American ground. That matter was mundane, earnest, and prosaic, and addressing it cast Powell in a role he described to the Senate Appropriations Committee on May 3 as that of "the leader, the manager, the CEO of the Department of State."

No question, the terrorism-foiling globe-trotter is the one the public will want to rally around. For that very reason, though, the CEO is the one who could really use some support. And, if there are any inferences to be drawn from the opening lines of the "Diplomatic Readiness" brochure prepared by the human resources department at State, Powell's rank and file could use a graham cracker and a hug: "We are America's first line of defense. We are America's diplomatic workforce. We are the people that take on the global challenges of American diplomacy in the 21st century," the text says, a little ruefully. "We are not overseas bureaucrats.... We may not have tanks, ships, or satellites, but we have a powerful vision.... In fact, in the last half-century, more ambassadors than generals have died in the line of duty."

Since Sept. 11, I have come to think of the totality of our government policy status quo-immigration, law enforcement, public health, and all the rest of it-as a great, vertiginously uneven floor beneath our collectively quivering feet. On this floor, the State Department has got to be one of the very grottiest, worst-maintained, you'd-faint-if-the-neighbors-saw-it tiles. Foreign-policy experts are rarely noted for their simple way with speech, but on this matter, they can be admirably blunt.

"It's absurd, for God's sake," says Frank Wisner, who has served as the U.S. ambassador to Egypt, the Philippines, Zambia, and India, and who believes that the Administration's three top reform priorities ought to be "money, money, and money.... Walk into our embassy in Beijing-you'd think you're in a slum. Our embassy in Tel Aviv is like a dung heap." Daunting though such physical problems may be, at least their existence is not debatable.

The same cannot be said for the swing of the policy-emphasis pendulum from officers steeped in regional expertise to officers promoted for their managerial or technical skills. Some view this swing, which began but did not end with Henry Kissinger, as having been wise and necessary; others view it as having gone too far; some view it as not really having occurred all that clearly; and others view it as a big fat disaster.

"I've seen the tremendous change in the State Department from what used to be an emphasis in area expertise to an emphasis in technical expertise," says Peter Bechtold, the chair for Near East and North Africa Studies at the Foreign Service Institute, which trains State Department officers. "We have some gigantic embassies of the Near East staffed by people who can't even say 'good morning.' Anybody who talks about the importance of area studies instead of management issues gets cut off at the knees."

So far, so predictable: There have always been tales of diplomats who played badminton and sipped port while whatever Rome they were in was burning, and there have always been grievances about a system designed to reward those who spend their time polishing prose bound for Washington rather than sharpening their vision of their posts. But in this, as for so many other of those policy "tiles," the most challenging issues arise not from decisions that reflect stupidity; but from those that involve rationality and often necessity.

An easy example: During all those years of contraction, one of the only budget areas that consistently expanded was that of regional security officers. This made sense, as did the fact that those additional monies were often been earmarked for security-minded embassy relocation, rebuilding, or fortification, since terrorism was sending some of its most potent appetizers to the diplomatic corps. However, the ironic result has been that, just as the United States most sorely needs to have eyes and ears all over, we have devoted more and more resources to initiatives that pull personnel away from the real lives of foreign cultures, and fewer and fewer resources to initiatives that enable personnel to move into foreign cultures.

Likewise, it is logical that in an era where more and more foreigners seek U.S. visas, more and more staffers must spend their time screening and processing those applications--leaving fewer and fewer free to do anything meaningful in the way of training or exploration. That all adds up to an understandable problem, but it is a problem. "One of the ways they have saved money over the years is by reducing to the minimum the amount of training available," says David Mack, the vice president of the Middle East Institute and a former ambassador to the United Arab Emirates. "It's the work of a lifetime to take a farm boy and turn him into an Arabist, and if he turns out to be an alcoholic or something, you've lost it all."

Moreover, the treatment of the Foreign Service as a redheaded stepchild has been a bipartisan effort, with right-wing Republicans administering regular beatings, and Democrats counseling not-so-benign neglect. Skimping on State didn't just please conservatives such as Sens. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., and Phil Gramm, R-Texas--the latter having once derided the State Department for "building marble palaces and renting long coats and high hats." It also served liberals in search of the post-Cold War "peace dividend"--never mind that when the Soviet Union collapsed, states scattered from it like falling bricks, necessitating more, not fewer, embassies, and more, not less, rigorous analysis.

Don't get me wrong. I am not arguing that if only we had some postgrads equipped with unaccented Hindi and a wild eagerness to mingle we would be less ugly, more understanding Americans, and thus be able to fix whatever intercultural unpleasantness that we couldn't preempt. But the Foreign Service highlights two excellent aspects of the present crisis: it is systemically penny-wise and pound-foolish, and it is currently bearing silent witness to the Rio Grande-size gap between the rhetoric of aspirations for the future, and the reality of implementation in the past. Rhetoric conjures up 007-style technologies and the need for seamless interfacing among agency databases; reality interjects Wisner's recollection that from 1994-97, as ambassador to India, he presided over a junior staff whose computers were older than they were.

Every campaign cycle, candidates declaim that every one of our schoolchildren--whether or not he or she has the slightest idea what to do with a book--desperately needs to be hooked up to the Internet. Just a thought: Why not first hook up every diplomat? According to one estimate, career officers in the armed services can expect to spend about a third of their time in training of some sort. Career officers in the Foreign Service can expect to spend a tenth of their time there.

Actually, the comparison is apt. On March 15, appearing before the House Budget Committee, Powell likened his old, military stomping ground to his new, diplomatic one. "If we think it's important for our fighting men in the Pentagon to go into battle with the best weapons and equipment and tools we can give them, then we owe the same thing to the wonderful men and women of the Foreign Service."

Now the future of the State Department, like that of everything else, has become a question: Will the argument for sustained growth be strengthened, out of the recognition that America can no longer afford to stint on the international front? Or will it be weakened, in light of the many other demands on the nation's resources and on Powell's immediate attention--to say nothing of the possibility that, in days to come, Americans may be less of a mind to build bridges to their potential adversaries than to bomb the nests out from under them. Personally, I think it's worth getting as smart about the building as we are about the bombing.

"Do the best you can, with what you've got, where you are," Theodore Roosevelt liked to say. Foreign Service officers are presumably doing the best they can. But what they've got is not what they need, and where they are is not nearly where they should be.