The tech crash course that trains US diplomats to spot threats

By the time the Senate unanimously appointed Nate Fick as America’s cyber ambassador in September 2022, the problems of tech diplomacy had become impossible to ignore, and Fick immediately tasked his team with creating a modern training program and incorporating it into FSI’s regular curriculum.

“He understood we needed to do more and better in terms of preparing our guys in the field,” Hopp says.

Fits well into training programs Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s View An American diplomatic corps that is well-versed in modern challenges and nimble enough to meet them. “Advancing our tech diplomacy” is one of Blinken’s “key priorities,” Fick says.

When developing the curriculum, Fick and his colleagues had several broad goals in mind for the new training program.

The first priority was to ensure that diplomats understood what was at stake in the competition between the US and its rivals for global superiority on technological issues. “Authoritarian states and other actors have used cyber and digital tools to threaten national security, international peace and security, economic prosperity, [and] “This course is an important step in the application of human rights,” said Katherine Fitrell, a senior cyber policy adviser at State who helps run the course.

Equally important was preparing diplomats to promote the US technology agenda from their embassies and provide detailed reports to Washington on how their host governments were working on these issues.

“It is important for us that the technical expertise [in] “Our goal is to not have the department just sitting at headquarters, but to have our people everywhere – in all of our positions around the world, where the real work is done – equipped with the tools necessary to make decisions with a reasonable amount of autonomy,” says Fick.

Foreign Service officers are America’s eyes and ears on the ground abroad, studying the landscape and alerting their bosses to risks and opportunities. They are also the U.S. government’s most direct and regular interlocutors with representatives of other countries, building personal relationships with local officials that can sometimes make the difference between unity and disunity.

When these diplomats have to discuss the US tech agenda, they can’t just read dully off a piece of paper. They need to really understand the positions they’re presenting and be prepared to answer questions about them.

“You can’t just call someone in Washington every time you have a cyber question,” Sherman says.

But some issues will still require the help of experts at headquarters, so Fick and his team also wanted to use the course to deepen their relationships with diplomats and give them friendly points of contact in the cyber bureau. “We want to be able to help officers in the field deal with these issues,” says Melanie Kaplan, a member of Fick’s team who took the class and now helps run it.

Inside the class

After months of research, planning, and scheduling, Fick’s team launched. Cyberspace and Digital Policy Tradecraft courses at the Foreign Service Institute, with a test run in November 2022. Since then, FSI has taught the classes six times — once in London for European diplomats, once in Morocco for diplomats from the Middle East and Africa, and four times in Arlington — and trained 180 diplomats.

The program begins with four hours of “pre-work” to prepare students for the lessons ahead. Students must document that they have completed the pre-work – which includes experimenting with generative AI – before heading to class. “This has put us light years ahead in making sure no one gets lost on day one,” Hopp says.