When Ralph A. Gaspard II joined the U.S. Department of State in Mexico more than two decades ago, he viewed it as a calling – and a career.
That is how it turned out for Gaspard, a career member of the U.S. Senior Foreign Service with tours in countries ranging from Portugal to Pakistan.
Fewer people are following in his footsteps. “I don’t know that folks joining the Department of State today or any other government agency are choosing to go ahead and do this as a career,” Gaspard said on Nov. 12 at the GDIT Emerge: Protect the Homeland event in Washington, D.C.
And that presents a dilemma for Gaspard in his current role as director of the State Department’s Office of Security Technology. “How do we adjust and adapt,” he said, “to go ahead and get talent to come in, understanding that they might only do it for five or 10 years?”
Especially needed are talent cybersecurity and computer science, he added. Both are increasingly important to his office’s mission to safeguard government personnel, property, and information at more than 450 State Department facilities abroad and domestically.
Gaspard is trying to adjust with what he called “creative ways” of recruiting – at universities and laboratories, from the military, and by working with industry. But finding people with expertise in cybersecurity remains a challenge, especially those willing to move to potentially dangerous postings abroad.
Many people still envision the foreign service as serving in Europe, Gaspard said. “Of course, I’d love to go to London. I’d love to go to Paris,” he added. “But we (also) have Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of the Congo), Iraq, and Pakistan.”
In his role, Gaspard oversees physical, technical, and cybersecurity countermeasures against adversaries that he said can include people threatening a diplomatic mission in Haiti or aiming drones and missiles at State Department facilities in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
“We face various cyber, technical, physical security threats every day,” he said. “So to make sure that we’re staying ahead, we try to use artificial intelligence (AI) responsibly to … be a little bit more proactive, resilient, and have redundant systems when available.”
Gaspard said the threat environment and challenges to foreign postings have evolved over the years. Now they include Ebola in Africa, which his office is “constantly looking at.”
“We have to go ahead and look at emerging threats, be they cyber activities, natural disasters or … all kinds of differing things,” he said.
As for his intensive recruiting, Gaspard said much of it focuses on universities. “Back when I started with the Department of State, there wasn’t such a thing as cybersecurity professionals. There weren’t a lot of computer engineers. So (today), we are just going ahead and trying to reach out to those folks earlier.”
He even made a plea for recruits during his presentation at the GDIT event, drawing laughter from the crowd. “We have internships. You know, we do have paid internships,” he said. “There are even opportunities to go overseas. So go ahead and experience the foreign service so you can see if this is the lifestyle that you know would be good for you.”