Some of this would change if a different kind of person was recruited into State. Like, giving strong preference to ex-military. Even more preference to retired military.
My Grandfather was hired by the State Department in 1919 after taking a civil service test in 1918. He got the telegram while on a troop ship headed to London halfway across the Atlantic. He had been drafted just after taking the test and it took the government a long time even then to make a decision.
He had no college. He was a farm boy from Indiana. But he self educated to the level where he tested as a graduate student over the years.
And being brought up in a self sufficient world, he was no one’s fool. He spent much of the pre-WWII years in Prague, going toe to toe with the Germans brought in to run Czechoslovakia by the cession of the Sudetenland. They didn’t get very far with him. He was a stubborn SOB who later became a police chief. That was the old State Department.
Now we have callow children. Imagine them up against Reinhardt Heydrich.