No, it's not particularly accurate. For someone coming in as an O-4, you'll probably get sent to a staff just so that you can get a hard-ish breakout (1 of 4 is better than 1 of 1) to set you up for the O-5 board, but generally you won't just bounce from staff to staff. The ones that do are usually punks who are trying to homestead in the DC area(?!).My perception is the FAO just relegates you to staff work for the rest of your career. Is that perception accurate, and if so, did you know that going in? How often was your foreign area expertise utilized vs. just being a plug and play staff action officer?
This is what people going into the FAO community need to know: there are two big issues with the FAO community's talent management, IMHO. #1 is that there just isn't enough talent. Great, your parents are Chinese and you grew up speaking Mandarin. Great, you were born in the Soviet Union. But how good of an officer are you? Have you ever even touched warfare? *Can you write in English?* In order to reduce time and cost to train, we're grabbing people who check the qualification blocks (foreign language, master's degree, in-country experience) who were accountants. It's silly and sad and you might end up working for an O-6 that is mind-numbingly poor at their job. #2 is that the community is matched, numbers-wise, almost exactly to billets it has to fill. There's little to no flexibility and zero transparency. So you maybe studied Mandarin for 8 years and wrote your doctoral dissertation on PLAN naval tactics--orders to Sierra Leone incoming! Part of this is because a lot of operational (i.e. not training) FAO billets are attache billets, owned by DIA. You have to plan WAY in advance for those, so the community has someone designated to be nominated, they get nominated, and then they blow the DIA interview or have an issue with the overseas medical screening (former SWOs aren't as good at lying to docs as former aviators). So you end up with an O-6 Korean-as-first-language down in Honduras in an O-4 billet. That obviously creates ripple effects that mean the community is always doing a significant amount of crisis detailing vice deliberate detailing.