I'm sure the QPs and most milpers on the board are familiar with this, but some of the civilian readers may not realize how regional divisions vary between different government agencies.
As frustrating as it can be that they don't share the same regions as DoD,
StateDept divisions make more sense IMO. Now, the downfall is when you get into interagency projects (such as the TSCTP), and suddenly you have AFRICOM projects requiring coordination with two different StateDept chains of command with both the NEA and AF bureaus. Likewise CENTCOM includes portions of NEA and South and Central Asia.
The truth is sometimes geographic boundaries are not as accurate as cultural boundaries, at the regional, national, or even district level. Take for example the
linguistic map of Afghanistan/Pakistan.
I have had the problem of trying to figure out whether to follow cultural, diplomatic, or geographic boundaries back to high school when I was in charge of the extemp box for the speech team. I can't tell you how many times I had to move the Afghanistan folder back to Asia after some punk thought he was doing the world a favor by putting it in Middle East.
Back in my box now.
-out