Managing Military Readiness

Understanding the limits of the Nation’s ability to generate and deploy ready military forces is a basic element of national security. It is also the element most likely to be taken for granted or assumed away despite ample historical evidence of the human and operational costs imposed by such an error. As budgets shrink and threats grow more diverse, national security leaders need a specific accounting of the readiness limits of the force and the consequences of those limits as well as the insight to make timely and effective mitigation decisions.

This paper presents an analytic framework that builds from previous work to yield the systematic and defendable readiness analysis that must underlie decisions ranging from budget allocation to force employment and even strategy development.

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Executive Summary ...........................................................................................1

Introduction........................................................................................................2

The Supply of Ready Forces ..............................................................................5

The Demand for Ready Forces .......................................................................20

Methods of Integrating Supply and Demand Factors..................................25

When Supply Falls Short of Demand.............................................................28

A Leadership Imperative .................................................................................30

Appendix A. SORTS, DRRS, and the Chairman’s Readiness System ........31

Appendix B. Readiness Analyses....................................................................35

Glossary .............................................................................................................44

Notes ..................................................................................................................49

This paper may be of interest to policymakers, military leaders, and members of Congress.