Does Military Readiness Exist?
A case for an empirically based readiness system.

The views expressed are my own and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Joint Staff, U.S. Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.
Military readiness dominates almost every conversation about fiscal planning for the largest area of government discretionary spending. Readiness is described as one of the most important measures when decisions are made about overseas stationing, operational deployments, and force size. In recent years it has even been elevated to an end in itself, with resources allocated to Service readiness recovery plans.
Within the military training and exercise programs, readiness is often cited as the justification for spending significant resources. The Combatant Commander’s Exercise Engagement and Training Transformation program alone spends in excess of $600 million dollars annually to enable exercise and training programs. Given the prevalence and importance of readiness, one would think that the word has a technical applications that exist beyond the colloquial use of the word.
Unfortunately this is not the case. Readiness doctrinally defined is “the ability of U.S. military forces to fight and meet the demands of the National Military Strategy. ” The broad scope of this definition allows readiness to be all things to all people. To understand one of the biggest sources of tension, one needs a brief introduction to the roles of the Combatant Commands and the Services.
The Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines may be the public face of the military, but they do not fight our nation’s wars. The Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 redesigned the way that the Services interact. In a sweeping set of reforms, the act established Combatant Commanders — 4 star generals who are in charge of furthering the military objectives within geographic areas. Services are responsible for manning, training, and equipping forces to provide to these Combatant Commanders to use in operations.
This distinction in purpose between the four Service chiefs, and the nine Combatant Commanders should be enough to illuminate how the broadness of the term can create tension. When Combatant Commanders are using forces to accomplish their objectives, they are more ready. Conversely, Services are less ready. Following a deployment, Services need to recover these forces — repair equipment, and train them on a variety of other tasks that they were not performing while they were deployed. In a general sense Combatant Commands are trying to accomplish a set of objectives, while Services are trying to be generally prepared to fight and win across a broad spectrum of potential conflicts.
This duality has been expressed in recent years by the Services describing significant readiness shortfalls as a result of the extended wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The forces that participated in the Combatant Command exercise above increased the ability of that Command to do some task, while simultaneously exhausting equipment maintenance, and reducing the Services time to train for other contingencies. There is no clear way to aggregate Service readiness and Combatant Command readiness into a singular idea of military readiness.
And, it is precisely this point that renders the question, “Did this exercise increase or decrease our readiness?” a meaningless one. But there is even more confusion about the topic. Brad Carson, former Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, discussed the ambiguity with which the term readiness is used. This includes all sorts of morale and welfare programs. Recently I was re-tested for a penicillin allergy that I had been told I showed as a child. The test was done under the auspicies of a readiness issue to the force.
The idea that health and welfare programs, service training, and combatant command exercises can be combined into a unifying theory of readiness is daunting, and far from being realized.
The lack of a unifying theory of readiness is not a unique challenge within the military. In his work on the theory of deterrence, Thomas Schelling articulates that the military is the only sizable and respectable profession with “no identifiable academic counterpart.” The lack of a theory of readiness should be concerning, given that this idea is a significant lens through which decisions are made in the military — which represents the largest discretionary expense for the U.S. government.
In its current state, it seems reasonable to question whether or not military readiness exists.
In a mathematical sense, we might be content to say that we have defined it, therefore it exists. Hubbard makes the case in How to Measure Anything that if something exists, then its change can be perceived. By finding a meaningful way to measure this change, we can define what we are talking about and find a way to measure it. While consistent, this is parochial.
We are only interested in fictional definitions of concepts if they can be demonstrated to have some predictive power in the real world.
Intelligence Quotient (IQ) is an illustrative example. The idea of a general intelligence was conceived by evaluating different test scores and observing that the results were positively correlated. Students that performed well on one test performed well on all tests. The concept of IQ, defined into existence, would only be a curiosity, except that it has been demonstrated to predict many positive social outcomes.
But this is the challenge of invoking readiness. Either it is a measurement of some state or a desired outcome. Military readiness cannot, at the same time, be the instrument and the predicted outcome. The empirical issue is attempting to demonstrate a difference of performance in military tasks for units that have different readiness ratings. Military units with different readiness ratings need to be assessed against combat tasks in order to determine if the readiness ratings are a good predictor of success.
If the instrument of readiness cannot help military leaders predict whether or not their units will be able to successfully fight and meet the demands of the National Military Strategy, then it is nothing more than a curiosity. It certainly should not be the basis upon which multi-billion dollar decisions are made.
Assuming that the instrument for measuring readiness actually measures some aspect of the world that leaders care about (and this is no small assumption), the next issue to address is reproducibility. Any diagnostic instrument that has unacceptable levels of variation cannot be used as a reliable test. How much would you pay attention to medical tests, if they resulted in different answers under the same conditions?
The current level of subjective assessment within the readiness system leaves it prone to many of the cognitive biases of human perception.
If we have continued to ask the same question with no answer, we may be asking the wrong question. An advance in understanding can occur when you frame the problem in a different way.
Herzberg’s two factory theory of motivation did just that for understanding employee motivation. As more and more work becomes intangible and knowledge-based, managers are more concerned with motivating their employees. They find themselves trying to manage their employee’s satisfaction, but were continually frustrated to find that whatever they were calling satisfaction was not a good predictor of performance, or turnover.
In 1968 Herzberg developed a theory of motivation claiming that satisfaction and dissatisfaction are not the extremes of one scale, but instead are two separate scales. His study of 203 engineers showed that the factors that led to dissatisfaction (pay, job security, and fringe benefits) were not the same as those led to job satisfaction (challenging work, recognition, and responsibility). By understanding employee motivation as a combination of hygiene factors and motivation factors, you might gain some understanding by asking the right question.
Military readiness is almost certainly not reducible to a singular value. There may be a number of hygiene factors (personnel strength, assigned equipment) and optimizing factors (training hours, maintenance availability) on two separate scales. A theory for readiness should allow leaders to allocate and predict the result of resourcing decisions. For example, one might want to make a minimum threshold investment in hygiene factors, and then maximize the optimizing factors. Determining which factors are hygiene factors, and which are optimizing factors is not something that can be determined before the data are collected.

Military leaders want to ensure that they are successful when called upon by our civilian leadership. In order to do this, they need a relevant theory of readiness. The theory should be able to describe and predict why changing some input would cause a change in output. As a respectable profession, military leaders should continually challenge the theories and assumptions that underpin critical decisions.
In its current state, the readiness system is not able to answer questions about its own predictive power and reliability. The readiness system must be examined empirically to know to what extent any of the factors are contributing to national security outcomes. Dogmatic belief in a system is not only wasteful, it can be dangerous and fatal.
Robust readiness assessments would help hedge against such surprise. Done correctly, an analytically rigorous, independent, enterprise-level readiness system would serve as a leading indicator of a strategy-resource gap, telling senior leadership soberly what they can and cannot expect to accomplish. Without reform to the current military readiness system, we multiply the fog and friction in which we are already forced to operate and risk failure in answering with incoherence that all-important question: “What are my options?” — Carson, November 2016
