KEEPING U.S. FORCES READY
The number one priority of the Department of Defense is maintaining the readiness and sustainability of U.S. forces. The United States must have highly capable forces that are prepared to rapidly respond to the diverse demands of a post-Cold War world. Managing this goal is one of the Department's most aggressive and ambitious undertakings. A fundamental challenge rests in understanding what readiness really means in terms of national policy goals and what the Department is doing to assess, measure, correct, and project the readiness of U.S. forces today, tomorrow, and in the future.
The U.S. National Military Strategy outlines a broad spectrum of commitments, specifically that U.S. forces must be prepared to fight and win the nation's wars, deter aggression and prevent conflict, and conduct peacetime engagements.
U.S. forces are ready to meet these missions. To maintain the readiness of the force, the Department has encountered these challenges: develop and retain high quality people, ensure adequate readiness funding, and develop and manage a system of measuring and assessing readiness.
The first challenge to keeping a ready force is recruiting and retaining high quality people. This is becoming increasingly difficult, given the attractiveness of nonmilitary careers in an improving economy, the demanding pace of military operations, and the reduced pool of candidates for military service.
The second challenge is to make sure the Department has the right resources allocated to the right purposes in support of readiness. Even with a solid foundation of readiness funds in the DoD budget, the costs of unbudgeted contingency operations can reduce resources available to carry out training, maintenance, and other readiness-related activities.
Even with the emphasis on quality of life and ample funding to support readiness, the third challenge is to closely monitor and track budgets and plans as they are executed, to make timely corrections if problems arise, and to make thorough program decisions to ensure readiness in the future. The Department must watch with great vigilance over its force and continue to refine its ability to monitor readiness to ensure that it has both a clear, up-to-the-minute picture of the health of the force and the ability to project future readiness.
The Department of Defense is responding to each of these challenges through a series of management initiatives. Moreover, DoD is keenly aware of tomorrow's challenges and is taking the necessary budgetary and policy steps to ensure that tomorrow's joint, modernized force is ready to fight.
READINESS AGENDA
Maintaining readiness is an essential component in virtually all of the Department's activities. In general terms, readiness is the overall ability of forces to arrive on time where needed and prepared to effectively carry out assigned missions. The ability of units to be ready on time to carry out their missions, in turn, is a function of having the equipment, supplies, logistics, intelligence, and experienced people with the skills to accomplish assigned tasks.
This overarching concept of readiness is easily understood. However, upon closer examination, one finds that readiness is composed of diverse elements of organization, resources, people, professional education, and leadership. It includes the ability to train, maintain, and sustain these elements in a synergistic force prepared to meet mission-oriented goals. All these elements must be balanced throughout the defense program to ensure that the Department has highly capable forces that are prepared to execute the National Military Strategy.
The concepts, understanding, and management of readiness differ from small unit to joint task force. Readiness involves a complex range of elements that, when viewed in aggregate, depict the force's capability to operate in a post-Cold War environment of instability and new security challenges. Each Service is responsible for organizing, equipping, training, and providing materiel support, the principal ingredients in the readiness of the forces provided to the warfighting commanders in chief (CINCs). The Department of Defense provides the resources and assigns tasks from the National Military Strategy to the Services.
DoD must be able to manage readiness: understand, measure, assess, and project on a variety of levels. Successfully accomplishing these readiness management functions involves a complex set of interactive tasks that, in many cases, break new ground for the Department. The key is to identify those policy, budget, and operational levers that are integral to force readiness and can be used to ensure current and future readiness. In this context, the Department has undertaken a broad range of initiatives -- policies, budget actions, organizational structures which, taken in sum, represent a determined agenda -- to assess and actively manage the readiness of U.S. armed forces from a DoD-wide perspective.
Readiness and sustainability remain the highest resource priorities of the Department and constitute the two most essential components of near-term military preparedness. The Department is committed to ensuring U.S. forces are ready to carry out their missions. During the past year, the Department examined the core elements of readiness and how they are assessed, reported, and funded to ensure the United States has forces ready to fight now and in the future. This section depicts the concepts, initiatives, and evolving programs the Department has developed to achieve its goals.
NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY AND READINESS
U.S. forces are organized and trained to support the National Security Strategy. Ready forces are vital to maintaining America's leadership in world affairs. U.S. forces must be manned, equipped, and trained to deal with diverse and challenging threats to U.S. national security. They must be prepared for, and on occasion must engage in, operations that support the full spectrum of national interests:
Forces assigned for these demand functions must meet standards in terms of the:
Having forces that are ready to fight requires an appropriate force structure, modernized equipment, maintenance and logistics support, and the requisite trained and motivated personnel. A deficiency in any of these elements can hurt readiness, inhibiting the timing of deploying forces, and thereby resulting in a readiness gap. In managing readiness, the Department strives to maintain a delicate balance of all these crucial elements to ensure that forces arrive on time and fully capable to meet mission demands.
U.S. FORCES ARE READY
To achieve its number one resource priority, DoD has focused on the lessons learned from hollow force periods of the 1970s and early 1980s and has taken deliberate steps to prevent a recurrence. Previous incidences of force hollowness reflected a force that was, on average, less educated, not as well-trained, more poorly equipped, less sustained, and less strategically mobile. In contrast, today's forces are the best ever fielded. U.S. military forces are well-educated, receive quality training, and utilize technologically superior equipment. Recruiting high quality people is the key to this progress. The quality and capability of today's force clearly show that DoD has implemented lessons learned from previous periods of hollowness. The high readiness of the force continues with the nearly completed and carefully managed post-Cold War drawdown.
READINESS PERSPECTIVE IN A POST-COLD WAR ENVIRONMENT
Defining the Readiness Model
In recent years, the United States has committed its forces to contingency operations that posed significant challenges to keeping readiness in balance. Forces have been committed to operations in Somalia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Korea, Rwanda, Southwest Asia, Haiti, Cuba, Peru, Ecuador, and the United States in a wide array of missions ranging from deterrence to natural disaster relief. At the same time U.S. forces have been engaged in support of the full spectrum of national interests, the United States sustains its readiness to counter major regional threats.
Keeping forces ready in peacetime to protect U.S. interests requires a delicate balance. When not involved in conflict, U.S. forces are in three basic postures: those forces that are forward deployed or stand day-to-day alert, those forces engaged in contingency operations (protecting vital U.S. interests, promoting important interests, and providing humanitarian assistance), and those training for conflict. The key to maintaining balance is to ensure that contingency operations are carried out effectively, but without placing undue burdens on training for war.
Such a readiness balance requires forces actually engaged in operations to be in a high state of readiness to carry out their assigned missions. The readiness of forces in training, by contrast, will vary considerably. Some units will be currently deployed or must be ready to deploy at a moment's notice. These are first-to-fight forces that would initially respond to a crisis. Some units are less ready. They may, for example, be recovering from overseas deployments, transitioning to new equipment, later deploying units, or in the case of many Reserve component units, between training cycles. Managing this balance involves keeping a close eye on deployed and nondeployed units to ensure they possess the appropriate resources and are ready to meet their assigned mission tasks in terms of capability and time requirements.
Joint Readiness Perspective
As military forces shrink in size and the missions they perform are becoming more diverse, the Department must place a premium on forces being able to conduct joint operations. Today's and tomorrow's forces will fight jointly; this requires a new level of cooperation. In addition to the traditional readiness requirement of keeping individual units able to fully perform their individual functions, now these units must be integrated, across Service lines, into an effective joint force.
A chief initiative is the CINCs' specifying their missions as joint mission essential task lists (JMETLs), complete with conditions under which the tasks must be performed and the standards they expect the units or staffs to meet. This project does not change the missions that the CINCs are expected to perform. Rather it specifies the tasks in sufficient level of detail to allow staffs and units to train and fully develop the necessary level of both unit and joint readiness. This ongoing process focuses on train-like-you-fight activities and will serve to revolutionize joint training and exercises. It will eventually provide a basis to measure readiness in terms of output (ready to accomplish the specified mission) rather than today's input-oriented (ready to perform as intended by the unit design) processes.
Simulation Training
The readiness of U.S. forces is directly related to the quality of their training. While the phrase train-as-you-fight has become a well worn cliche in some circles, the ability to provide realistic joint training across all phases of military operations for all types of missions remains a formidable challenge. While the Services have made great strides in developing simulation technology that supports individual and unit training, substantially more progress is needed in providing a capability to support interservice and joint task force training. Recognizing this urgent need, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), the Joint Staff, and the Services are coordinating their efforts to create a coherent integrated plan for the use of modeling and simulation in support of joint and interservice training.
The Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Readiness and the Joint Staff Director for Operational Plans and Interoperability, in collaboration with the Director, Defense Research and Engineering and the Services, have established a Training Council for Modeling and Simulation. The primary objective of this council is to develop and implement joint/interservice training simulation plans that represent the needs and interests of the training community. The significance of this effort is threefold. It will: (1) provide a central focus for coordinating simulation training plans across DoD, (2) provide high-level user requirements to guide DoD research and development efforts, and (3) greatly increase the cost-effectiveness of DoD investments by eliminating unnecessary duplication while improving the Services' ability to share common resources.
A major focus of the new Training Council is the Joint Simulation System (JSIMS) program. The JSIMS program represents a quantum leap over existing training technology. It will encompass the full range of missions across all phases of military operations. It will share a common architecture with other training simulations as well as analytical and acquisition related models. Finally, it will interface with actual command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence (C4I) equipment in the field. DoD has established a Joint Program Office for management of the JSIMS program and is in the process of providing staffing from each of the Services. A new program element has been established for the core JSIMS developments, and efforts are underway to coordinate related Service activities.
The Department has made a priority of exploiting enhanced modeling and simulation through distributive technology. The Department's policy for joint readiness includes proactive application of simulation technologies in the areas of joint training, exercises, and readiness monitoring. The DoD Modeling and Simulation Master Plan will be amended with a definitive description of the requirements, plans, and programs to support joint and interservice training. In addition, DoD is pursuing development of better modeling methods to improve U.S. capability to predict the interaction of forces and reduce the fog and friction of war. The net result of this coordinated effort by the Services, Joint Staff, and OSD will be increased efficiency and interoperability, as well as improved cost efficiency, through more efficient utilization of the simulation technology.
READINESS CHALLENGES
In today's dynamic political, fiscal, and operating environments, achieving and maintaining DoD readiness goals are challenging. Some believe that in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet empire, the United States should rapidly draw down its forces, dramatically lower its defense spending, and reduce its commitments abroad. In the past, precipitous force drawdowns led to a hollow force structure. Indeed, drawdowns have characteristics that inherently degrade readiness (e.g., reorganization, personnel turbulence, uncertainty, etc.) during the transition. Maintaining readiness is central to successfully managing the drawdown.
Challenges to maintaining readiness rest primarily with six variables: personnel, equipment, training, logistics, professional development, and the financial resources to support these elements. A deficit in any one will degrade readiness. It takes resources and time to develop and sustain ready forces. Readiness is cumulative; it takes 20 years to develop senior level individual military leaders, 7-11 years to develop and field technologically superior equipment, and 1-2 years to develop a sustainment program to provide trained and ready units. A decline in resources or adequately educated and trained people will lengthen the amount of time it takes to rebuild readiness. Through its efforts to ensure a highly capable force, DoD has encountered these challenges to readiness: people, readiness funding, and staying on top of readiness. The following discussion characterizes these challenges and describes how the Department is addressing these issues.
CHALLENGE -- QUALITY PERSONNEL
Attracting/Retaining Quality People
The first challenge to keeping a ready force is attracting and keeping high quality people. This is becoming increasingly difficult, given the attractiveness of nonmilitary careers in an improving economy and demanding pace of military operations. Today, the all-volunteer force includes some of the most skilled men and women ever to wear the uniform. High quality people are the foundation of today's high quality force. The challenge to readiness is to keep it that way. A weapon system will be only as effective as the people who operate and maintain it. Recruiting and retaining quality people significantly affect readiness. The Department is meeting its recruiting goals, including quality goals, and currently enjoys high retention rates among service members. The Department has taken several steps to improve quality of life so that the Services can continue these positive trends.
Quality of life programs support readiness in three ways. First, quality of life helps the Department recruit good people by offering attractive incentives for education, health care, career advancement, and retirement, among others. Second, quality of life programs provide assurance to service members that their families will be taken care of during deployments -- an important consideration with a more mature and family oriented all-volunteer force. Third, they help to retain the best people -- well-trained people who are competent in their skills and who have high morale. The Secretary of Defense's initiative to add $2.7 billion over six years (FY 1996-2001) recognizes the importance of the quality of life of service members and its relation to the readiness of the force. The $2.7 billion for these initiatives will improve compensation, living accommodations, and family and community support.
Managing Time Away From Home: Personnel Tempo
Since the end of the Cold War, the increased pace of military operations means military people are, on average, away from home more often. Although much of the satisfaction that comes from military service is the opportunity for individuals to do what they have been trained for -- to apply what they have learned by engaging in worthy missions that support American values and interests -- extensive deployments increase the time service members are away from their families and communities. This cannot help but impact the way military members and their families feel about serving their country. To maintain a reasonable balance, the Department is pursuing several initiatives, including:
Medical Readiness
Medical readiness is the cornerstone of the Military Health Services System (MHSS). It encompasses the ability to mobilize, deploy, and sustain field medical services; to maintain and project the continuum of health care resources required to provide for the health of the force; and to operate in conjunction with beneficiary health care. The MHSS supports the full array of military missions, including MRCs, lesser contingencies, humanitarian assistance, and disaster relief.
A key component of medical readiness is the experience acquired through real-world operational support missions. Over the past year, the Department provided medical support to numerous peacekeeping and humanitarian support operations around the world. These missions include maintaining a 60-bed deployable medical systems hospital in Zagreb, Croatia; medical support to the NATO Implementation Force involved in operations in the former Republic of Yugoslavia; providing care in support of migrant operations at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; medical support in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia; and medical support for the mission in Haiti. Among the humanitarian assistance missions supported this past year were humanitarian aid in Rwanda and Zaire; support to other government agencies in Zaire during the Ebola virus outbreak; and numerous humanitarian and civic action projects around the world, relying heavily on Reserve components.
The Department also provided medical support to domestic assistance/action missions in the continental United States. Operations include assistance following the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and the Reserve component's Arch Angel medical training and support program.
In addition to these opportunities to learn from operational missions, the CINCs and Services conduct exercises worldwide that provide additional opportunities for medical personnel to hone their skills in a realistic environment, employing the equipment and systems used to support combat operations.
In March 1995, the Department released the Medical Readiness Strategic Plan 2001 (MRSP 2001), the first comprehensive update of U.S. medical readiness strategy since 1988. The purpose of the plan is to provide DoD with an integrated, coordinated, and synchronized plan for achieving and sustaining medical readiness through 2001 and beyond. It will be used to articulate requirements and resources and for developing policies and procedures. Medical readiness will be measured against the objectives outlined in the plan.
The Department intends to continuously monitor the status of DoD medical readiness through the development and implementation of an effective oversight/evaluation mechanism. Development and fielding of the strategic plan is only one element in the overall process. Defense Medical Program Guidance will also play a key role by specifically addressing medical readiness priorities within the Defense Health Program. Together, these elements will establish a cyclic and perpetual process to identify requirements, develop policy, provide resources, and monitor success of medical readiness programs and initiatives.
The MRSP 2001 provides a medical readiness vision for 1995-2001. The vision covers 10 separate functional areas: Planning; Requirements; Capabilities and Assessment; Command, Control, Communications, and Computers (C4) and Information Management; Logistics; Medical Evacuation; Manpower and Personnel; Training; Blood Program; and Readiness Oversight. The strategic plan will be a living document that will be updated and adjusted to respond to changes in a highly dynamic environment. When a given objective is achieved, the supporting action plan will be removed and new functional areas, objectives, and action plans will be added as opportunities to improve medical readiness are identified.
CHALLENGE -- READINESS FUNDING
The second challenge is to make sure the Department has the right resources allocated to the right purposes in support of readiness. Many of the assumptions on funding become inaccurate due to shifting priorities and the lengthy budget and execution cycle. Structuring the budget to ensure readiness involves a rigorous, multistep process. For the FY 1997 budget request sent to Congress, this process began over a year ago with the Secretary's guidance to the Services and other defense components. The Secretary directed the Services to provide enough funding in future programs and budgets to ensure their forces were ready to carry out missions at acceptable levels of risk. Underscoring the strength of this priority, the Secretary allowed the Services to break his guidance elsewhere if required to maintain readiness.
The budget development process included two other important steps to ensure that U.S. forces had sufficient readiness to carry out joint operations. The first involved direct discussions between the Secretary and the CINCs to ensure that their readiness concerns were met. Second, the Joint Staff, under the leadership of the Vice Chairman, undertook a detailed review of readiness-related funding. The results, reflected in the Chairman's Program Assessment, led to the incorporation of several important enhancements in the final budget submission.
The results of DoD's approach to getting readiness funding right from the start were incorporated into the FY 1995 budget, which involved many changes from the previous year and corrected some unrealistic assumptions. The FY 1996 budget also reflected robust readiness funding. The Department's FY 1997 budget request offers further refinements in readiness, building on progress made in the previous fiscal year. For example, levels of funding for operations and maintenance -- the major, but not sole, source of readiness funding -- indicate that DoD has maintained historic levels of readiness.
In light of the improvements made, the FY 1995-1997 budgets are balanced and realistic. Indeed, the funding provided in the FY 1997 budget will maintain adequate readiness levels in the Services, with one important provision -- the Department must receive timely funding for unbudgeted contingency operations.
Contingency Funding in the Post-Cold War Environment
Part of the fiscal challenge is to ensure that, even with a solid foundation of readiness funds in the DoD budget, the costs of unplanned contingency operations do not undercut readiness. The Department remains dependent on timely congressional approvals to fund unplanned contingency operations.
In recent years, U.S. forces have deployed around the world to perform a wide variety of operations that forced DoD to spend more than planned in DoD budgets. This situation became acutely apparent during latter FY 1994, when U.S. forces were deployed in support of several contingency operations. Acting prudently, the Department reallocated scarce resources to those forces that needed them most -- those engaged on the front lines and those preparing to execute contingencies. As necessary as these reallocations were, they diverted funds from planned activities that were often critical to the readiness of its remaining forces. Consequently, the Department suffered some difficult readiness cash flow shortages, particularly in the fourth quarter of FY 1994. These cash flow problems were brought on by high year-end demands on its forces including operations in Rwanda, Cuba, Haiti, and Kuwait. Moreover, the problems were exacerbated by receiving supplemental reimbursements only after the close of FY 1994. As a result, training and sustainment accounts for important missions were placed at risk.
The Department took aggressive measures to minimize the effects of these temporary cash flow shortages. Examples included expedited withdrawal of forces from completed missions, financial management measures to ensure the proper execution of missions, and freeing operating funds through reductions in the training, maintenance, and supply of selected units. Nevertheless, each of the Services had to selectively reduce readiness-related activities that ultimately resulted in lower unit readiness primarily for those units that had recently returned from deployments, those units that deploy later in mission plans, or those units scheduled for deactivation.
Today, the Department continues to stress its effort to prevent any reoccurrence of similar cash flow shortages in FY 1996. This perplexing problem can be partially avoided through careful budgeting of resources. The Department's FY 1996 budget reflects such planning through careful adjustments in Operation and Maintenance (O&M) funding for each Service. The FY 1997 budget includes funding for contingencies expected to carry into the new fiscal year, plus robust O&M spending.
Importantly, Congress and the Department share the responsibility to sustain a consensus on how to fund America's international commitments without degrading the readiness of its forces. DoD realizes the crucial importance of timely reprogramming activity and supplemental appropriations from Congress. When DoD does not have timely congressional approval of these requests, readiness is placed at risk. Likewise, the Department understands that timely submission of requests for supplemental appropriations and reprogrammings to Congress helps to expedite the approval process. In addition, it is crucial that the Department and Congress work closely to ensure a clear understanding on this important matter.
Evaluating Standards, Indicators, and Measures of Readiness
Understanding and managing the complexity of O&M programs and their funding is a difficult but important task. These funds can impact the current readiness of U.S. forces almost immediately. O&M funds are planned for specific programs within a year of execution and fund managers order their programs to execute according to this plan. Historically, O&M resources have been the Department's only source of flexibility or discretionary dollar assistance when financial constraints are encountered during the year. As budget execution progresses, costs become fixed and fewer dollars become available to finance the unanticipated contingencies, leaving O&M appropriations as the resource of last resort.
The Department has been working hard on several initiatives to analyze the nature of the O&M funds and to measure the impact on the readiness. The Department is exploring multiple methodologies to quantify O&M's relationship to readiness and to develop quantitative measures to forecast the impact of resourcing decisions on readiness. Developing these analytical tools is an ambitious undertaking. However, it is envisioned that this effort will be mature enough for use in the preparation, analysis, and review of the President's FY 1998 budget.
Assessment of Readiness Funding
The resources in the FY 1997 budget will provide adequate readiness for America's armed forces, provided that:
For the outyears of the program beyond FY 1997, DoD plans to focus on maintaining adequate readiness, specifically, the elements of readiness critical to the execution of U.S. defense strategy. DoD has fully funded operating and personnel programs. At the same time, there may be significant risks to readiness as DoD plans are executed. For example, some programs in the O&M appropriations may eventually need more funds. DoD must take care to ensure that reallocating funds for these purposes do not unduly divert resources away from more direct readiness needs. The Department must also maintain a balance between current readiness and required increases in procurement and modernization funding in future budgets.
FY 1997-2001 Programs and Budgets
Despite the challenges in precisely projecting U.S. readiness and sustainability needs in uncertain times, the readiness programs and budgets being submitted to Congress represent the best estimates within DoD today of the necessary resources to keep U.S. military forces ready to execute U.S. strategy successfully.
Future programs and budgets were developed using the direction provided through prior years' planning. The principal guidance affecting readiness follows:
Modernization/Long-Term Capability
Technologically superior equipment facilitates combat success. Maintaining an advantage will continue to be paramount to U.S. success in future battles. Long-term capability depends, among other things, on the modernization of weapons and equipment. Recognizing the need to maintain the technological superiority of U.S. forces, the Future Years Defense Program provides procurement funding in FY 2001 that is 47 percent higher than the $39.4 billion requested in the FY 1996 budget. The opportunities for meeting United States' long-term goals lie in four areas:
The Department of Defense must maximize its efforts in these areas and continue to make prudent investments in recapitalization if it is to ensure that tomorrow's readiness is equal to tomorrow's challenges.
CHALLENGE -- STAYING ON TOP OF READINESS
Even with the best plans for people and resources to support readiness, the third challenge is to watch closely what happens as plans are executed and to make timely adjustments when problems arise. The Department has improved its ability to assess readiness to ensure that it has a clear picture of the health of the force. When costs were incurred for unfunded contingency operations during FY 1994, the Department knew there would be some pockets of unreadiness, but the effect that reallocating O&M funds had on force readiness could not be accurately projected. When readiness declines did occur, the readiness reporting system informed senior leaders in the Department only after many weeks had passed, which was an inherent weakness in the readiness reporting methodology in effect at the time. To correct these deficiencies, especially the ability to uncover readiness problems quickly and correct them as fast as possible, DoD implemented a number of initiatives to improve its assessment and correctional capability.
Senior Readiness Oversight Council
The first step was to create an improved forum for assessing and correcting problems in the near-term readiness of the force. This initiative used an existing body, the Senior Readiness Oversight Council (SROC), whose membership includes the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Service Chiefs, the Under Secretaries of Defense and military departments, and other senior officials with interests in readiness.
Initially, the council looked at broad plans to maintain readiness in the future. Given the events of late 1994, however, it was apparent that consideration of only future readiness was not enough. The Deputy Secretary subsequently refocused the council's attention on the readiness of the force today. He directed that each month's meeting includes a readiness assessment of U.S. forces, both today and a year into the future, by each of the Service Chiefs. The Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller), who plays an important role in financing readiness, also became a key participant in council deliberations.
Working closely with the Joint Staff, the refocused SROC has made excellent progress in providing a forum for DoD leadership to assess and manage readiness. Since its initial current-readiness assessment in December 1994, the council has incorporated the following:
Chairman's Readiness System/Joint Monthly Readiness Review
In late 1994, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff directed the Joint Staff to build a readiness system to define, measure, and fix joint readiness. The resulting comprehensive readiness system, called the Joint Monthly Readiness Review (JMRR), combines Service and CINC assessments of the force readiness. Chaired by the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the JMRR includes the principals of the Joint Staff directorates, the Service Deputy Chiefs of Staff for Operations, and representatives from the unified commands and combat support agencies. It is designed to examine the readiness of the armed forces to carry out the National Military Strategy, including winning two nearly simultaneous MRCs. The Chairman has the overarching responsibility to carry out the National Military Strategy. His view of readiness, therefore, requires visibility into the traditional readiness status of units provided by the Services, as well as joint readiness, and the CINCs' ability to integrate and synchronize assigned forces to accomplish their missions.
During the JMRR, the Services brief unit readiness of their major fighting organizations, and the Joint Staff Director for Operations (J-3) briefs the theater commanders' assessments of eight functional areas that are integral to joint readiness: Mobility; Joint Headquarters Capability; C4; Special Operations; Logistics/Sustainment; Infrastructure; Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance; and Joint Personnel. In addition, the defense combat support agencies, including the Central Imagery Office, Defense Intelligence Agency, Defense Information Systems Agency, Defense Logistics Agency, Defense Mapping Agency, and National Security Agency, all participate in the JMRR. The joint review process also includes an extensive feedback process to ensure that critical deficiencies are addressed by near-term policy, operational, and/or programmatic fixes.
The review has directly enhanced the Chairman's ability to provide accurate advice to the President and Secretary of Defense on the use of force, current and projected unit and joint readiness, current force commitments, and how those commitments impact the flow of forces to warfighting commanders. Furthermore, the review's swift evolution has provided the Senior Readiness Oversight Council an essential evaluative tool for measuring joint readiness.
In general, Services and CINCs' readiness assessments provided to the council show that, overall, the readiness of military units today is holding steady where levels are already as desired, and getting better where improvements are needed. The Department can carry out the strategy for prosecuting two nearly simultaneous MRCs at today's readiness levels.
Joint Requirements Oversight Council
Another initiative undertaken over the last year is being carried out by the Joint Requirements Oversight Council, or JROC. Chaired by the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, this council includes the Vice Chiefs of the Army, Navy, and Air Force and Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps. It is currently conducting a series of Joint Warfighting Capabilities Assessments (JWCAs) to investigate potential improvements in military capabilities.
Joint Readiness Assessment
The evolving emphasis on the joint task force requires CINCs to dispatch joint force packages to meet a wide variety of missions on very short notice. In preparing for deploying troops on contingency operations, the CINCs have noted they do not have an effective mechanism for assessing the joint readiness of the forces assigned to them. While each Service has its own system to assess readiness, there are clear differences in how each Service prepares its respective forces and assesses their suitability for deployment. However, this training does not evaluate the joint capabilities required by deployed forces in the event of emergent contingency operations. Thus, the CINCs need a system that can depict the overall readiness posture of their forces so that they can provide the optimum force package to meet the National Command Authorities' goals.
Seeing a critical deficiency in the need to track the readiness of its forces, the Department has undertaken a number of initiatives to better assess joint readiness. DoD, in particular the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is developing an Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration (ACTD) that utilizes an automated database to access existing databases in order to give the CINC an accurate, near real-time snapshot of his forces and their readiness posture. The system will provide the ability to integrate major unit readiness Status of Resources and Training System (SORTS) data with the Time Phased Force Deployment Data (TPFDD). These two diverse data systems are being linked by an DARPA-developed Object Architecture that facilitates rapid data manipulation and a response in minutes which previously took days. While this effort is in the developmental stage, these types of initiatives are indicative of the Department's intent to move forward in the readiness assessment arena.
Service Readiness Updates
The Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Readiness meets regularly with Service representatives to receive in-depth readiness assessments of their forces. The briefings cover current readiness of units, highlight deficiencies, outline solutions, discuss new initiatives, and provide a forum to discuss overall Service and joint readiness issues. These proactive meetings provide further insight into tracking and assessing the current and future readiness of U.S. forces.
Current-Readiness Spokesperson
Another initiative was designed to ensure that the public and Congress have a prompt, clear, and candid picture of the readiness status of U.S. forces. To accomplish this, the Deputy Secretary has asked the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to serve as the Department's spokesperson on current readiness. The Deputy Secretary's charge to the Vice Chairman is to provide an unvarnished picture of the U.S. military's readiness and to foster a fully informed discussion of any actions needed to correct problems that may arise.
Defense Science Board Task Force on Readiness
A fifth initiative, now completed and which served as the foundation to many of the current readiness initiatives, was the creation in May 1993 of the Readiness Task Force to provide the Department's leadership a source of independent advice on readiness. The task force provided a significant impetus to the Department's efforts to manage readiness. Comprised of eight retired four- and three-star officers under the lead of retired General Edward C. (Shy) Meyer, U.S. Army, the task force focused primarily on bringing a greater joint-force perspective to readiness activities, and especially on increasing CINC involvement in the resource allocation process. The task force published a formal report in June 1994, providing observations and recommendations to the Secretary, and served as the lightning rod for many key issues in the management of readiness. The panel continued to meet quarterly to assess readiness issues and review progress made in implementing the recommendations from its report. The Task Force held its final meeting in August 1995, and concluded its efforts with a report to the Secretary that included an updated status on its previous recommendations.
CONCLUSION
DoD continuously faces new challenges to readiness as the world changes. Based on past experiences, America's vigorous responses to each, and the valuable lessons derived, U.S. forces today are ready to fight -- ready to get where they are needed, on time, to carry out the nation's tasks.
For FY 1997 and beyond, the Department will maintain the readiness of its forces to carry out the National Security Strategy. The policies and programs enumerated in this section demonstrate the continued initiative and energy with which the Department is addressing these challenges and will set the stage for ensuring readiness for the future. Such efforts rest with the shared responsibility between Congress and the Department. With approval of these proposals, particularly timely funding for contingency operations, the United States will continue in the future to have the world's best trained, best equipped force run by the world's best men and women.
