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The authors explore a more expansive approach to readiness assessments that goes beyond the narrow lens of operational readiness and considers a broader set of dimensions that could affect readiness outcomes.
This report reviews the state of the art in readiness and sustainability measurement and develops a strategic concept design for measurements that would better serve high-level defense decisionmakers. The authors identify (1) incremental improvements that would raise the value of information derived from current reporting and analysis systems and (2) a new concept for assessing readiness and sustainability that would integrate several existing reporting and analysis approaches. The findings indicate that today's indicators of readiness and sustainability do not provide high-level defense decisionmakers with appropriate information. Estimates of the levels of activity that U.S. forces could achieve over time in different contingencies would be more useful. Using continuous numerical scales and showing changes during a contingency, such integrated assessments should prove more sensitive to resource level changes and allow easier comparisons from year to year.
"Today, the American people are faced with more challenges than they have ever been faced with before. Challenges that are so complex, diverse, intertwined, and further complicated by factors such as globalization, climate change, authoritarianism, and technology that it is becoming extremely difficult to predict what the future of national security will hold. Simultaneously, the difficulty in establishing and maintaining a consistently resourced and coordinated strategy is muddled by partisan politics, annual budgets, a 4-year Presidential election cycle, and an unstable and unpredictable security environment. It is crucial that the United States, specifically the Department of Defense (DoD), develops a Strategic Readiness methodology by which its most important security strategies can be assessed periodically against the objectives that define them in a way that is credible to the whole of government. Strategic readiness is the comprehensive assessment of not only operational readiness data but the holistic view of how the DoD is meeting the objectives of the National Defense Strategy. Today, the Defense Department focuses their readiness efforts on individual problem sets, centered around U.S. strategic competitors. These problem sets encompass primary and supporting operational plans that are not always resource and readiness informed. Readiness efforts are also focused on establishing readiness goals based on supply versus demand from the Combatant Commanders. It is evidently clear after reviewing the current policies and procedures in place that the DoD lacks a Strategic Readiness methodology. The current readiness system is myopic and puts too much focus on operational and tactical level concerns. Research has shown that the methodology by which readiness is reported and tracked is solely based on objective metrics and plans. The current assessment methodology is effective at assessing operational readiness, but it was not designed to address strategic issues such as long-term strategic competition, rapid dispersion of technologies, and new concepts of warfare. It is important to understand that readiness defines not only the material capabilities to wage war but the non-material capabilities to train and equip forces and more importantly, the education and support mechanisms that build a resilient and ready force. The operational aspect, which is where the DoD focuses its readiness efforts, only represents the surface of the true definition of readiness. This paper offers a novel methodology to holistically assess strategic readiness. The methodology described in this paper facilitates the analysis of seven strategic readiness dimensions including: operational readiness, lethality, global posture, mobilization readiness, sustainment readiness, resiliency, and allies and partners. By assessing them individually and then collectively, against the National Defense Strategy objectives, a holistic assessment can be published and utilized to assess the DoD’s effectiveness at meeting their overall strategy. This methodology provides the DoD a dynamic tool that is easily modifiable as strategic objectives change or as the strategy changes based on real world events or changes in political administrations. More importantly, the DoD can use the results of the assessment to course correct the strategy and refine their approaches to meeting national security objectives. It is imperative that the DoD takes every step necessary to maintain an advantage against near-peer adversaries like China. Every dollar spent, training hour utilized, and decision delayed risks the ability of the U.S. to compete in the future. Without making corrections now to the comprehensive understanding of readiness, the DoD will be behind in great power competition for years to come. Due to the bureaucracy of how the government and DoD functions, decisions made now will have an impact for decades to come. Evidence of this is the 20-year acquisition timeline for the F-35 and multiple failed programs, mis-managed from their onset and by many measures, an inefficient use of government resources now under fire from the House Armed Services Committee Chairman. By not making corrections along the way and adjusting resources to meet higher priority needs and requirements, the DoD will not be as effective as possible. A feedback mechanism with actionable information is necessary to aid in this area and assist senior leaders in steering the department towards success. I recommend that the DoD adopts such a strategic readiness assessment methodology, built off the current statutory requirements for operational readiness. At the highest level, Congress should amend the National Defense Authorization Act to include updates to Title 10, sections 117 and 153, and mandate, at a minimum, an annual Strategic Readiness Assessment. This assessment should be briefed to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees prior to annual budget debates and in conjunction with SECDEF and CJCS testimony. The intent of the assessment would be to inform budget decisions with respect to strategy and provide actionable information for senior leaders and congress. The Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness (OSD P&R) would be primarily responsible for authoring the assessment and would rely heavily on other experts to inform the assessment. Along with the Strategic Readiness Assessment, OSD P&R should host bi-annual strategy development conference to review the strategy and provide updates to senior leaders and congress. Visualization of the assessment is critically important in ensuring that senior leaders understand the information and the impact of decisions made daily. Using the current Defense Readiness Reporting System Strategic, I recommend that a strategic readiness tool be implemented and employed in a dashboard type format, and example which you will see in Chapter 4. This program will allow stakeholders to implement their assessments, and using artificial intelligence, see the impact of not only operational decisions but strategic decisions. The DoD needs to take advantage of every opportunity to stay ahead of a rising Chinese global power. Every domain, every decision, and every task will have a role in the strategic race. It is imperative that the DoD thinks innovatively about how it measures strategic success and how it uses data to inform tactical and operational decisions that may unknowingly have strategic impacts. The comprehensive strategic readiness of the DoD is an area of immense value if measured and assessed honestly. After demonstrating effective utilization of the strategic readiness assessment methodology, the DoD should share its assessment and results with other government agencies such as the Department of State and the Department of Treasury to truly reinforce the whole of government approach that is so desperately needed in great power competition."--Executive summary.
"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. To manage readiness, the Department of Defense must balance the supply and demand of deployable forces around the world. The readiness of an individual unit is the result of a series of time-intensive force generation processes that ultimately combine qualified people, working equipment, and unit training to produce military capabilities suitable for executing the defense strategy. While this discussion is a basic tenet of production theory, it had not been commonly applied to readiness management until recently. The important point here is that understanding how the readiness of military capabilities is generated provides the clearest picture of the current readiness status and whether that status is likely to change over time. Furthermore, it provides the best shot at identifying effective management policies to ensure that DOD can generate the capabilities that the Nation asks of it. This paper argues that traditional unit-level readiness metrics are useful as part of a larger readiness management construct, but by themselves they do not provide enough information to proactively manage strategically. This approach provides a clear explanation of the causes of readiness degradations and options for how to mitigate them that can be traced to precise resource investments"--Page 1.
AR 525-30 06/03/2014 ARMY STRATEGIC READINESS , Survival Ebooks
Shows executives--anyone concerned with making change happen--how to move beyond the limitations of fixed strategic planning processes and programs to create a flexible, responsive organization that thrives in today's climate of uncertainty: the learning organization. Draws from an extensive study of two hundred change-oriented organizations including Honeywell and Motorola to identify a series of practical actions that can be used immediately to help develop a firm's capacity to learn.
Throughout most of American history, U.S. military forces proved unready for the wars that were thrust upon them and suffered costly reverses in early battles. During the Cold War, for the first time, U.S. defense policy tried to maintain high readiness in peacetime. But now, with the Cold War over and defense budgets falling, what will happen to U.S. military forces? Will they revert to a state of unpreparedness or find a new balance? Politicians and military planners alike have found this crucial issue especially difficult to deal with because they have often misunderstood what readiness really means. In this book, security expert Richard Betts surveys problems in developing and measuring combat readiness before, during, and after the Cold War. He analyzes why attempts to maximize it often have counterproductive effects, and how confusions in technical concepts cause political controversy. The book explores conflicts between two objectives that are both vital but work against each other because they compete for resources: operational readiness to fight immediately, and structural readiness—the number of organized units that increase military power, but require time during a crisis to gear up for combat. Betts also discusses the problem brought on by the Cold War and plunging defense budgets: mobilization readiness—the plans and arrangements needed to shorten the time for recreating a large military if it once again becomes necessary. Betts offers new ideas for understanding the dilemmas and tradeoffs that underlie debates on how readiness should be maintained in peacetime, and he explores the strategic consequences of different choices.
The authors of "The Balanced Scorecard" and "The Strategy-Focused Organization" present a blueprint any organization can follow to align processes, people, and information technology for superior performance.
Accelerated Strategy Development and Execution The company of today has its supply chains and finances stretched further around the globe than ever before while simultaneously having increasing pressures to drive value across a complicated and fluid set of metrics and deliver innovations, products, and services more quickly and reliably. The competitive advantage belongs to the companies that can quicken their vision-building and strategy-execution efforts—the ones that can identify challenges more swiftly and accelerate their decision making so they are better able to formulate and deploy responses decisively yet with greater agility. To successfully accomplish this, companies will have to prioritize creating a culture of leadership that strengthens communication skills and emphasizes systems thinking by building capacity and capability that cuts across the business smokestacks and permeates the entire organization. In State of Readiness, Joseph F. Paris Jr. shares over thirty years of international business and operations experience and guides C-suite executives and business-operations and -improvement specialists on a path toward operational excellence, the organizational capability and situational awareness that is attained as the enterprise reaches a state of alignment for pursuing its strategies. In doing so, create a corporate culture that is committed to the continuous and deliberate improvement of company performance and the circumstances of those who work there—a precursor to becoming a high-performance organization.
"The main scope of the book is to highlight the importance of intangible resources in business management, evidenced in their measurement and financial valuation, and the need for a strategic analysis that enables them to be identified and then assessed"--Provided by publisher.