Developing an Analytical Method for Assessing Readiness, Risks, and Opportunity

Readiness implies the ability to generate trained, equipped, and manned forces at the time and location that they are required for military operations. This paper introduces a novel way of quantifying one aspect of readiness, namely the force sufficiency of ready forces that are likely to be available, on average, given broad decisions about US Army force management policies. This work simplifies the many dimensions of readiness into metrics related to the number of available units, allowing for a simple way to quantify and communicate differences between readiness policies. Specifically, this paper makes two significant simplifications to the quantification of readiness. The first simplification is common in the literature and suggests that force sufficiency based on "readiness ratios" can serve as a proxy for overall readiness. The second simplification is novel and reduces the output of such force sufficiency analysis to two simple metrics: the number of ready units and the number of potential additional ready units if maximum stress policies are applied. The analysis presented in this paper serves not to replace or even improve more detailed prescriptive planning efforts, but rather to introduce a back-of-the-envelope analytical tool that can help quantify rough impact of big-picture strategic decisions. Strategic decisions that may be of interest include decisions about force size and mix, component usage, deployment and readiness policies, peacetime posture, and ability to disengage from existing commitments.