READINESS: MORE THAN A CONCEPT
Of the four-plus-one challenges, “We have to be able to deal with two of the four named countries simultaneously, or near simultaneously, and one of them we have to defeat and the other we have to deny,” Milley told an audience at the U.S. Army Reserve Command Senior Leader Conference in April 2016 at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. “At
the same
time, you have to maintain your current level of effort against the counterterrorist fight and you have to protect the home- land. Tat’s for the U.S. military, not just the Army.”
Talk to any randomly chosen person involved in the military, and readiness could mean having enough people … the right equipment … appropriate training … enough modeling and simulation … proper testing … adequate maintenance … reliable sustainment … or, a universal theme, enough money. Achieving any of those, in turn, is subject to politics, bureaucracy, endless acquisition regula- tions and the organizational culture of
the military—the constants of getting things done in DOD.
Readiness is “what the entire department [DOD] does,” said Dr. Laura Junor in a July 10 interview with Army AL&T. For Junor, a former senior defense readiness official who holds a Ph.D. in applied microeconomics, the military is one mas- sive and massively complex supply chain serving up a single product: “to secure the nation’s defense,” she said. For every- one along that supply chain, readiness represents distinct priorities.
NO ‘FIRE AND FORGET’ What to do to make Army acquisition ready? As Junor sees it, readiness for the acquisition community “is recognizing that acquiring a weapon system or even a Soldier is not the end, it’s the begin- ning. Unless we buy that with all of its spares, with a full understanding of what it’s going to take to make that capabil- ity deployable when we need it, we’re not being effective.” So, for example, in
buying a new weapon system, that means understanding
“the training
require-
ments, what type of people you need, especially now as we’re moving into a new and exciting realm of unmanned systems.”
All of those long-term costs should be factored in on the front end of the acqui- sition process, Junor said, so that “we buy something that we know how to keep operating.” Otherwise, the risk is what she described as a “fire and forget” approach to acquisition program man- agement. “I ask that [program managers] make sure to consider not just the specs of the weapon but all of the things that are involved in the sustainment of that capability going forward: the type of the labor that’s required, the training, the spares and the maintenance.”
After years in “the building,” as Junor and many others call the Pentagon, she is director of the Institute for National Strategic Studies at National Defense
NEW CHALLENGES EN ROUTE
U.S. Army Reserve Soldiers from the 316th Sustainment Command (Expeditionary) (316th ESC) have supported the fight against the Islamic State group in the U.S. Army Central Command area of operations by providing fuel, life support and munitions, including those delivered by these UH-60 Black Hawks to Forward Operating Base Shalalot, Iraq, in July. While the U.S. military has focused on violent extremism, it also faces threats from peer and near-peer adversaries with capabilities designed to limit its ability to project power. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Christopher Bigelow, 316th ESC)
12
Army AL&T Magazine
October-December 2017
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