READINESS: MORE THAN A CONCEPT
Invoking a phrase coined by retired Army Gen. Frederick J. Kroesen, former vice chief of staff of the Army and for- mer commander in chief of U.S. Army Europe, Dillard said readiness is “the lion in the fight” for limited resources, while the jackal is acquisition, trying to sow the seed corn for future modernization efforts.
Kroesen, now a senior fellow of the Insti- tute of Land Warfare at the Association of the United States Army, sees Army readi- ness in a “dire” situation. “Te downslope that began at the end of the Cold War has not been interrupted ever since, and the past eight years did nothing but deepen the curve,” he stated in response to ques- tions from Army AL&T. “Army readiness today is limited to only a portion of the total force, those committed to the com- bat requirements being pursued.”
Meanwhile, he wrote, “the portion of the Army stationed in the U.S. is in many stages of unreadiness and the future of the Army is in grave doubt because the R&D portion of the budget has been badly depreciated for the last almost 30 years. Yes, the situation is dire,” Kroe sen concluded. “Te current administration’s proposals are only the first baby steps in what will be a long climb to a true ready capability.”
CONCLUSION Ultimately, the Army Acquisition Work- force supports the warfighter’s readiness to fight by understanding, balancing and, to the extent it is able, incorporating the warfighter’s capability needs in system design and production.
“Te combatant commanders are very much go-to-war oriented today—we used to say ‘tomorrow’—and they don’t think about the long-term impacts” of system design, Dillard said. “Who does? Don’t you always turn down the warranty when a guy is selling you the washing machine or the television? Nobody thinks about the operations-and-support end of it.
“It’s very human, I think, to push that off, and it’s human on the part of the PM, too: Te [logistics] support manager comes in and says, ‘Hey let’s talk about logistics,’ and the PM is saying, ‘Are you kidding me? I just want to demonstrate vertical flight.’ ”
In sum, then, can the Army fulfill its No. 1 priority, to be able to put Soldiers where they need to be, when they’re needed, with the capabilities that they need?
“Can we do what we need to do today plus that whole
four-plus-one? Simultane- ously, no,” Junor said. “We’ve never been
“The only thing more expensive than deterrence is actually fighting a war, and the only thing more expensive than fighting a war is fighting one and losing one.”
18 Army AL&T Magazine October-December 2017
able to do that. So then the smart issue is, all right, what can we do? We have two responsibilities, to target specific produc- tion pipelines to cover as many of those requirements as possible, and to very clearly articulate what we’ve missed and why that matters.”
As to the role of Army acquisition, she said, “We’re pretty harsh on them—the global ‘we’—because of the extreme sto- ries that come out about the cost and the slow pace and all that kind of stuff. But we also aren’t fair in that we don’t come to them with steady, predictable require- ments for them to respond to.”
“Put yourself in the warfighter’s shoes for a second,” Jones said: “I know what my mission is, I know what I’ve got. We’ve got to fight with what we have. We put a plan together, and we execute our plan.” Tat crystal-clear operational environ- ment is one thing, but outside of it, things are much more ambiguous.
“Tere are going to be changes out there that you didn’t anticipate. And so when we approach these programs, we need to put those things into our thought process. What happens if, for example, we have a depression in five years? What happens if Congress decides to do something weird, like a sequestration that nobody believed would ever happen and then all of a sud- den it happens? We spend more time arguing and fighting those things than we do just recognizing that that’s just part of the environment. I think the process is fine. It’s how we implement the process.”
Junor echoed that sentiment. For her, one of the issues with readiness is DOD itself.
“DOD is a big traditional institution,” she said. “It does not move fast. So when you ask it to change direction, it doesn’t do it quickly, it just doesn’t.” Readiness means money, and when money is tight, the
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