Measuring Military Readiness and Sustainability

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.