The Fundamentals of Military Readiness

Each year the Department of Defense DOD requests and Congress authorizes and appropriates billions of dollars in Operations and Maintenance O and M funding to support what the DOD calls readiness. Additionally, other types of defense appropriations may be used to contribute to producing, sustaining, or otherwise enabling readiness. DOD defines readiness as the ability of military forces to fight and meet the demands of assigned missions. What precisely this means is a matter of ongoing discourse among congressional leaders and defense officials alike. Despite disagreement over specific definitions of readiness, DOD retains statutory authorities and responsibilities to produce and sustain ready military forces, and Congress has the constitutional authority to resource and regulate military forces for the nation. For these reasons, many government officials and members of the defense community agree that the focus of readiness is to generate ready military forces. The process of generating these forces is complex, and differs across a range of various circumstances e.g., branch of armed service, military occupation, status of a servicemember commissioned officer, warrant officer, or enlisted, and duty typecomponent i.e., active or reserve. Nonetheless, the militarys overall readiness production process can be broadly described in terms of producing and sustaining ready military units over time, with the principal focus within these units being the warfighter i.e., the servicemember.