Rethinking Readiness

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has moved to institutionalize the concept of strategic readiness, which it identifies as "the ability to build, maintain, and balance warfighting capabilities and competitive advantages that ensure DoD can achieve strategic objectives across threats and time horizons." This report summarizes key shortfalls in prior systems for understanding readiness, outlines a framework for how DoD might conduct a future strategic readiness assessment (SRA), and highlights several analytic tools that could be used within this framework to better understand risks and options. This framework and the associated tools are then applied to two illustrative sets of defense policy issues, one on munitions procurement and another on planning modernization schedules across services. The report concludes with recommendations for how an SRA might be implemented.