The Army's role as the cornerstone of the Joint Force continues to be affirmed by our ongoing commitments to missions both overseas and here at home. Demonstrating the Army's flexibility and competence, these missions encompass the full range of military operations to include fighting terrorists around the world, providing deterrence in Europe, training the armed forces of Iraq and Afghanistan, offering security assistance in Africa, and conducting Homeland Defense activities across the country. While capable and effective in the accomplishment of these tasks, the Army's greatest risk, given this high operational tempo, is being ill-prepared to respond to emerging threats and major contingencies with ready and available units. For this reason, readiness is the Army's number one priority.
Readiness translates into the Army's ability to meet known decisive action, Joint and Army requirements while simultaneously retaining sufficient full spectrum capabilities and the capacity to meet the requirements of the national military strategy. Therefore, a "Ready Army" is one that's able to project continuous, simultaneous combinations of offensive, defensive and stability support globally while simultaneously providing support to civil authorities at home.
As the Army's new force generation methodology, Sustainable Readiness is foundational to recovering this decisive action proficiency. The Army sustains readiness by providing leaders the tools to more effectively optimize resources and synchronize activities to train in a way that maximizes readiness. These key resources and activities include manning, equipping, sustaining, installation support, leading, and training. This readiness generation methodology enables the Army to understand what a ready Army looks like and more importantly, how ready of an Army the Chief of Staff of the Army is able to generate.
Sustainable Readiness reframes key decisions to ensure that Army Senior leaders clearly understand strategic context and the consequences of the Army's ability to accomplish its missions as a part of the Joint Force in support of contingency requirements. This means the Army always deliberately balances the risk for current demand against the preparedness for war plans. In addition it provides the Army with the much-needed flexibility to respond to the broad array of security challenges that characterize the contemporary operating environment.
The Army is building and preserving the highest possible unit and overall strategic readiness while minimizing risk to meeting operational demands within existing resources. It affords Army leaders with the analytic tools to assess readiness requirements and to align appropriate resourcing and synchronization decisions. Ultimately, the objective of this process is to sustain an optimal level of readiness throughout the Total Army to meet the requirements of an engaged and operational force, to include not only its early-deployers, but the operational and strategic depth which reside in its follow-on forces.
Given that the Army is at its smallest size since World War II, operationalizing the Army National Guard and Army Reserves is imperative to its success. The requirement for National Guard and Reserve forces now extends far beyond just providing key enablers and depth. The Army now depends on the Reserve Components to provide well trained and well led combat and combat support formations. By providing additional resources for enhanced pre-mobilization training at home station, Sustainable Readiness allows these units to deploy in less time once they reach a mobilization station. Additionally, this also allows us to will normalize manning and synchronize both equipping and modernization timelines to meet operational demand requirements.
THE SUSTAINABLE READINESS PROCESS
Unlike Army Force Generation, Sustainable Readiness forecasts unit readiness against anticipated demands on a quarterly basis through the first two years of each Future Year Defense Program. This forward-looking methodology synchronizes Army activities and resources by placing units in either Prepare, Ready, or Mission modules. As the Army strives to maximize training opportunities and combat effectiveness in each of these three modules, it is no secret that modernization efforts have been negatively impacted due to budgetary constraints and sequestration. As a result, Sustainable Readiness prioritizes the building and preservation of decisive action ready units that are optimally manned, equipped, trained and led. The overall goal is to sustain the highest number possible of units within the band of excellence. For the regular Army this means ready for immediate deployment, while Reserve components are either ready for immediate deployment or sufficiently ready to quickly advance with post-mobilization training to meet the readiness requirements of the National Military Strategy.
Central to the "Prepare" module is the unit's Home Station Training plan. Home Station training is critical to developing and then sustaining these objective readiness levels for longer periods. As Commanders develop their Home Station Training plans, they focus on the individual and collective tasks required to accomplish their overarching mission essential tasks. This training includes the integrated training environment with live, virtual and constructive tools consisting of live fire, mission command, and maneuver scenarios conducted in Decisive Action Training Environments against a hybrid threat.
In the "Prepare" module, Commanders train their units to execute the full range of military operations using an objective baseline standard for assessing collective training proficiency. Using these standards, all Army units will undergo external evaluations led by Commanders two levels up prior to reporting a "trained" proficiency level. These evaluations include Modified Table of Organization Equipment specific key training activities like Company combined arms live fire exercises, Battalion live fire exercises for a Field Artillery Battalion, and Platoon convoy live fire exercises for Brigade Support Battalions. The Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Plans is implementing a common objective standard called Objective-T for reporting and assessing training readiness across the total Army. Once implemented, all Regular Army and mobilized Reserve or National Guard units will report their monthly readiness status using Objective-T standards via the Unit Status Report system. In addition, all non-mobilized Reserve and National Guard units will report on the same Objective-T standards on a quarterly basis. With the standards prescribed under Objective-T, and increased reliance on third party external evaluations, Unit Commanders will have the resources to train and sustain proficiency on their Mission Essential Tasks as well as the tools needed to more accurately and confidently report the readiness they've achieved to common, easily quantified and measurable standards.
Units in the "Ready" module sustain decisive action levels of readiness and are in the band of excellence. Units in this module are at the highest readiness levels and are prepared for immediate deployment in support of emergent requirements and contingencies. The Ready module includes those Reserve Component units receiving additional training days and other resources to achieve decisive action readiness. The Army goal for both service retained and assigned units in this module is to build and sustain the highest levels of decisive action readiness, thus keeping units in the band of excellence by effectively managing resources and activities.
MANEUVER COMBAT TRAINING CENTERS
Combat Training Centers (CTC) training rotations are generally conducted while units are in the "Ready" module where they have sufficiently high levels of readiness at entry to the centers to take full advantage of a more competitive and challenging training environment. CTCs provide a crucible experience for units and leaders through training in a complex, realistic environment designed to replicate combat by stressing every Warfighting Function in ways that cannot be replicated at Home Station. Part of the Army's strategy to rebuild combined arms proficiency is to have leaders iteratively participate in multiple CTC rotations throughout successive jobs in operating force units.
For Army National Guard BCTs, the CTCs represent a capstone training event that enables them to transition from the "Prepare" module to the "Ready" module. The Army's CTC program also affords Commanders with a key tool for assessing combat readiness and is a cornerstone of a unit's integrated training program. The Army recently decided to increase the number of annual CTC rotations for Army National Guard Brigade Combat Teams from two to four beginning in fiscal year 2018. This will result in a greater level of combined arms proficiency and overall readiness in every component of the Army.
REGIONALLY ENGAGED AND GLOBALLY RESPONSIVE
As needed, units will transition from the "Ready" module to the "Mission" module when they deploy to meet Combatant Commander requirements. Sustainable Readiness facilitates meeting known demands by appropriately resourcing training, manning, and equipping requirements throughout the "Prepare" phase in order to achieve readiness outcomes consistent with the requirements of forces apportioned to Combatant Commanders. The Army validates assigned mission readiness through exercises such as Swift Response and other Emergency Deployment Readiness Exercises. For this reason, a key objective of Sustainable Readiness is maximizing the number of Army units in this module while still meeting all joint requirements.
The 82nd Airborne Division's designated Global Response Force illustrates the flexible role of units in the "Mission" module. The Global Response Force conducted a Joint Forcible Entry exercise known as Swift Response in June 2016. Swift Response was a U.S. Army Europe-led multinational exercise that highlighted the ability of the Global Response Force to quickly project national power from an intermediate staging base in Europe to conduct multiple airborne operations and follow on missions on short notice. Similarly, the 30th Armored Brigade Combat Team (ABCT) is an example of a National Guard unit operating within a "Mission" module. The 30th ABCT was assigned to NATO's peacekeeping mission in Kosovo last year. In preparation for its Kosovo Forces rotation, the 30th ABCT conducted an extensive readiness exercise during their Annual Training event at Fort Pickett, Virginia. Kosovo Forces is a North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led International peacekeeping mission that United States Army Europe oversees each year.
FORECASTING READINESS
A critical aspect central to Sustainable Readiness is the Army's ability to predict readiness outcomes resulting from programmed expenditures. The Army projects readiness by assessing leading indicators tied to the key Strategic Readiness Tenants of manning, training, equipping, leading, installations and sustaining. These indicators will help Army senior leaders shape budgetary program projections in order to maximize readiness. Leaders who are attuned to the cost of training can better enable the Army to align training dollars to ensure Commanders are able to maintain a proper balance with modernization and manpower accounts. To this end, the Army seeks predictable and consistent funding so that it can appropriately plan and synchronize activities in order to generate needed readiness.
CONCLUSION
The Army will continue to answer the call when required, but to do so effectively and efficiently we must remain agile, flexible and globally responsive in order to accomplish the mission. Sustainable Readiness synchronizes the resources essential to enabling realistic training, manning, equipping, and leader development to deliberately build and sustain readiness. Even when resource shortfalls exist, Sustainable Readiness provides Army leaders with feasible mitigation strategies. With the implementation of this process, leaders at all levels, will identify requirements, develop training objectives and execute training plans in order to produce trained and ready units postured to meet Joint Force operational and contingency demands. A ready Army is what we need; Sustainable Readiness is how we will get there.
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