army readiness regulation

Such cannibalized vehicles or other pieces of equipment are sometimes used to skew unit readiness reporting requirements and mask unit logistical and materiel deficiencies. 1 Research has shown the following: 56% of Soldiers in 2017 were diagnosed with a new injury. (Photo courtesy of J. VanDomelen, https://blogs.mentor.com/jvandomelen/blog/2011/12/28/power-problem-what-now/), From March 2018 to November 2019, the Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General conducted an audit of the U.S. Army’s active component readiness. If we take readiness to be the Army’s number one priority (or goal), then goal displacement is the most pernicious consequence of the USR as it definitionally displaces readiness. Upon receipt of the repair parts, the maintenance leadership divvies them up to the many other inoperable but unreported vehicles. Simply put, readiness is the capacity for the armed forces to fulfill assigned missions.3. Army mobilization is the process of bringing the Army to a state of readiness for war, contingency, or national emergency. The denominator for equipment on-hand is what the Army has decided that a reporting unit must have, recorded in what is formally known as the modified table of organization and equipment (MTOE). This discussion will focus on the question of equipment on-hand (the S-level) and equipment readiness (the R-level). Battalions, desirous of reporting themselves ready, consequently prioritize pacer maintenance. There is no great advantage to monthly reports but many costs, only some of which have been discussed. Musculoskeletal (MSK) injury is the leading cause of medical non-readiness in the Army. Contact Us | 913-684-2127. In it, Scott relays among many examples the challenge Napoleonic France faced as it sought to standardize myriad local measurement codes: “Either the state risked making large and potentially damaging miscalculations about local conditions, or it relied heavily on the advice of local trackers—the nobles and clergy in the Crown’s confidence—who, in turn, were not slow to take full advantage of their power.”23 Scott notes attempts to strike the balance, such as those by Deputé Claude-Joseph Lalouette, failed to win requisite support for fear of too empowering the landowners.24 This concern does not apply to the question of readiness reform, for instead of thousands of landowners with ulterior motives, the Army needs to only solicit input of several dozen BCTs supportive of its mission. o Contains extensive information regarding Army Strategic Readiness and how it is reported, prepared, reviewed, and submitted (throughout). This process cuts out the ordering of new parts altogether. But unless the USR undergoes reform, it will neither ready us nor convey how ready we are, to the public or ourselves. The perversion of maintenance that results is a familiar story to anyone who has worked in an Army motor pool. This warping of organizational behavior is the inevitability of Muller’s metric fixation. 2. Similarly, to decry the pernicious effects of the USR is not to deny the need for readiness reporting and the use of metrics toward that end. Pacer designation is an example. Muller defines short-termism in The Tyranny of Metrics as “diverting resources away from their best long-term uses to achieve measured short-term goals.”14 And because USR reports recur for battalions monthly, they disrupt long-term strategies for the maintenance, acquisition, and retention of equipment in pursuit of a good monthly read. Meanwhile, armament sections learn not to order parts for broken machine guns until after USR reporting windows close, delaying weapons repair by months to avoid flagging them as inoperable. SUBJECT: Army Directive 2019-17 (Changes to the Soldier and Family Readiness Group Program) personnel, including single Soldiers and their Families, into … Check it out. Subject memorandum directed the U.S. Army Concepts Analysis Agency to develop an expert system to advise on the assignment of equipment readiness codes (ERC). It comprises four measured areas: personnel (the P-level), equipment on-hand (the S-level), equipment readiness (the R-level), and the unit training proficiency (the T-level) (see figure 1 and figure 2). “Mutual trust” fails. Army Readiness Guidance 2016-2017; Army Regulation 525-30, Army Strategic Readiness; Related STAND-TO! The U.S. Army has rewritten Field Manual 7-22, Physical Readiness Training as FM 7-22, Holistic Health and Fitness (H2F). The Army would thus have to maintain a high but passable bar for what equipment supports only existing mission essential tasks. This author acknowledges that the below recommendations are not equally feasible, and if executed improperly, fail to resolve the excesses of metric fixation. Even worse, units will not turn in irreparably broken equipment (a process known as “coding out”) for fear that the loss will drop them below the MTOE-prescribed quantity, opting to retain unserviceable property and thereby precluding the fielding or even requisition of a functioning replacement. The above temporal fixes reduce short-termism. The goal of reporting a healthy pacer OR rate has displaced the goal of being ready. The frequency and high stakes of USRs demand of battalion and brigade staffs days of data compilation that might otherwise be spent planning training. Washington, DC . This practice survives because few commanders command long enough to reckon with the fall out of this behavior. Army Deployment and Redeployment : Headquarters : Department of the Army . He holds a BS from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The Army defines readiness as the capability of its forces to conduct the full range of military operations, including the defeat of all enemies regardless of the threats they pose. Commander’s Unit Status Report Metrics (Figure from Army Regulation 220-1, Army Unit Status Reporting and Force Registration—Consolidated Policies, 15 April 2010, https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/pdf/web/r220_1.pdf) 3. Army Regulation 525–93 . Applicability. The reform, not the scrapping, of reporting metrics and structure, promises a reduction in goal displacement, short-termism, innovation aversion, time burdens, and degradation of work. The Army measures readiness by evaluating tactical units and their ability to execute predictable deployments against irregular threats. We have ongoing work assessing DOD’s progress in achieving its overall readiness goals in each of five warfighting domains: ground, sea, air, … readiness in accordance with the requirements stipulated in Army Regulation (AR) 220-1 (Army Unit Status Reporting and Force Registration - Consolidated Policies), and the Leader’s Guide to Objective Assessment of Training Proficiency.17 The Army G-3/5/7 published the Leader's Guide in 2017 as the interim authority for CUSR Objective T- Though there is much to be said for earning one’s place, ideas expire with time, and many exit the profession of arms before entering positions of influence in search of a more enterprising culture. The reports do so because they demand inflexible quantitative measurements unfaithful to the outcome they purport to depict—how ready a unit is to accomplish its mission. These tend to report concrete ‘statistics,’ or case examples, rather than intangible achievement.”12 This academy-speak might translate into military-speak by simply saying that the USR makes the Army a self-licking ice cream cone. Yet another painful example of goal displacement induced by USR involves what regulation calls “pacing items.” AR 220-1 defines pacing items (colloquially called “pacers”) as “major weapon systems, aircraft, and other equipment items that are central to the organization’s ability to perform its designated mission.”13 A pacer for a medical unit might be a field litter ambulance; for a cavalry squadron, it might be its anti-tank missile systems and the vehicles on which they are mounted. Company commanders reported in a 2019 RAND study that they devoted a full 15 percent of their time to “tracking readiness,” second only to USR-adjacent “equipment maintenance and accountability.” Both outstripped the 13 percent of each quarter commanders professed dedicating to “unit-specific training.” Ironically, soldiers shared that a common means of coping with the time burden was to report readiness metrics inaccurately (see figure 3).19 This spells doom for mission command’s “shared understanding,” as staffs and commanders dedicate to data’s collection and grooming the attention that mission orders desperately need. Amidst all this short-termism, “recovery” becomes something of a four-letter word. A second obvious objection to unit partial authorship of either MTOE or pacer designation might read as follows: every unit setting its own standard reduces the term “ready” to something just shy of meaningless as each unit proffers its own (perhaps self-serving) definition. SUBJECT: Equipment Readiness Code Rule System 1. But the price of that due diligence is at times one, if not several, unfavorable USRs, and units are too often unwilling to pay. The effects of those flaws are twofold: USRs not only fail to capture the readiness of reporting units, but they also actually harm the readiness of reporting units. The bedrock of Army morale—the nobility of its mission—crumbles as the mission is reduced to a series of reported fractions. Permitting divisions or brigades some role in the authorship of their MTOEs would better marry MTOE materiel with the needs of the unit. A 2016 GAO report typifies its argument for hard numbers and the tongue-clicking that ensues when results are insufficiently quantified: “The services have not fully established metrics that the department can use to oversee readiness rebuilding efforts and evaluate progress toward achieving the identified goals.”5 Testimony from the GAO in February 2020 sustains this tone, lauding the Department of Defense’s progress as it develops “metrics to assess progress toward readiness recovery goals that include quantifiable deliverables at specific milestones [emphasis added].”6, In view of the above, Army Regulation (AR) 220-1, Army Unit Status Reporting and Force Registration—Consolidated Policies, endows the USR with an unsurprisingly quantitative structure. Short-termism. SFRG Regulations. Readiness, it says, is the ability of the Armed Forces to carry out the president’s National Security Strategy, the secretary of defense’s defense planning guidance, and the chairman of the Joint Chief’s National Military Strategy. endstream endobj 1636 0 obj <. § 117. As George Kennan wrote in 1958 when discussing the expanding administrative state and its managerial malaise, The premium of the individual employee will continue to lie not in boldness, not in individuality, not in imagination, but rather in the cultivation of that nice mixture of noncontroversialness and colorless semicompetence that corresponds most aptly to the various banal distinctions of which, alone, the business machine is capable.21. Enlarge the figure, Muller explains metric fixation as the overreliance on transparent, quantified measurements to capture and incentivize an organization’s performance; it is also the persistence of this overreliance despite myriad negative consequences. Because maintenance sections are often stretched for time, vehicles that cannot roll or start at all are reported for weeks if not months as serviceable simply because their issues have not yet been diagnosed. The resultant amalgam of definitions cripples the military bureaucracy’s ability to manage. Robert K. Merton, a founding father of sociology, defined goal displacement as when “an instrumental value becomes a terminal value.”11 Professors W. Keith Warner and A. Eugene Havens elaborated in a seminal 1968 article that among goal displacement’s chief causes were “records and reports submitted to other echelons of the organization or to the sponsors, the public, or clients. It establishes procedures for conducting a Soldier Readiness Program (S RP), in order to process soldiers and Department of the Army civilians for deployments/movements under the SRP. But to understand the scope of the harm, one must first understand the desired end (in this case, readiness) and the metrics used to measure it—the USR and its components. The various forms of appeal, whether an “operational needs statement” or a “reclamation,” prove so cumbersome and lengthy that staffs rarely pursue them except in the direst cases. Fortunately, organizational theory bypasses these obstacles convincingly. AR 210-22, Private Organizations on Department of the Army Installations [6/8/2005] This Army Regulation replaces AR 210-1, which was rescinded in 1998. 1 The USR and its pruning voraciously consumes another resource that serves a battalion’s mission: leaders’ and soldiers’ time. Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 66027 Only strict standardization renders the force legible, whether to the Pentagon or to Congress. The audit’s resultant report was, on the whole, positive. Army Methodology for Overall Unit Readiness Assessments (Figure from Army Regulation 220-1, Army Unit Status Reporting and Force Registration—Consolidated Policies, 15 April 2010, https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/pdf/web/r220_1.pdf) In pursuit of a high S-level, units forsake actual equipment needs for a good report. Just as reporting units have unique insight into what equipment most contributes to their mission in the case of pacers, so too do they have a strong understanding of what type and quantity of equipment they use to fulfill their missions. Search: View Section 508 Version. As the metrics employed by USR gravitate closer to actual drivers of readiness, the risk of the former displacing the latter would necessarily decrease. Any system “shall measure in an objective, accurate, and timely manner.”4 The verb of choice in this sliver of code is “measure,” trotted out no fewer than seven times over two paragraphs. 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