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blog post
April 25, 2011
The Department of Defense (DoD) broadly defines “readiness” as the ability of U.S. military forces to fight and meet the demands of the National Military Strategy (which describes the armed forces’ role in achieving national security objectives). DoD typically cites the readiness of military units to perform their missions in wartime as the primary justification for its operation and maintenance (O&M) budget requests to the Congress. For example, budget materials that the Army submitted with its 2012 request for O&M funding state the following: “The budget provides resources to train and sustain the active component combat forces at readiness levels consistent with mission requirements....”
Spending for O&M supports the military services’ day-to-day activities, such as training military units, maintaining equipment, recruiting service members, operating military bases, and providing administrative services. In 2010, appropriations for O&M (excluding funds for the Defense Health Program) totaled $157 billion and constituted some 29 percent of the Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) “base” budget.
DoD has not been able to clearly identify the relationship between the department’s O&M spending and the readiness of military units (such as Army brigades, Marine Corps regiments, Navy ships, and Air Force squadrons). Nor has CBO’s recent analysis—which used historical data to attempt to establish statistical relationships between O&M spending and readiness for selected units—yielded a well-defined linkage. CBO’s efforts to establish a statistical link were not fruitful largely because the information needed to determine that linkage—effective measures of readiness and detailed data on spending—is not readily available or may not, in fact, exist. The military’s current measures of readiness are not readily applicable to such analyses, and there are some concerns about the quality of its assessments of readiness.
Yet even if readiness were well measured, determining the relationship between readiness and O&M spending will still present challenges. Some activities supported by O&M spending may be more directly related to a unit’s current readiness than other such activities are; in addition, some spending from other types of appropriations may affect readiness. Also, spending intended to support units’ readiness activities must be distinguished from spending for overseas contingency operations (for example, in Iraq and Afghanistan). If DoD is to determine how O&M spending affects units’ readiness, it may have to conduct controlled experiments in which it methodically varies readiness-related spending for otherwise similar units and see how their readiness varies.
This study was prepared by Adebayo Adedeji of CBO’s National Security Division.