“The surest way to prevent war is to be prepared to win one. Doing so requires a competitive approach to force development and a consistent, multiyear investment to restore warfighting readiness and field a lethal force.”[1]

In his book, Making the Unipolar Moment, Hal Brands describes the unique strategic environment that emerged after the Cold War with the United States as the sole and uncontested superpower.[2] The world Brands describes is not the one the United States Department of Defense operates in today. The urgency of the quote above from the 2018 National Defense Strategy, that we must restore readiness rather than maintain it, is underscored throughout that document in its discussion of that fast pace at which the Nation’s peers are catching up to it.

The U.S. Army must determine not only how and when to modernize, but also how to mitigate the cost of modernization.

It is imperative that the Department of Defense figure out how to remain competitive by achieving the maximum readiness that allows it to compete or to transition to conflict. This is certainly a challenge for the Department of Defense as a whole, but each service also faces its own unique challenges. As the ground force provider with constant missions, the United States Army has, post-WWII, attempted to maintain readiness while it modernized simultaneously and in-stride. However, the force the U.S. Army wants to field in the future is transformational and therefore requires a more deliberate approach. The U.S. Army must determine not only how and when to modernize, but also how to mitigate the cost of modernization.

The U.S. Army is an ever-changing organization that must adapt to changes in society and politics, global threats from both official state and non-state actors, evolutions in warfare, and technological advancement.

The cost of readiness need not be measured only in dollars, with a fixed budget creating a zero-sum game; it is more interesting to understand the trade-off between readiness today and readiness tomorrow. The U.S. Army is an ever-changing organization that must adapt to changes in society and politics, global threats from both official state and non-state actors, evolutions in warfare, and technological advancement. Facing any one of these changes potentially requires transforming how the Army sees itself and how it fights. However, what happens when all of these occur at once? This is the operational environment the U.S. Army currently faces. With the war in Afghanistan behind it, the Army must look forward to how it anticipates what it needs to fight in the future. It also must conduct a modernization effort that is decades overdue. Attempting to balance this transformation without incurring risk to its current demands, the U.S. Army has implemented a new force generation model: the Regionally Aligned Readiness and Modernization Model.

Motivation for Transformation

Since the attacks of 9/11, the U.S. Army has found itself engaged in and fully committed to a protracted fight against numerous threats from both state actors and non-state-sponsored terrorist organizations. During this war, the level of demand on the Army varied, but at its peak, the Army was utilizing legacy processes and procedures to build and maintain readiness. The Army adopted the Army Force Generation model to generate readiness to deploy more predictably for the fights in Iraq and Afghanistan.[3] The Army developed this model to facilitate the readiness needed for either short-term, high-tempo or long-term, low-intensity operations.[4] However, as the war on terrorism continued with multiple surges of forces, that force generation model proved insufficient to meet demand. In 2017, the U.S. Army once again changed how it generates the force to the Sustainable Readiness Model.[5] Shifting its focus from primarily the war on terrorism to acknowledging the multitude of other near-peer and global threats, the U.S. Army needed to have more units ready to fight at any given time than the Army Force Generation model provided. Sustainable Readiness intentionally pushed units to maintain as much readiness as possible at all times to continue in an enduring, high-tempo fight, but also to be prepared to engage in large-scale combat operations. This is no longer the operational environment the U.S. Army faces. Rather, after scaling back from the conflicts of the last 20 years, Army leaders have determined that to remain globally competitive and relevant, the “American way of war must evolve and adapt,” and the Army must prepare to fight and win in multi-domain operations in a large-scale conflict.[6]

Because of its focus over the last 20 years on the fights in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. Army has not emphasized significant modernization of any of its major systems.

*UH-60 Blackhawk. (Matt O’Dell/Unsplash)*

The motivation to change the force generation model extends beyond how the Army generates readiness within units based on training plans. Because of its focus over the last 20 years on the fights in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. Army has not emphasized significant modernization of any of its major systems. This is not to say that it has not sought or created new technology to improve how it fights. Rather, it has been decades since the U.S. Army fielded a new major weapon system. It was in the 1970s and 1980s that the U.S. Army fielded the Big Five: the Abrams fighting vehicle, the Bradley fighting vehicle, the Apache attack helicopter, the Blackhawk utility helicopter, and the Patriot air defense missile system.[7] While those systems have seen incremental upgrades, the U.S. Army has not conducted a modernization that fundamentally changes the tactics and how the Army fights. It is also interesting to note that as described in the study authored by Conrad Crane and published by the United States Army War College, the fielding of the Big Five should not serve as the optimized example of how to modernize. Rather, the authors propose that modernization must be a deliberately planned and synchronized effort that is not a mere update of technology, but is also a holistic update to doctrine and how the U.S. Army fights.[8]

Cost of Transformation

…the cost of a more modern and presumably more capable force in the future is a decrease of forces available to meet today’s demands.

While the monetary cost of modernizing to this level is monumental, it is far more interesting to consider the cost to readiness of fielding the planned systems. Historically, and to the chagrin of many commanders, the Army’s procurement community has planned, scheduled, and dictated the fielding of new equipment. In light of the magnitude of the current modernization effort, this method would hamstring the U.S. Army. When considering readiness, a unit that is receiving a new system cannot be considered mission capable for several months, at best, since it must first divest its old equipment then receive and train on the new equipment. Thus, the cost of a more modern and presumably more capable force in the future is a decrease of forces available to meet today’s demands. The magnitude of the risk to meeting today’s mission is exacerbated or mitigated depending on the speed at which the Army can accomplish modernization. If it is critical for the Army to modernize as fast as possible, then it must reduce the mission capability of more units almost immediately. Alternatively, if the Army perceives that it has more time before it needs to have reached a sufficient level of modernization, then it decreases the risk to today’s mission.

Regionally Aligned Readiness and Modernization Model

It is this need to modernize at a magnitude unparalleled for 50 years with no foreseeable relief from the global demands of competition, which necessitates a new force generation model. To be feasible, the new model needs to meet the demands of today while allowing the U.S. Army to be able to flex, or surge, in the event of a large-scale conflict. It also has to provide the time and space for the force to modernize as it transitions to a multi-domain capable force. Finally, it needs to create stability, predictability, and the ability to synchronize the entire force including the Reserve Components.

The Regionally Aligned Readiness and Modernization Model does all this. The model establishes a life cycle for each unit, thereby creating predictability for all units, Soldiers, families, the industrial base, the procurement community, and the Department of Defense. This life cycle consists of three or more phases depending on the type of unit and the demand. Regardless of the particular structure of the life cycle, it still contains a modernization phase. Given that the life cycle is repeated over time, the Army knows the modernization phases of all units for the foreseeable future and thus can drive the procurement timeline rather than have units react to the fielding of modernized equipment. Most importantly, this life cycle model clearly establishes which units are ready and when they are ready. U.S. Army senior leaders now know through the Future Years Defense Program how much of their unit inventory is available and can make risk decisions if that inventory is perceived to be insufficient.

The U.S. Army can no longer proceed with its current force generation model; otherwise, in a decade it will find itself woefully behind its peers in technology.

This model certainly contains risk. To establish the necessary predictability to truly benefit the procurement community, the model trades flexibility. If delivery of equipment is delayed or takes longer than anticipated, the unit life cycle is disturbed and that disrupts the schedules of its sister units on the same mission line. This model also assumes a constant set of demands which, if altered, will require a revision of the mission line allocation. Given these risks and an understanding of the mitigation measures, the Regionally Aligned Readiness and Modernization Model better provides the force generation structure to transform the U.S. Army than its predecessors.

Conclusion

Ultimately, there is a trade-off between having a sufficiently modern force for the future and having maximum availability of units today. The Regionally Aligned Readiness and Modernization Model creates a scaffolding to balance and make decisions about where risk is acceptable. The U.S. Army can no longer proceed with its current force generation model; otherwise, in a decade it will find itself woefully behind its peers in technology. Taking risks now when the global threat is better understood, rather than in a nebulous future, is essential. In today’s fiscally constrained environment without the ability to build more units to cover for modernizing ones, today’s readiness is the non-monetary cost to creating critical readiness for tomorrow.

Christine Krueger is an officer in the United States Army. Her academic interests include operations research, systems engineering, and system dynamics. The views expressed are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

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Header Image: Untitled, August 29, 2020 (Robert Thiemann).

Notes:

[1] James Mattis, “National Defense Strategy Unclassified,” Office of the Secretary of Defense,

[2] Hal Brands, Making the Unipolar Moment. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016.

[3] Alexandra Hemmerly-Brown, “ARFORGEN: Army’s Deployment Cycle Aims for Predictability,” November 19, 2009, https://www.army.mil/article/30668/arforgen_armys_deployment_cycle_aims_for_predictability.

[4] Army Regulation 525-29: Force Generation- Sustainable Readiness, November 1, 2019.

[5] Congressional Research Service, “The Army’s New Regionally Aligned Readiness and Modernization Model,” March 9, 2021, https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11670.

[6] TRADOC Pamphlet 525-3-1: The U.S. Army in Multi-Domain Operations 2028, 6 December 2018.

[7] Conrad Crane et al, “The Force Management Challenge: Balancing Modernization and Readiness,” https://ahec.armywarcollege.edu/documents/Modernization_and_Readiness_Study.pdf.

[8] Ibid.