The Most Critical Strategic Leadership

The Most Critical Strategic Leadership
Issue
One of the most critical strategic issues that face my organization and which requires accelerated change is army readiness. The distribution of power across the globe is changing as new, previously unforeseen threats begin to emerge. China and Russia, along with other regional actors like North Korea and Iran, are increasingly becoming assertive and pose a significant threat to America’s security, interests, and allies. Moreover, violent extremism and terrorism, both local and international, continue to threaten a stable and open global system.
Background
The United States is currently situated in a progressively challenging national security setting: in addition to dealing with an unsustainable fiscal situation, a reduced force structure and personnel, insufficient equipment, and limited modernization of its forces, the U.S. Army is faced with the growing threat of large-scale conflict. After a decade of conflict, cutbacks in force structure, and budget uncertainty, the U.S. army finds itself unprepared for large-scale conflict. The biggest threats to America's prosperity and security are tied to the incredible power competition the country is currently embroiled in with China and Russia. Army readiness for large-scale combat is imperative to success in the current security environment. However, DOD reports indicate that army readiness continues to be challenging and has remained so for the past nine years. The DOD has had to deal with the challenging decision of balancing ongoing operational demands and making provisions for future challenges. Choosing between maintaining and improving weapon systems currently in use or modernizing their abilities to ensure they match or even outpace those of advancing competitors has not been easy.
This strategic issue has been further complicated by America’s years of sustained conflict, especially regarding personnel and equipment. Some factors contributing to the strategic issue of inadequate army readiness include insufficient personnel, training, and equipment; a high operational tempo; and limited funding. Concerning personnel and force structure, the U.S. army is currently experiencing challenges in expanding its forces owing to missed recruitment targets, significant shortfalls in critical skills like civilian flight test pilots in depots, poor monitoring, and management of personnel time away from home, as well as limited cyber and security force assistance units. Missed recruitment targets have severely affected America’s ground force preparedness. The decade spent fighting violent extremists and executing contingency operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria has adversely affected balancing the country's forces in recent budget requests. The DOD has acknowledged that continuous demands by geographic commanders for specific types of forces have disrupted equipping, manning, and training cycles.
As a result, there are currently significant gaps in building and sustaining necessary operational capabilities in the event of a full large-scale conflict. Although some service branches have managed to improve their army readiness, significant issues remain in several areas of each. For instance, the Marine Corps has reported considerable shortages in aviation units and are currently deficient in aircraft ready for wartime demands. Similarly, the Air Force and Navy have witnessed sustained operations with a plummetingg pool of resources and insufficient time for recovery or repairs. The former reports that less than half of its forces are at satisfactory readiness levels. On the other hand, the service branch has reported a deficiency of 3,400 aircraft maintainers and 1,500 pilots. Although the U.S. Army has made efforts to improve the situation by ensuring that at least two-thirds of its early critical formations are at minimum readiness levels, current service demands are likely to consume readiness faster than the army can generate. Several unit commanders at the Joint Multinational Readiness Center have also warned about the limited preparation and training done at home stations as platoons and companies.
The army is also having issues with equipment repair and modernization. For instance, a significant proportion of defense equipment is old and worn out from heavy usage. The army is currently struggling with repairing heavily-used air defense equipment and applying leading practices for modernization. Tied to this issue is evaluating short-term modernization efforts' outlays and efficiency. The U.S. Army is also challenged to improve its operational capabilities in multi-domain environments such as cyber and space. DOD's efforts to develop following-generation weapon systems that are more sustainable, agile, resilient, and lethal in a large-scale conflict are impeded by budget cuts. Another reason for poor army readiness is the challenge of ensuring complete training of personnel in new units under accelerated programs, improving current personnel selection strategy, and ensuring sufficient facilities for training personnel, especially unmanned aerial system (UAS) pilots. The army is also facing difficulties in filling and maintaining key personnel in a number of areas: aggressive measures of retaining these staff are currently lacking, and the army's qualitative advantages over its foes are slowly shrinking. On the whole, the leading challenges facing sufficient army readiness include preparing units to carry out extensive, decisive-action operations, equipping units with modernized equipment, and expanding forces through recruiting targets, particularly in multiple domains such as cyber.
Analysis
The first strategic task required to address the issue of insufficient army readiness is the reprioritization of physical, monetary, and human resources. There is a need to reverse the current trend of budget cuts and allocate more funds to the DOD to sustain America’s current qualitative and quantitative competitive advantage in the great power competition. Suppose the country fails to change the current trajectory of reductions in funding. In that case, there is the risk of losing the U.S. armed forces' definite advantages over its peers in capabilities, training, technology, and years of operations. The government should allocate more monetary resources to modernize its service forces, meet recruiting goals, retain key personnel, and provide adequate training. More importantly, the government needs to allocate more resources to research and development: the current global security environment requires that America sharpen its readiness in advanced technology, artificial intelligence, and cyberspace capabilities.
The current budget for America’s National Defense Strategy is insufficient primarily as China seeks to combine its economic, technological, diplomatic, and military power to counter America's global influence. China and Russia have invested heavily in new weapons systems, while regional actors like North Korea and Iran have been pursuing game-changing technologies that can only be countered through research and development in new warfighting capabilities. Specific service forces lack adequate equipment and human resources, challenges that bigger budgets can only solve. Meeting recruit targets, repairing old equipment, and modernizing current capabilities, all of which are essential to improving the U.S. army's readiness, will require additional spending. For instance, filling and retaining new cyber and electronic warfare formations with personnel will require training resources and equipment. Since cyber personnel and other critical personnel such as civilian flight test pilots at depots are in high demand retaining and attracting these staff will likely require providing attractive compensation packages and work conditions.
At the same time, improving the service readiness of all servic...