Tiered readiness

It sounds ominous.

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel warned in December, "We may have to accept the reality that not every unit will be at maximum readiness, and some kind of a tiered readiness system is, perhaps, inevitable." [Source]

He echoed comments by Army Chief of Staff Ray Odierno, who stated in October that the Army will have to move to an "extreme tiered readiness model" as it struggles to train and equip soldiers amid the ongoing fiscal crisis. [Source]

Ominous, indeed, but it's not news. That's how things have always been. As the first article states, "the military already does that to some degree as a matter of routine."

Those of us who work in sustainment know that better than most. We're get the short end of the stick on just about everything. So while human resources officer (S-1) CPT Carla L. Bender of the 101st Airborne Division got to tote a cool-looking M-4 for her otherwise desk-bound job, the truck drivers I ran outside-the-wire convoys with had to lug around the Vietnam-era M-16A2s.

Equipment isn't the only difference between high-profile units (like the 101st) and the sustainment brigade I'm in -- there's a big gap in pre-deployment training, too. Typically, a Brigade Combat Team (BCT) will go to a national training center prior to deployment.

However, according to the July-September 2013 issue of Army Sustainment magazine, "more than a third of soldiers and units are not assigned to a BCT and are unlikely to have the opportunity to train in the high-intensity and realistic environment of a Combat Training Center."

You might think that, even in sustainment, a brigade headquarters would merit at least *some* sort of training that certified they were ready to deploy, but that's not the case. "Unlike BCTs, sustainment brigades do not have mandated training gates that must be accomplished before they are certified to deploy."

Part of the problem is that while BCTs deploy all together, sustainment units deploy as individual companies. Thus, a sustainment brigade consists solely of its headquarters and relies on "plug and play" companies to build capability.

Yet money is the real limiting factor, and "the Army remains BCT-centric in its warfighting doctrine and training methodology and places less emphasis on mission command of other units."

So it's not so much that "tiered readiness" is a new thing. Rather, it's that sequestration has brought "tiered readiness" to the combat arms community. It's that part that bothers Odierno, who's worried about the secondary effects.

"They are not going to be trained properly. That means when they go, it is going to take them longer to do it. They might have more casualties. So, to me, that is unacceptable." [Source]

More interestingly (at least from my perspective), having fewer "high tier" units will affect officer development. With unit readiness being a variable, I imagine the Army to mirror the Navy in the way it doles out command time.

"There are a lot of unfortunate [commanding officers] who take over a ship and wind up going into dry-dock for a year and a half," said Bill Hatch, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School. "That's why some people never make it past O-6." [Source]

So maybe it's good to be in logistics. While the combat arms guys jostle each other to get their command time with a "high-tier," functional unit, we logisticians can continue writing our evaluation bullets with the same old, second-hand equipment. It may not be much, but it's better than sitting around, waiting for the next conflict to bring money in.