One of the primary management functions of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is managing Total Force preparedness to prevail in conflict and competition across different time horizons and strategic objectives. In 2023, DoD codified the concept of strategic readiness to evaluate readiness through a lens that considered building capability for future conflicts while still meeting current missions. The new policy established a framework for assessing strategic readiness and assigned oversight functions. After a year of initial implementation, RAND researchers examined progress toward these goals and considered next steps.
RAND was asked to develop ways to ensure that department decision making regarding strategic readiness is pedagogically coherent, objectively grounded, informed by data, and based on risk. This report is structured around three questions: (1) Is the strategic readiness concept sufficiently clear to be useful to DoD stakeholders? (2) How can DoD risk management of strategic readiness be improved? (3) How can DoD leverage ongoing data efforts to better inform its decisionmaking? The authors approached these questions by reviewing DoD’s policies, strategic guidance documents, and risk and readiness assessments. They conducted a literature review of RAND, academic, professional military, and business literature for best practices for military readiness, risk management, and data analytic methods. To gain first-hand insights and critiques, the authors conducted semi-structured interviews with key Office of the Secretary of Defense and Joint Staff stakeholders, as well as a red team panel with subject-matter experts. Finally, they examined ongoing department data modeling efforts and experimented with using artificial intelligence to support analysis of strategic readiness.
Key Findings
- The DoD definition of strategic readiness needs to include an explanation of how the dimensions of strategic readiness should be measured and how they interact as inputs and outputs leading to outcomes.
- DoD risk management of Total Force strategic readiness is inconsistent in its analytic methods, application in DoD processes, and DoD-wide oversight.
- Middle-term strategic readiness risks lack a champion in policy deliberations, both in internal DoD discussions and in national-level policy conversations.
- DoD has an abundance of data and readiness reporting but is challenged to turn those data and reporting into timely, issue-relevant assessments for policymakers because of uncertainties about data quality and a lack of data analytics tools.
Recommendations
- DoD should adopt a logic model for strategic readiness that maps inputs to outputs to outcomes to guide deliberations about policy trade-offs.
- DoD should create an independent oversight function within DoD for strategic readiness.
- DoD should develop clear guidance for risk thresholds, organizational responsibilities for risk management, and application of strategic readiness assessments in DoD processes.
- DoD should develop the organizational expertise and analytic tools in the Office of the Secretary of Defense to dynamically track, assess, and explore strategic readiness trends within the DoD data ecosystem.
- DoD should expand the suite of DoD data science tools — dashboards, modeling and simulation, and artificial intelligence co-pilots — to enable risk analysts to leverage all relevant data ecosystems.
– Published courtesy of RAND.
