A new paradigm for measuring military readiness

What is readiness? The commander of a unit has the responsibility for his unit, and for deciding whether that unit is ready, so the only irrefutable definition of readiness is the commander's judgement. However, the definition of readiness in the commander's head is not helpful to anyone else unless that definition has been portrayed as a numerical measure. We seek numerical proxies for the commander's judgement, good measures that can be easily explained, easily stored in computers, provide operational guidance, and do not contradict common sense. For low-level units such as a ship or an Army tank battalion, we show that readiness should be measured in units of time. Measuring readiness at unit level is inherently a problem of scheduling those activities that a commander believes must be done in order for the unit to be ready. For higher-level units such as an Army division, we recommend that readiness for a specific operation be measured in dollars. This calculation is inherently a mobility planning problem.