US Army Soldiers, assigned to 101st Combat Aviation Brigade, 101st Airborne Division, hover over a landing zone in UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters during air assault training at Jalalabad Airfield in eastern Afghanistan, Sept. 16, 2015. US Army | Flickr
Key Points
Though analysis of the US military often focuses on what has already happened or what might happen, we must appraise the current state of the US military to understand how to move forward.
In capacity, capability, and readiness, the US military is currently performing a juggling act that could come crashing down in the event of a significant contingency.
While the health of all-volunteer force remains the strongest attribute of the military, it is beginning to show cracks in retention and recruitment.
An analysis of the defense budget does not fully capture the state of the US military. But the numbers do tell us that the US Department of Defense is the world’s largest organization.
Its annual budget was $578 billion last year. It employs just under three million people. It owns or operates 557,000 facilities in the US and around the world with real estate valued at more than $800 billion. To organize, train, and equip the US military, this federal agency also has its own school systems, health care management system, and grocery chains. It runs its own versions of FedEx and Amazon. And it develops and purchases some of the most complex technology ever contemplated.
Examining the Defense Department as a whole can be daunting. Too often, the emphasis is on how much its efforts cost rather than what they buy the American people. To begin to determine the state of the US military, policymakers should examine four areas: (1) readiness, (2) capacity, (3) capability, and (4) the health of the all-volunteer force.
Readiness describes whether the armed forces are fully trained to carry out the missions they might need to perform. Since the US military relies heavily on superior training in combat, the current readiness shortfall worries commanders. On a broader level, the readiness of the US military also affects how seriously adversaries regard American hard power.
Capacity covers the size of the American military—how much the nation can ask service members to do without imposing the undue strain of longer and more frequent deployments. When the four service chiefs discuss the size of US fleets of ships and aircraft or even brigades of soldiers, they are referring to the capacity—or supply—available to meet all current and expected future demands.
Capability is about not size, but what the military can do. A modern soldier or ship has far more
proficiency than its predecessors, for instance. Capabilities are often connected to technological advantage—a traditional advantage of American military power that is waning. After a procurement holiday in the 1990s and a hollow buildup during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, American military capabilities have declined independently and relatively to adversaries like China, Russia, and Iran.
The all-volunteer force is a group of highly qualified, educated, and trained professionals. The volunteer aspect of the fighting force attracts military personnel of the highest quality—a group of citizens who count combat as their profession. However, 15 years of constant operations, combined with ill-advised budget cuts, have created cracks in the force. Further, the military faces new challenges in finding and keeping the right talent in roles like cyber personnel and drone pilots.
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