Today’s military might need its own Billy Beane.
A new report suggests the Pentagon needs to rethink military readiness the same way the former general manager of the Oakland A’s revolutionized baseball in the 1990s by focusing on nontraditional metrics that revealed how players actually play and how games are actually won.
Todd Harrison, a defense expert with the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said today’s Pentagon leaders are trapped in an old mindset that focuses on the amount of money spent on readiness, the age of military gear and the amount of time troops spend training, flying, steaming or studying.
Yet those metrics do not necessarily reveal whether troops are truly ready to fight and win wars.
“It is the equivalent of judging the performance of a baseball team by the size of its payroll (an input) rather than the number of games it has won (an output),” Harrison wrote in a recent report published in the military journal Strategic Studies Quarterly.
“Teams with larger payrolls do not necessarily win more games. While resources available to hire more talented players can certainly affect the performance of a team ... many other factors can be at work as well,” Harrison wrote.
The crux of Harrison’s argument is that today’s Defense Department focuses too much on the time and money spent on training rather than the level of effectiveness resulting from those investments and the force’s ability to execute real-world missions.
“In defense, as in baseball, the way money is spent often matters as much as the total amount of money available. History is replete with examples of wealthier nations being defeated by more modestly resourced adversaries,” Harrison wrote. “Understanding how best to resource readiness requires the same two things Billy Beane brought to the Oakland A’s — better metrics and better understanding of the relationship between inputs (resources) and outputs (readiness).”
Readiness and the way it is measured is drawing new attention as defense budgets flatten and Pentagon leaders look for new efficiencies that could prevent a risky drop in military preparedness.
The Pentagon may be at a historic turning point when massive spending is replaced in part with high-powered data analysis that was not possible a few years ago. In an era of “constrained resources and unconstrained data,” the military should adapt the way it measures readiness “to these changing circumstances,” Harrison wrote.
For example, he said, instead of measuring the readiness of a fighter squadron by the number of flight hours logged in training or the age of its aircraft, the Navy and Air Force could conduct close-air support drills, track pilots’ ability to hit targets and measure bomb-miss distances.
Harrison pointed to a Rand Corp. analysis of air-to-air combat drills that studied videos of pilots’ head-up displays to evaluate their performance; no correlation was found between simple flying hours or long-term career experience and performance in the combat drills.
However, the study did find that pilots who had recently performed air-to-air combat training performed far better than those who had not had that very specific training recently. More specifically, practice conducted more than 30 days prior to the test appeared to have no impact on the pilots’ performance; only practice within the past 10 days had a direct affect.
“You might realize that we don’t need to keep these guys at the highest levels of readiness all the time,” Harrison said while discussing his report Sept. 4.
The readiness evaluation system also is flawed because when it does evaluate performance, it focuses on well-planned exercises for which units temporarily raise their readiness level by stepping up training and borrowing equipment from other units, among other actions.
Units should be periodically tested at random with minimal notification ... and restrictions placed on what they can borrow from other units,” Harrison said in his report.
The way readiness is evaluated also should be linked to the overall national security strategy. Harrison noted that the Pentagon issued a new national security strategy in 2012, declaring a new focus on the Asia-Pacific region and an aversion to large-scale, Iraq-style counterinsurgency operations. But that substantial change in mission did not result in any corresponding revision in the way the force evaluates its own readiness.
Military readiness is also fundamentally changing with the the new generation of unmanned aircraft. Not only can they stay on station for longer times, they do not require the same type of ongoing training. “Once software is written and tested, it does not need recurring practice because its abilities do not degrade with time,” Harrison wrote.
The current system, he said, actually obscures the true readiness level of today’s force.
“The result could be a hollow force, or worse, a hollow force masked as a ready force,” Harrison wrote.