By Capt. Gail A. Fisher and Col. Gary C. Howard U.S. Army Reserve retired

The prolonged operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have created an urgent demand for unit readiness data, and this is especially true for the Army Reserve. At first glance, determining readiness might seem easy. The basic elements are fairly obvious: soldiers, equipment and training. And the unit status report (USR), the Army’s primary mechanism for measuring and reporting readiness, rates each of these and rolls up the information into a single report that everyone should understand.

Unfortunately, several unique aspects of the Army Reserve severely limit the effectiveness of the USR. In fact, using the USR to measure readiness in the Army Reserve is like taking a pulse with a thermometer.

We believe that effective readiness metrics must have several characteristics. Accurate measures must be identified, and any data must be valid. The report must enable comparisons between the active and reserve components and between the services. Finally, the process must not be a burden on the unit being measured.

Personnel. Measuring personnel readiness is straightforward, and the USR provides a good formula. Generally put, unit personnel are matched by rank and military occupational specialty (MOS) to positions on the modified tables of organization and equipment (MTO&E) or tables of distribution and allowances (TDA). Those soldiers who fit are considered ready. For the Army Reserve, the problem is not the metric. It’s how to use the metric to account for the wide geographic distribution of individual Army Reserve soldiers. The active component moves soldiers to fill vacancies wherever they occur. In the Army Reserve, however, soldiers generally must accommodate themselves to the units near their hometown.

For example, a qualified truck driver might relocate to a new town that only has an opening for a personnel NCO. To be considered qualified, the soldier must be retrained as a personnel soldier. The result is a significant pool of soldiers (perhaps 20 to 25 percent of all Army Reservists) who are counted as not qualified despite having completed their training for a specific military occupational specialty.

What’s missing is a mechanism that accounts for these unqualified soldiers, so that the true readiness of the Army Reserve can be calculated in the context of today’s operations. Reservists are routinely cross-leveled to fill vacancies in deploying units: qualified truck drivers will be used as such, regardless of what type of unit they are in. Therefore, a national roll up should be added to the USR that describes the entire Army Reserve. Although soldiers might be considered not ready in their current unit, they are absolutely useful to the entire force. This measurement will allow planners at Forces Command and higher levels to understand the true capabilities of the Army Reserve.

Geography also confounds other measures. Unlike active component officers, Army Reserve officers are considered qualified if they have completed any officer basic course. Branch qualifying assignments (for example, battalion operations officer or executive officer) are not required for promotion or command selection. Thus, even battalion and brigade commanders may never have functioned in the branch of their units. Simply changing the rules to require officer qualification on the USR and in promotions and command selections would greatly improve officer training and would bring the Army Reserve into line with the active component and the other services.

Training. A unit is more than a collection of soldiers with the correct rank and MOS. They must train together in the context of a unit structure to develop professionally as officers and NCOs. It’s hard to be a good platoon sergeant if you have not served as a squad leader.

Unlike personnel readiness, training readiness is the least reliable measure on the USR. Army Reserve commanders are, in essence, asked to grade themselves. They must use numerical ratings to rate the ability of their units to accomplish various aspects of their wartime mission as trained, partially trained or untrained. Although numbers are used, the assessment is still overwhelmingly subjective.

The USR training report lacks the objectivity of the training measurements of the other services. For example, a pilot in the Air Force must fly a certain number of hours every month under specified conditions to be considered ready in training. The Army Reserve should establish specific performance standards against which a commander (or preferably an objective rater) could measure unit training.

The real challenge for the Army Reserve, however, has long been finding adequate time to train. Legacy formulas and rules restrict training flexibility. Collective training opportunities are very limited for units larger than a small detachment, and training a battalion or brigade staff is extremely difficult. One potential solution would be to concentrate training at a small number of centers. The centers would ensure that adequate soldiers, units, equipment and training support are available for high-quality training. They would also facilitate the standardization of training, and administrative burdens would be reduced by leveraging initiatives already implemented by the Chief of Army Reserve (for example, holding companies for untrained soldiers and centralization of personnel records).

Equipment. Soldiers also need the tools of the trade. Although considerable progress has been made to improve the equipment available to Army Reserve units, problems remain. Acquiring the equipment is only the first problem. For many units, the amount of equipment required by MTO&E is enormous. Equipment might be stored at sites several hours away from the unit, and even inventorying large numbers of sets and kits can be challenging.

The equipment problem is often compounded by maintenance issues. In the Army Reserve, regional shops called Army maintenance support activities or equipment concentration sites do most maintenance beyond the operator level. In fact, they often do some operator-level maintenance because of the limited training time available to Army Reserve soldiers. The DA civilian employees who staff these activities do not necessarily belong to the multiple units whose equipment they service, and unit commanders have little influence over maintenance support.

These factors combine to render the USR measures for equipment-on-hand and maintenance unreliable. The USR asks commanders to report which pieces of equipment they have and whether the equipment is ready to go to war. The reality is that commanders have little control over maintenance and may only see their unit equipment during inventories.

We recommend that the Army Reserve establish ready-to-go equipment sets for specific types of units. These equipment sets should belong to maintenance units that are located at training sites. The maintenance units should then report on the use, maintenance and availability of its particular collection of equipment. Divorcing equipment from a unit would be a conceptual shift for the Army Reserve. It would, however, create a more accurate readiness picture and would free up valuable time for training. Once activated, a unit would leave its minimal training set and pick up a complete set at the power projection platform or fall on to equipment already in theater. Equipment and maintenance could then be deleted as measures of an Army Reserve unit’s readiness.

Data. The current USR system suffers from several sources of potential error. For example, most USR data must be manually transcribed into the USR system from other systems, providing an opportunity for simple typographical errors. Commanders are subject to pressure from the entire chain of command to report the best possible ratings. Finally, readiness data can be changed at each command level to produce more favorable but possibly less accurate results.

We recommend that the reporting system collect the most objective data available from existing systems. In the Army Reserve, personnel data is already collected in a system called regional level application software or RLAS. As soldiers join or depart the unit, they are added and subtracted from the system. By using assignment data from this system and validating that data with pay information (documenting actual participation at training), bias or transcription errors would be reduced in the personnel portion of the USR.

Next, data should be automatically compared to the USRs from the previous quarter and year. Variations outside a prescribed limit should trigger further review. Algorithms should be electronically created so that units should be automatically compared to like units: reserve truck companies with other reserve truck companies. This would create a flagging system useful for high-level commands when a unit diverged from the norm.

Joint use. As U.S. Joint Forces Command becomes the single conventional joint force provider and capabilities are drawn from all services, careful measurement constructs must be developed and reports must be comparable so assets from different services can be combined into a seamless force. Because the Army Reserve is different from the active component, special measures should be adopted that capture the true capability of these units. Also, with the massive reconfiguration of the Army, readiness standards must realistically measure definable qualities so decision-makers can understand the capabilities of the available forces.

Automation. Finally, it is hard to overestimate the value of automating the readiness reporting system for the Army Reserve. In addition to improvements in accuracy, reports must be generated in real time. The current labor-intensive process requires that reports be initiated well in advance of the actual report date and almost ensures that they will be out of date when submitted. Most important, unit commanders would be relieved of the considerable burden of preparing and briefing these reports. They could then focus their attention on what’s important: planning and conducting the training that will actually improve retention and readiness.

Now is the time to consider what we are measuring, how we are measuring it and how we are collecting the data to ensure that the new multimillion dollar Department of Defense readiness reporting tool is useful. While it works well for the active component, the USR we use today has very limited applicability to the Army Reserve.