Military Budgeting

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Introduction
For the last decade and a half, the United States military has found themselves in a "wash, rinse, and repeat" cycle geared around training, deployments, and reset operations. The war brought a significant amount of support from all over to boost military power but now the operational environment is changing and with that comes a rebalance of readiness needs. Military forces should make operational readiness a top priority, but a decrease in the fiscal budget and manning constraints will impact success. The purpose of this paper will be to provide a board analysis on the status of the military's current operational readiness. Furthermore, the review will cover two critical issues related to budgeting and manning requirements as …show more content…

Congressman Thornberry, Chairman for the House Armed Service Committee, commented that "a variety of factors including budget cuts, the failure to recognize and then address mounting readiness problems, as well as shrinking the size of the force while keeping a high tempo of operations" are damaging our current preparedness status (Gould, 2017, para. 4). The budget crisis is probably one of the most significant challenges currently harming the operational readiness of military forces worldwide. Those that served in the late 90's and early 2000's can remember a time when the budget was so low there was barely any equipment, supplies, or resources to train forces the proper way. According to Livingston (2017), the challenges currently faced between readiness and the current budget crisis could be traced back to the Budget Control Act of 2011 which had a significant impact on force restructuring. Furthermore, it was asserted after the 2013 budget sequestration, that the current budget would reduce critical infrastructure and services, training events, and have a crucial influence on the overall quality of life readiness (Index of U.S. Military Strength, …show more content…

During times of transition operational readiness will be impacted and now is no different as are current status is not adequate to face another war on the home front. Leaders at all levels of the government and military need to realize that operational readiness needs to be the number one priority to ensure that forces remain ready to face there next challenges in the world. Current readiness status is low; impacted by both budget cuts and the drawdown of both manning and combat action units. These constraints will have to be met by the military's future leadership where they will have to learn to be resourceful when developing training plans as well as management skills. The current state of the military readiness is starting to improve but will take these leaders to move it forward to the next

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