The Department of Defense is still struggling to return to its full readiness capacity after two decades of conflict and counting, the Government Accountability Office said in a report published this week.
The report looked at readiness from the period 2017 to 2019. Ground capabilities improved over that time, and seapower lost some of its readiness capacity. Results for air, space and cyber were mixed, as Military Times reported.
“DOD has identified a wide range of challenges it faces as it seeks to improve readiness in each of the five domains,” the authors wrote. “For example, within the sea domain, the Navy identified limited maintenance capacity at private and public shipyards as the primary challenge for recovering ship and submarine readiness.”
DOD updated its readiness goals in 2018 to match the National Defense Strategy. That same year, Congress required GAO to produce annual assessments of DOD readiness through 2022, using 2017 as a baseline metric.
Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Samantha Villarreal