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1 1 (May 2017)

handle is hein.amenin/aeiaadu0001 and id is 1 raw text is: Key Points The 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, Ist Infantry Division, is stretched thin as it prepares for an upcoming deployment to Europe. There is no margin for error in its training and deployment schedule. * Its greatest challenge is personnel readiness, particularly filling all necessary positions, managing personnel turnover, and matching open positions with troops who have the right skill set to fill them. * Struggling with a lack of available spare parts and maintenance time, the brigade also faces significant equipment readiness shortfalls. This is the first in a planned series of reports on the readiness status of the 2nd Dagger Armored Brigade Combat Team (ABCT) of the ist Infantry Division, stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas. We will track the brigade's readiness over the coming months to understand the challenges it faces as it prepares to deploy to Germany as part of the European Reassurance Initiative. But we will also evaluate the Army's efforts to return from a rotational, wartime readiness model to a more traditional pattern meant to sustain overall service preparedness for a wide variety of missions while rebuilding the capabilities needed for high-technology conventional conflicts. Dagger Brigade is representative of this initiative, indeed of the heavy Army in general. To begin with, the overall reductions in Army personnel strength and delays in modernization place limits on what can be accomplished. Even though the brigade's weapons systems have been improved and upgraded, its Mi Abrams tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and Paladin howitzers are fundamentally the same as those employed in the 1991 Gulf War, and the brigade now has less equipment than it did. Its other supporting capabilities have also been reduced, and its parent division is a smaller organization. The parent division can provide some support, including select equipment and personnel from its sustainment and combat aviation brigades, but it cannot allocate the firepower, communications, or logistics support past division structures permitted. Finally, if employed on today's high- end battlefields, the brigade would lack organic air defense or electronic warfare assets; while it can coordinate external support, it would not necessarily own the skies or the electromagnetic spectrum on its own. Thus, even as we measure Dagger's efforts to meet the new and rigorous service readiness standards, it is important to understand what these standards mean in terms of combat capability and capacity. Assessing readiness must include an explicit definition of the unit's mission. Ready for what? is the underlying question. For Dagger, that means preparing for high-intensity land combat-decisive action in the Army's lexicology-while also readying to work with and support US allies. As the following trip report reveals, by far the largest challenge to sustained readiness is personnel. At a fundamental level, the demands of the service AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE

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