Military Readiness: Implementing GAO's Recommendations Can Help DOD Address Persistent Challenges Across Air, Sea, Ground, and Space Domains

Fast Facts

U.S. military superiority depends on its ability to project strength in all areas—including the air, sea, ground, and space domains. We testified that military readiness has degraded over the last 2 decades due to a variety of challenges.

For instance, the military services have all had issues ensuring that they have enough personnel, aircraft, and ships that can perform their missions.

At the same time, DOD will need to continue balancing their work rebuilding existing forces with its efforts to modernize.

DOD has yet to implement more than 100 recommendations we've made to improve military readiness.

Person in a U.S. military uniform saluting with their hand.

Highlights

What GAO Found

The United States' military superiority depends on its ability to project strength across all warfighting domains. GAO's body of work has shown that U.S. military readiness has been degraded over the last 2 decades due to a variety of challenges, including maintaining existing systems while acquiring news ones that can overcome rapidly evolving threats. Implementing GAO's open recommendations will help the Department of Defense (DOD) address these challenges and enhance readiness. The figure below shows selected GAO recommendations that DOD has not yet implemented.

Selected Open GAO Recommendations to Address Persistent Military Readiness Challenges

Why GAO Did This Study

DOD's readiness rebuilding efforts are occurring in a challenging context that requires it to make difficult decisions on how to meet continuing operational demands while preparing for future challenges. DOD has taken steps to address persistent and long-standing readiness challenges, but significant work remains.

This statement provides information on readiness challenges across the air, sea, ground, and space warfighting domains.

This statement is based primarily on published GAO reports since 2020 that have examined aspects of military readiness, operations, and sustainment in the air, sea, ground, and space domains. This statement also includes information on related ongoing work. We expect to report on those results in March 2025. To perform all this work, GAO analyzed Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Space Force readiness, maintenance, personnel, and training data and interviewed cognizant officials.

Recommendations

Across the reports summarized in this statement, GAO has made over 100 recommendations to help improve readiness across and in each of the domains. DOD needs to take additional actions to implement most of these recommendations, as discussed in this statement.