The reason the Pentagon’s budget is now on a long-term upswing is because the military has spent years loudly lobbying for such an increase while complaining about an alleged “readiness crisis”….U.S. policymakers have seen this movie many times before. I experienced it myself in the 1990s, when the brass was displeased with the budget levels set by the Bill Clinton administration and whined about readiness problems to the Office of Management and Budget, where I worked. My follow-up with the Pentagon’s civil servants made it clear that the measures they were using were rigged to show low levels of readiness; they set standards that called units “ready” only if they had every capability imaginable to fight a major ground war, and they counted as “unready” units that were back from deployments and had missed a training slot for that big war, one they would soon be scheduled to receive.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/02/15/the-militarys-readiness-scam-worked-again/
