Defense Management

The Army's Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) trains soldiers and develops doctrine and future warfighting concepts to fight the battles of today and tomorrow. As such, the Command has been designated as the lead in the Army's transformation from a Cold War-oriented force into a rapidly deployable and responsive force better able to meet the diverse challenges of the future. Concerns have been raised at congressional hearings about TRADOC's readiness to perform its mission, particularly within the context of Army transformation and associated funding priorities. GAO assessed the impact of budget, workload, and personnel changes, as well as ongoing transformation plans, on TRADOC's ability to perform its mission and deliver well-trained soldiers to the combat forces.

Since fiscal year 1995, while TRADOC's workload has grown as a result of new mission requirements, the number of personnel authorized to meet those requirements has declined. Also since fiscal year 1995, the Command's operation and maintenance funding increased, but TRADOC allocated these and other operations money to support its highest mission priority--training--while other areas received less emphasis. The table below depicts the number of personnel TRADOC believes are needed to perform its workload (personnel requirements), as well as the number of personnel the Army has authorized for this purpose. Unresolved differences exist between TRADOC and Army Headquarters over TRADOC's personnel requirements. Amid the increases in workload and reductions in personnel authorizations, TRADOC has met its training mission, but with difficulty. Moreover, the Command has workload backlogs in other mission areas, such as developing training materials and Army doctrine. The effect of these backlogs is illustrated in TRADOC's monthly status reports, which show that the Command assigned the lowest readiness rating to more than two-thirds of its units during fiscal year 2001 and into 2002 and attributed the low ratings primarily to the lack of personnel. Furthermore, two Army leadership panels concluded that TRADOC's training and development standards had deteriorated, and mechanisms for evaluating training and leader development programs were lacking. Several ongoing and planned Army initiatives may affect TRADOC's ability to perform its mission in the future. These include efforts to reassess TRADOC's process for determining personnel requirements and ongoing efforts to transfer forces from TRADOC and other noncombatant commands to warfighting forces. At the same time, TRADOC is losing flexibility to shift funds from one mission area to another because the Army established the Installation Management Agency to manage its facilities. TRADOC is developing a reengineering plan that Command officials believe will increase TRADOC's efficiency and improve its ability to meet mission requirements; however, the costs, benefits, performance measures, and human capital issues associated with the plan are not yet clear.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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