Doctrinally, the U.S. Army determines the readiness of company-sized and battalionsized units by assessing them in four areas: personnel, equipment on hand, equipment serviceability, and training to meet mission-essential tasks. Surprisingly, these assessments do not include factors identified in surveys, personal interviews, and observational accounts of soldiers regarding what prepares them for combat and contributes to their combat effectiveness. Among the more prominent of these factors are the quality of small (primary) group relationships and the competencies of unit leaders. The present study considers these factors in addition to doctrinal readiness assessments. Soldier perceptions combined with doctrinal assessments (1) more readily differentiated the readiness of units; (2) were associated with independently derived soldier perceptions of fellow soldiers, leaders, and equipment being prepared for combat operations; and (3) implied interventions to improve specific unit activities.
and Robert R. Sinclair, James E. Martin, and Robert P. Michel, “Full-time and Part-time Subgroup Differences in Job Attitudes and Demographic Characteristics,”Journal of Vocational Behavior55, no. 3 (1999): 337-357.
2.
Bruce R. Orvis, Herbert J. Shukiar, Laurie L. McDonald, Michael G. Mattock, M. Rebecca Kilburn, and Michael G. Shanley, Ensuring Personnel Readiness in the Army Reserve Components, Report No. MR-659-A (Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 1996).
3.
and U.S. Army Reserve history is available at http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/agency/army/usar-history.htm.
4.
Craig W. Duehring, “Statement of the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs” (Presented to the Military Personnel Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Armed Services in connection with reserve-component issues, February 13, 2002).
5.
General Accounting Office, “DoD Actions Needed to Improve the Efficiency of Mobilizations for Reserve Forces” (Report No. GAO-03-921, provided to the Subcommittee on Personnel, Committee on Armed Services, U.S. Senate, August, 2003).
6.
Ron Dabbieri, “Readiness: It’s Everybody’s Business,”Engineer21, no. 2 (1991): 28-33.
7.
Army Regulation 220-1, Unit Status Reporting (Washington, DC: Headquarters, U.S. Army, June 10, 2003).
8.
General Accounting Office, “Army Readiness—Readiness Improved for Selected Divisions, but Manning Imbalances Persist” (Report No. GAO-02-98, Subcommittee on Military Personnel Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives, December 2001).
9.
Jamie Gayton, “Have We Finally Found the Manning Holy Grail?”Military Review, March-April 2004, 17-20.
10.
Samuel A. Stouffer, Arthur A. Lumsdaine, Robin M. Williams Jr., M. Brewster Smith, and Irving L. Janis, eds., The American Soldier: Combat and Its Aftermath: Vol. 2. Studies in Social Psychology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949).
11.
Paul L. Savage and Richard A. Gabriel, “Cohesion and Disintegration in the American Army,”Armed Forces & Society2/3 (Spring 1976): 340-375.
12.
Mark Vaitkus and James Griffith, “An Evaluation of Unit Replacement on Unit Cohesion and Individual Morale in the U.S. Army All-Volunteer Force,”Military Psychology2, no. 4 (1990): 221-239.
13.
Stoufferet al., American Soldier.
14.
Frederick J. Manning and Lawrence H. Ingraham, “An Investigation into the Value of Unit Cohesion during Peacetime,” in Contemporary Studies in Combat Psychology, ed. Gregory Belenky (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1987), 47-68.
15.
James Griffith, “The Army Reserve Soldier in Operation Desert Storm: Perceptions of Being Prepared for Mobilization, Deployment, and Combat,”Armed Forces & Society21, no. 2 (1995): 195-215.
16.
David K. Vaugh and William A. Schum, “Motivation in U.S. Narrative Accounts of the Ground War in Vietnam,”Armed Forces & Society28, no. 1 (2001): 7-31.
17.
and Stoufferet al., American Soldier.
18.
and Roger W. Little, “Buddy Relations in Combat Motivation,” in The New Military: Changing Patterns of Organization, ed. Morris Janowitz (New York: Russell Sage, 1964).
19.
Charles C. Moskos, The American Enlisted Man (New York: Russell Sage, 1997).
20.
Leonard Wong, Thomas A. Kolditz, Raymond A. Millen, and Terrence M. Potter, “Why They Fight: Combat Motivation in the Iraqi War,”Strategic Studies Institute Monograph (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army Senior Service College, July 2003).
21.
and John D. Rosenberger, “Reversing the Downward Spiral of Combat Readiness: Change the Way We Measure It,”Military Review, November-December 1999, 54-59.
22.
Bruce Newsome, “The Myth of Intrinsic Combat Motivation,”The Journal of Strategic Studies26, no. 4 (2003): 24-46.
23.
John M. Spiszer, “Leadership and Combat Motivation: The Critical Task,”Military Review, May/June 1999, 66-70.
24.
Timothy P. McGonigle, Wendy J. Casper, Edward P. Meiman, Candance Cronin, Brain E. Cronin, and Rebecca R. Harris, “The Relationship between Personnel Support Programs and Readiness: A Model to Guide Future Research,”Military Psychology17, no. 1 (2005): 25-39.
25.
Reuven Gal, “Unit Morale: From a Theoretical Puzzle to an Empirical Illustration—An Israeli Example,”Journal of Applied Social Psychology16 (1986): 549-564.
26.
Stoufferet al., American Soldier.
27.
Manning and Ingraham, “An Investigation into the Value of Unit Cohesion.”
28.
James Griffith, “Will Citizens Be Soldiers? Examining Retention of Reserve Component Soldiers,”Armed Forces & Society31, no. 3 (2005): 353-383.
29.
Jum C. Nunnally, Psychometric Theory, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978).
30.
Elazar J. Pedhuzar and Leora P. Schmelkin, Measurement, Design, and Analysis: An Integrated Approach (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991).
31.
Frederick J. Manning and Terrence D. Fullerton, “Health and Well-Being in Highly Cohesive Units in the U.S. Army,”Journal of Applied Social Psychology18, no. 6 (1988): 503-519.
32.
Kenneth O. McGraw and S. P. Wong, “Forming Inferences about Some Intraclass Correlation Coefficients,”Psychological Bulletin1, no.1 (1996): 30-46.
33.
Cheri Ostroff, “The Relationship between Satisfaction, Attitudes, and Performance: An Organizational Level of Analysis,”Journal of Applied Psychology77 (1992): 963-974.
34.
see also Mark S. Aldenderfer and Roger Blasfield, Cluster Analysis (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1984).
35.
and David J. Ketchen and Timothy B. Palmer, “Strategic Responses to Poor Organizational Performance: A Test of Competing Perspectives, Journal of Management25, no. 5 (1999): 683-706.
36.
Adelheid A. M. Nicol and Penny M. Pexman, Presenting Your Findings: A Practical Guide for Creating Tables (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2000).
37.
and Newsome, “The Myth of Intrinsic Combat Motivation.”
38.
William Reeder was an original member of the Army Research Branch. He noted General Bradley’s reliance on survey data during a presentation attended by the author at the Department of Military Psychiatry, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, April 1985.
39.
Herbert F. Weisberg, Jon A. Krosnick, and Bruce D. Bowen, An Introduction to Survey Research, Polling, and Data Analysis, 3rd ed. (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 2003).
40.
A readily available set of survey items to assess unit social climate can be found on the Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences’s Web site: http://www.hqda.army.mil/ari/surveys/commandclimate.shtml.
41.
and Marija J. Norusis, “Measuring Scales: Reliability Analysis,” in SPSS for Windows: Professional Statistics Release 6.0, ed. Marija J. Norusis (Chicago: SPSS, 1993), chap. 6.
42.
Steven W. J. Kozlowski and Katherine Klein, “A Multilevel Approach to Theory and Research in Organizations: Contextual, Temporal, and Emergent Processes,” in Multilevel Theory Research, and Methods in Organizations: Foundations, Extensions, and New Directions, ed. Katherine Klein and Steven W. Kozlowski (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000), 3-90.
43.
Diego Gambetta, Trust (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988).
44.
Sandra L. Rousseau, “Psychological and Implied Contracts in Organizations,”Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal15 (1989): 245-259.
45.
Mady W. Segal, “The Military and the Family as Greedy Institutions,”Armed Forces & Society13 (Fall 1986): 9-38.
46.
Sandra L. Robins, “Trust and the Breach of the Psychological Contract,”Administrative Science Quarterly41 (1996): 574-599.
47.
and Martin and Hafer, “Multiplicative Interaction Effects.”
48.
and Department of Army, Consideration of Others Program, draft DA Pam 600-XXX (Washington, DC: Headquarters, Department of Army, 2005).
49.
Department of Commerce, Baldrige National Quality Program: Criteria for Performance Excellence (Gaithersburg, MD: National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2005).
50.
Department of Army, Army Performance Improvement Criteria (Arlington, VA: Office of the Chief of Staff, Strategic Management and Innovations Division, 2005).
51.
and Fred A. Mael, Measuring Leadership, Motivation, and Cohesion among U.S. Army Soldiers, Report No. ARI-TR-867 (Alexandria, VA: U.S. Army Research Institute, 1989).
