Military Readiness: DOD Should Take Further Actions to Address Challenges Across the Air, Sea, Ground, and Space Domains
Fast Facts
We testified on U.S. military readiness before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Readiness and Management Support.
This testimony is based on many reports from our broad work on readiness across the military services, such as:
F-35 Joint Strike Fighter: Actions Needed to Address Late Deliveries and Improve Future Development
Weapon System Sustainment: Various Challenges Affect Ground Vehicles' Availability for Missions
We've made almost 200 recommendations, many of which the Department of Defense has not addressed.
The Capitol building with text that reads, GAO Testimony to Congress.
Highlights
What GAO Found
To maintain its reputation as the dominant military force worldwide, the Department of Defense (DOD) must balance efforts to improve the readiness of its forces with meeting ongoing demands, modernizing its capabilities, and addressing priorities identified in the 2026 National Defense Strategy. 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 new capabilities. Implementing GAO’s open recommendations—such as those shown in the figure below—will help DOD address these challenges and enhance readiness.
Selected Open GAO Recommendations to Address Persistent Military Readiness Challenges
Why GAO Did This Study
DOD’s efforts to improve military readiness require the department to make difficult decisions on how best to address ongoing operational demands, adapt to shifting priorities, and prepare for future challenges. DOD has taken steps to address persistent readiness challenges, but significant work remains to make a range of needed improvements that GAO has identified.
This statement provides information on readiness challenges across the air, sea, ground, and space warfighting domains.
This statement is primarily based on published GAO reports since 2022 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 work ongoing during fiscal year 2026. To perform all this work, GAO analyzed Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Space Force readiness, maintenance, personnel, and training information and interviewed cognizant officials.
Recommendations
Across the reports summarized in this statement, GAO has made nearly 200 recommendations, with which DOD generally agreed, to help improve readiness across and in each of the domains. DOD needs to take additional actions to implement more than 150 of these recommendations, as discussed in this statement.