Military readiness and leadership in modern warfare preparation

Discussion Response
Readiness is absolutely essential for being able to respond to attacks and to be able to fight and win wars, as the Department of the Army (2017) points out. However, readiness is really a mental state as much as it is a technical state. It requires more than just going through the motions of training. The training has to be deep down and born out of strong leadership and guidance. The Army needs strong leaders who can give an example of the type of standards needed to maintain a readiness state. Once the battle is arrived, there is no time for standards to be taught or to be ingrained—they must be ingrained properly beforehand. This is even more important given the fact that battlefields themselves are changing and the very nature of warfare is in flux as technological weaponry alters and the nature of the war becomes different. Soldiers have to be mentally prepared to handle alterations and to rise to the challenge of change. There is no room for thinking that the old methods will always be enough or that leadership skills and other soft skills are unimportant: on the contrary, they will be essential to mission success.