Readiness & technical retention

Critical billets or teams with a formally validated, current scenario requirement divided by all declared critical billets or teams.

This governs denominator confidence and institutional planning evidence; it does not by itself show personnel capability. U.S.-PRC comparison is generally not symmetric.

Assigned personnel in the exact specialty, grade band, unit, and period divided by validated required billets for the same scope.

Overfill does not establish fit, qualification, availability, or team completeness. Compare with PRC only when the requirement construct is credibly bounded.

Assigned personnel meeting every declared fit criterion divided by validated required billets in the same scope.

Business rules and junior-to-senior substitutions must be visible. An administrative fit flag is not accepted without definition and reliability review.

Distinct people or complete teams meeting all fit, certification, currency, medical, administrative, legal, geographic, and availability gates divided by the validated requirement.

Preferred readiness stock metric. Do not estimate by multiplying unrelated aggregate percentages; use a bounded estimate if record-level intersection is unavailable.

Assigned personnel holding all required certifications, evaluations, repetitions, clearances, and recency for the task divided by assigned personnel in the same cohort.

Define current status by task and service standard. A course credential without current task proficiency does not qualify.

Personnel meeting the defined senior or advanced qualification divided by validated senior, supervisor, evaluator, and instructor requirements for the cohort.

Do not treat time in service alone as experience. PRC comparison normally requires proxy bounds and explicit analogue quality.

Actual retained eligible personnel divided by the validated retention requirement for the same specialty, grade, experience, decision window, and period.

Display the target method and historical rate. Meeting a low administrative target cannot override a negative qualified-stock balance.

Personnel reaching independent mission qualification during the period divided by permanent losses of independently qualified personnel in the same specialty and proficiency scope.

Transfers between components or services require de-duplication. A novice completion and a senior loss are not equivalent; pair this with depth and time-to-proficiency.

Graduates meeting the course standard divided by course starts for the same cohort, with washout, recategorization, recycle, and time-window rules retained.

A high pass rate can reflect easier standards. Qualification quality and post-school mission performance must remain visible.

Graduates who attain independent unit-level mission qualification within the approved window divided by graduates reporting to qualification units.

This prevents course completion from being counted as ready stock. Attrition and reassignment before qualification remain explicit.

Assigned qualified instructors and evaluators divided by validated instructor and evaluator requirements, by course and unit qualification function.

Count instructor time actually available after collateral duties. Contractor instructors require continuity, access, and wartime availability checks.

Median elapsed calendar days from accession into the specialty pipeline to independent mission qualification; also report 25th and 75th percentiles and attrition.

Do not compare specialties with different task standards directly. Use same-family U.S.-PRC analogue only with explicit scope and standard differences.

Median elapsed time from accession or initial qualification to the defined advanced qualification, including required repetitions and experience; report distribution and noncompletion.

This metric prevents one-for-one headcount replacement from standing in for experience replacement.

Months not deployed divided by months deployed for active-component units or individuals under the DTM-21-005 business rules.

Policy-derived U.S. condition only. Dwell is a burden indicator, not direct proficiency or retention; a PRC analogue requires a separate construct.

Months not mobilized divided by months mobilized for reserve-component units or individuals under the DTM-21-005 business rules.

Policy-derived U.S. condition only. Report involuntary and voluntary mobilization and specialty variation where available.

Share of required team positions occupied by the same qualified personnel across a defined workup, deployment, or readiness cycle, with planned rotations separated from unplanned churn.

Some rotation builds force-wide experience and can be beneficial. Stability is causal evidence only when linked to proficiency, workload, or losses.

Highest repeated result against declared mission-essential-task standards, preserving scenario realism, external support, adjudication method, repetitions, and failure modes.

Direct comparison requires similar tasks, opposition, standards, and disclosure. Exercise participation or official narrative alone is not a scored outcome.

Sustained mission output after a declared degradation package divided by baseline required output over the same period.

Scenario-specific. The degradation package, duration, replacement access, and baseline must match before U.S.-PRC comparison.

Calendar time to replace the scenario-specified loss and return complete teams to independent mission qualification, including recruiting, training, unit qualification, equipment, instructors, and accessions already in pipeline.

Always state the lost share and proficiency level being restored. Low/base/high PRC cases are expected when direct pipeline data are absent.

Categorical eligibility based on authority, availability, clearance, task qualification, equipment, interoperability, location, logistics, command relationship, and timing: verified_accessible; horizon_feasible; nominal; unavailable.

Credit only the task and quantity actually covered. One person cannot simultaneously fill active, contractor, reserve, and allied estimates.

Critical cohorts with complete required observation fields divided by all cohorts in the versioned critical-specialty register.

Calculate separately for U.S., each ally, and PRC. Data coverage governs confidence and sensitivity; it is not itself a relative capability advantage.