This past year, dozens of government officials sat before members of Congress, providing testimony to historically low readiness rates. These lamentations differed little from previous years, other than to demonstrate the situation is worsening. Headlines run daily reporting on low aircraft availability, shipbuilding delays, unmet production demands, absent parts and raw materials, and punted modernization programs.

If our national security enterprise does not adopt a new paradigm for readiness, the U.S. fleet will become the world’s most expensive military museum. The most capable and sophisticated weapons systems and platforms humanity has ever seen: now available for nothing other than display in depots around the globe.

This is the case because today, readiness is treated as a metrics system. It is viewed as a reporting requirement. Despite years of abysmal reports, there have been no consequences for this deteriorating state and no fundamental change to the system.

Part of the reason change has escaped us is the heroism of the people involved. Through hard work and ingenuity, the people working in our national security ecosystem find creative solutions to close gaps; they have perfected cannibalization to meet immediate needs; and they generally figure out how to accomplish the mission without the materiel they need. These heroics highlight the talent of the people involved in the system, but also how badly the system is failing them.

It is wrong—and unnecessary—to demand heroics and brute force from the people who hold this system up today. The United States has the resources and technology to attain readiness as a continuously held state. What is required is a new paradigm for readiness of the national security enterprise (Enterprise Readiness), the technology platform to manage it across federal agencies and the industrial base, and the leadership to reject the subpar status quo and drive change.

This is why Air exists.

We believe this vision of a ready America is possible. We have built the AI-native platform that makes it possible to close the Readiness Gap and manage Enterprise Readiness in an active state.

We believe the only way to return to a maximally ready, globally dominant national security enterprise across government, allies, and industry is to manage readiness in this way. We also believe our warfighters deserve this.

Moving from a reporting paradigm to a continuously held state of readiness requires real-time coordination across the entire spectrum of relevant assets, rather than static snapshots of the availability and location of people and parts. Until we built this capability specifically for this mission, it did not exist. It does today, and the results are evident.

Enterprise Readiness is no longer aspirational. It is possible, and it is starting to reverse these concerning trend lines. The mandate is set. The resources exist. The only remaining question is how quickly we will act.