During the presidential campaign, Mr. Bush assailed the Clinton administration's management of the Pentagon, saying that morale and readiness had declined sharply and that reductions in military spending had been one of the causes.
In the comparison group, the overall ART readiness score declined from 84% at baseline to 78% at endline.
The ART readiness score declined slightly in the intervention group, but this was primarily because of a sharp drop on a single standard, pharmacy counseling, which fell by 18 percentage points.
This echoes statements by George W. Bush that today's servicemen and women battle "back-to-back deployments, poor pay, shortages of spare parts and equipment, and rapidly declining readiness".
Dick Cheney turned up the heat on defense Wednesday with his charge that the Clinton administration had run down the military, leaving it with aging equipment, overextended forces and declining readiness.
Faced with such cuts, Mr. Hagel wrote that "two Navy air wings might not be able to achieve full flight hours, and Special Operations units, which are key to counterterrorism activities, would experience declining readiness".
Speaking to thousands of people at a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Milwaukee, a city he visited early in the day before traveling to Des Moines, Mr. Bush said today's servicemen and women were confronting "back-to-back deployments, poor pay, shortages of spare parts and equipment and rapidly declining readiness".
In his testimony, General Schwartz said that over the last year, North Korea had done more to arrest a decline in readiness among its troops and to improve its military capability than in the last five years combined.
With the reduced funding and a decrease in training opportunities, an ensuing decline in readiness occurred within the AFP.
This could reflect lower expectations and more readiness to accept functional decline in the 87 93-year-old 87 93-year-old 87 93-year-old
