Effective Operational Assessment: A Return to the Basics

The criticisms of the reports on progress in Iraq and Afghanistan validly point to a dysfunctional operational assessment process. This dysfunctional process results from the lack of direction on how to conduct operational assessment. In light of this lack of direction, operational staffs have decided on a wide variety of processes to conduct assessment, though they generally focus on an overabundance of quantitative measures. This overabundance has burdened staffs with an overly complex data collection and assessment process that fails to deliver as staffs routinely spend more time on reports than actual analysis. Despite the current problems with operational assessment, history shows that analysts can achieve effective assessment by adhering to some basic principles. The Armys Field Manual 5-0 captures these basic principles the joint force simply fails to live up to them. This paper demonstrates the importance of these basic principles and provides recommendations for their incorporation into joint doctrine and the Joint Operational Planning Process so the joint force has the tools needed to conduct effective operational assessment.