Battle Staff SMARTbook, 4th Rev. Ed Guide to Designing, Planning and Conducting Military Operations

While new copies of this edition are still available for purchase, we recommend that readers purchase the NEW FIFTH EDITION (BSS5), available in our Amazon store! Guide to Designing, Planning & Conducting Military Operations Commanders, supported by their staffs, use the operations process to drive the conceptual and detailed planning necessary to understand, visualize, and describe their operational environment; make and articulate decisions; and direct, lead, and assess military operations. The Army's framework for exercising mission command is the operations process: planning, preparing, executing, and continuously assessing the operation. Planning is the art and science of understanding a situation, envisioning a desired future, and laying out effective ways of bringing that future about. Design is a methodology for applying critical and creative thinking to understand, visualize, and describe complex, ill-structured problems and develop approaches to solve them. Preparation is activities that units perform to improve their ability to execute an operation. Execution puts a plan into action by applying combat power to accomplish the mission and using situational understanding to assess progress and make execution and adjustment decisions. Assessment is continuously monitoring and evaluating the current situation and the progress of an operation. The Battle Staff SMARTbook covers the operations process (ADRP 5-0); commander's activities (Understand, Visualize, Describe, Direct, Lead, Assess); the military decisionmaking process and troop leading procedures (MDMP & TLP); integrating processes and continuing activities (intel, IPB, fires and targeting) ; plans and orders (ATTP 5-0.1: WARNOs/FRAGOs/OPORDs); mission command, command posts, liaison (ADRP 6-0); rehearsals & after action reviews; and operational terms and military symbols (ADRP 1-02).