ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that academic scholarship related to national security decision-making to see what lessons might be gleaned about the factors that affect strategic assessment and how to improve it at the highest levels of government. It seeks to identify general principles and approaches for conceptualizing the ingredients of good strategic assessment. The chapter identifies three different approaches to conceptualizing the core elements of strategic assessment: an approach that focuses on organizations and bureaucracies; focuses on the practices and qualitative features of deliberative processes; and emphasizes the content and substance of the information and analysis that informs those deliberative processes. It employs a broad definition of strategic assessment: it is the means through which top officials arrive at a set of actions in response to particular security challenges, and more broadly choose how to employ resources and instruments of statecraft to secure the country. Evaluating what constitutes "good" strategic assessment can be challenging.
