ABSTRACT
Assessments in the Department of Defense cover a variety of reporting mechanisms and decision analysis tools in the military. While assessments were not originally considered traditional operations research, demand for scientific metrics-based operation assessments in recent military conflicts pushed this responsibility to the military operations research community largely based on analysts' familiarity with design, logic, critical thinking, data collection and management, data mining and problem-solving. As a result, operations research analysts often design, develop, write, and present evidence-based assessments. This chapter will outline the context of assessments, different types of military assessments, provide the best practices for executing each type of assessment, and conduct an overview of some recent unclassified examples using a generalized assessment taxonomy, lexicon, and framework to assist assessors in both discussing and conducting different kinds of assessments. After reading this chapter, analysts will understand of the best practices for a number of types of assessment and know how the assessments they conduct inform their command, their Service, or the Joint Force.
