FM 5-0, The Operations Process - Federation of American Scientists

Chapter 1
See FM 6-0 for a detailed discussion on command, control, the C2 system, and the duties and
responsibilities of the staff.
UNDERSTANDING AND DECISIONMAKING
1-17. C2 aims to enhance the commander’s ability to make sound and timely decisions. As such, C2 must
first support the commander in understanding the operational environment. Understanding is more than
awareness of information or the immediate surroundings. In the context of the cognitive hierarchy,
understanding is knowledge that has been synthesized and had judgment applied to it in a specific situation
to comprehend the situation’s inner relationships (FM 6-0). (See figure 1-2.)
Situational Understanding
Figure 1-2. The cognitive hierarchy
1-18. Situational understanding is the product of applying analysis and judgment to relevant information to
determine the relationships among the mission variables to facilitate decisionmaking (FM 3-0). As
commanders develop their situational understanding, they see patterns emerge, dissipate, and reappear in
their operational environment. These patterns help them direct their own forces’ actions with respect to
other friendly forces, civilian organizations, the enemy, the terrain, and the population. While complete
understanding is the ideal for planning and decisionmaking, commanders accept they will often have to act
despite significant gaps in their understanding.
1-19. The complex nature of an operational environment requires both analysis and synthesis to build and
maintain situational understanding throughout the conduct of operations. Analysis is the process of
studying a situation by successively dividing it into parts and addressing each part in turn. For example, the
initial stages of mission analysis and intelligence preparation of the battlefield rely heavily on analysis.
Understanding the parts of a situation is necessary; however, alone it does not provide an appreciation of
the relationships among the parts. That appreciation requires synthesis. Synthesis is thinking about how the
parts of a situation work together as a whole rather than in isolation. For example, the commander and staff
synthesize results of mission analysis to make sense of situations before developing courses of action.
1-20. This situational understanding is essential to the commander’s ability to establish the situation’s
context, develop effective plans, assess the progress of operations, and direct changes to the plan as
required during execution. Commanders realize that their initial situational understanding developed during
planning is not complete and may include inaccurate information. As operations are prepared for and
1-4 FM 5-0 26 March 2010