text: Chapter 7
  ASSESSMENT
  7-6. Assessment is a continuous activity that supports decision making throughout the operations process.
  Sustainment commanders and their staffs are required to continually assess the situation before and
  throughout operations to understand conditions and required decisions. Sustainment commanders should use
  continuous assessment to make decisions and anticipate and adapt to changes in the OE and operations.
  Effective sustainment commanders communicate up and down the chain of command to share information
  and observations and maintain situational awareness. They use assessments to review assumptions, revise
  running estimates, and understand risk. Sustainment commanders must also understand the importance of
  assessing operations in other domains to anticipate and prevent issues that could impede operations.
  SUSTAINMENT COMMANDER’S ROLE IN THE OPERATIONS
  PROCESS
  7-7. The sustainment commander’s role in the operations process is to lead Soldiers and organizations while
  providing purpose, direction, and motivation to accomplish operations. Commanders accomplish this through
  understanding the problem, visualizing the end state, describing the visualization, and directing actions.
  Commanders must use running estimates throughout the operations process to support understanding,
  visualizing, describing, and directing. Figure 7-1 describes the operations process and the commander’s role.
  Figure 7-1. The operations process
  UNDERSTAND
  7-8. Sustainment commanders collaborate with their staffs, other commanders, and unified action partners to
  build a shared understanding of their OEs and associated problems. The OE includes portions of all five
  domains and all three dimensions—human, physical, and information. Sustainment commanders must
  understand how sustainment capabilities are employed across the domains and the effects they produce across
  the dimensions. Commanders must continually assess their understanding of the OE and problem and adjust
  as necessary. A commander must understand the OE and accurately frame the problem to effectively visualize
  the desired end state and operational approach.
  VISUALIZE
  7-9. As sustainment commanders build understanding about their OEs, they start to visualize the desired end
  state and the operational approach to achieve it. Sustainment commanders use the shared understanding they
  gained with their staff to effectively visualize the desired end state and how the operational approach they
  envision their organization taking will achieve it.