Criteria and their Influence on the Tactical Decision-Making of Commanders in Operations

Decision-making is one of the core activities of commanders in operations. Commanders (with the help of staffs) carry out decision making, or the decision-making process in planning, because decision-making processes lie at the heart of planning processes. Commanders’ and staffs’ decision-making consists of the creation and assessment of various alternatives (variants of actions) according to certain aspects (criteria) and their mutual comparison, risk assessment, selection of the most advantageous (optimal) alternative and the adoption of a decision. In this paper, the authors focus on the method of deriving (selecting) a set of criteria from the objectives of the operation and their formulation for subsequent use in the creation, analysis, comparison and selection of a variant of action. The reason the authors carefully examine the significance of the influence of criteria on commanders' decisions is primarily the fact that these actions are not elaborated in detail in Alliance documents, which may subsequently affect the choice of optimal variants (decisions) regarding the actions of their own troops in joint (NATO) operations.