  Timely and comprehensive understanding of emerging events is crucial for
effective decision-making; automating situation report generation can
significantly reduce the time, effort, and cost for intelligence analysts. In
this work, we identify intelligence analysts' practices and preferences for AI
assistance in situation report generation to guide the design strategies for an
effective, trust-building interface that aligns with their thought processes
and needs. Next, we introduce SmartBook, an automated framework designed to
generate situation reports from large volumes of news data, creating structured
reports by automatically discovering event-related strategic questions. These
reports include multiple hypotheses (claims), summarized and grounded to
sources with factual evidence, to promote in-depth situation understanding. Our
comprehensive evaluation of SmartBook, encompassing a user study alongside a
content review with an editing study, reveals SmartBook's effectiveness in
generating accurate and relevant situation reports. Qualitative evaluations
indicate over 80% of questions probe for strategic information, and over 90% of
summaries produce tactically useful content, being consistently favored over
summaries from a large language model integrated with web search. The editing
study reveals that minimal information is removed from the generated text
(under 2.5%), suggesting that SmartBook provides analysts with a valuable
foundation for situation reports
