The heuristics of war: Scientific method and the founders of operations research

British Journal for the History of Science

Volumn 40, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 251-274

  Thomas, William ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 34248586650     PISSN: 00070874     EISSN: 1474001X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0007087407009508     Document Type: Article

References (74)

1. C. Kittel, 'The nature and development of operations research', Science (1947), 105, 150-3,
2. originally offered the definition 'Operations research is a scientific method for providing executive departments with a quantitative basis for decisions' (emphasis in original). This definition was adapted elsewhere before making its canonical appearance, in altered form, as the first sentence of P. Morse and G. Kimball, Methods of Operations Research, New York, 1951.
3. The historiography of OR is vast and includes a substantial and informative group of histories written by OR practitioners. Some of the most recent contributions by historians are also the most comprehensive and contain extensive bibliographies of older materials. See especially M. Kirby, Operational Research in War and Peace: The British Experience from the 1930s to 1970, London, 2003;
4. and E. Rau, 'Combat scientists: the emergence of operations research in the United States during World War II', Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1999, UMI number 9926187; as well as two published articles: idem,
5. 'The adoption of operations research in the United States during World War IP, in Systems, Experts, and Computers: The Systems Approach in Management and Engineering, World War II and After (ed. T. Hughes and A. Hughes), Cambridge, MA, 2000;
6. and idem, 'Technological systems, expertise, and policy making; the British origins of operational research', in Technologies of Power (ed. M. Allen and G. Hecht), Cambridge, MA, 2001.
7. Rau is currently preparing a book on the topic. M. Fortun and S. Schweber, 'Scientists and the legacy of World War II: the case of Operations Research (OR) ', Social Studies of Science (1993), 23, 595-642, is an influential essay on OR history that addresses sundry questions concerning its development, including its relationship with Taylorism and the preponderance of physicists in wartime OR.
8. Also see R. Rider, 'Operations research and game theory: early connections', in Toward a History of Game Theory: Annual Supplement to Volume 24, History of Political Economy (ed. E. Weintraub), Durham, 1992. A number of other works have commented on the significance of OR to wartime and post-war developments, without offering complete histories. These works will be cited here as appropriate.
9. A. Pickering, 'Cyborg history and the World War II regime', Perspectives on Science (1995), 3, 1-48, 13-18.
10. See both Rau, 'The adoption of operations research in the United States', op. cit. (2), esp. 227; and Rau, 'Technological systems, expertise, and policy making', op. cit. (2).
11. D. Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920-1970, Cambridge, 2006, esp. Chapters 4 and 5.
12. See also idem, 'British scientific intellectuals and the relations of science, technology and war", in National Military Establishments and the Advancement of Science and Technology (ed. P. Forman and J. Sánchez-Ron), Boston, MA, 1996. Edgerton's claims relate mostly to research and development but can be extended to operational planning as well.
13. Edgerton, Warfare State, op. cit. (5), quoting from P. Blackett, 'Scientists at the operational level', a 1941 memorandum reprinted in idem, Studies of War, Nuclear and Conventional, New York, 1962, 173. Note Blackett's comment two paragraphs above: 'The scientist, in considering an operational problem, very often comes to the conclusion that the common-sense view is the correct one.' The 'nine out of ten' figure is published in P. Blackett, 'Recollections of Problems Studied, 1940-45' (1953), reprinted in ibid., 210. Philip Morse, to be introduced shortly, once described Blackett as the 'general dean of OR everywhere', 'Diary of Dr. Philip M. Morse and Dr. William Shockley, Visit to London Commencing November 19, 1942, ' Folder 5, Box 39, Edward L. Bowles Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
14. The figures of the Arrogant Scientist and the Curmudgeonly Officer often appear in histories as colourful examples of tensions between science and the military. For a recent instance, S. Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War, Cambridge, MA, 2005, is an excellent account of the method and purpose of Kahn's work, but Kahn's often arrogant style is implicitly traced back to wartime OR, where we are presented with a Blackett whose 'smugness was intolerable to the services' (46). Stories of conflict between scientists and military officers should not be construed as typifying their relationship. In all of his work, Rau has continually made clear that territorial negotiations between OR scientists and officers were, taken on the whole, quite successful.
15. To clarify the meaning of 'methodology', Blackett and Morse are both viewed as crucial figures in the establishment of a broad methodology of OR, meaning what form OR groups should take, what their relationship should be with the military and some vague notion of their investigative concerns and methods. Blackett, particularly, published two influential wartime memoranda: Blackett, 'Scientists at the operational level', op. cit. (6); and Blackett, 'A note on certain aspects of the methodology of operational research' (1943), in idem, Studies of War, op. cit. (6). However, actual analytical methodology was not dictated from administrators such as Morse and Blackett, but would have been more dependent on the talents of individuals and their OR colleagues.
16. Kimball was Morse's deputy in the Anti-Submarine Warfare Operations Research Group (ASWORG), working for the US Navy, and was co-author of their influential post-war report of ASWORG's activities, which was later turned into a textbook; see Morse and Kimball, op. cit. (1). C. Waddington, O. R. in World War 2: Operational Research Against the U-Boat, London, 1973, was written soon after the war ended, but its publication was delayed by security issues. It clearly conveys a similar attitude to problem-solving that is familiar from Morse and Kimball as well as Blackett's writings on OR.
17. M. Nye, Blackett: Physics, War, and Politics in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA, 2004, quote on 140.
18. On the history of particle detection in cloud chambers see P. Galison, How Experiments End, Chicago, 1987, Chapter 3;
19. and esp. idem, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, Chicago, 1997, Chapter 2.
20. P. Blackett and G. Occhialini, 'Some photographs of the tracks of penetrating radiation ', Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series A (1933), 139, 699-726, Plate 21, caption, 720.
21. J. Chadwick, P. Blackett and G. Occhialini, ' Some experiments on the production of positive electrons', Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series A (1934), 144, 235-49, 237-8.
22. On the effects of gas see P. Blackett, 'On the technique of the counter controlled cloud chamber', Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series A (1934), 146, 281-99, 288-9.
23. A good discussion of more subtle distortion effects can be found in P. Blackett and R. Brode, 'The measurement of the energy of cosmic rays II: the curvature measurements and the energy spectrum', Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series A (1936), 154, 573-87.
24. See Chadwick, Blackett and Occhialini, op. cit. (13), and Blackett and Occhialini, op. cit. (12) for various examples of event rejection.
25. Blackett and Occhialini, op. cit. (12), 705. Sometimes particles of high energy were thrown backwards into the shower. There was also the possibility of errant particles entering simultaneously from below. The paper also deals with the possibility that positrons could be high-energy protons, which, though revealing, I have not recounted here.
26. Chadwick, Blackett and Occhialini, op. cit. (13), 23. The argument presented here should not imply that values of data accumulation were presupposed by the cloud chamber technology. Carl Anderson published his discovery of the positron based upon only three photographs. For a more in-depth discussion, particularly in reference to Anderson's greater emphasis on discrete events than his mentor, Millikan, see Galison, How Experiments End, op. cit. (11).
27. On the significance of so-called 'golden events' also see idem, Image and Logic, op. cit. (11), esp. Chapter 3, in regard to nuclear emulsions.
28. Nye, op. cit. (10), 63; and P. Blackett, 'The craft of experimental physics', in University Studies: Cambridge 1933 (ed. Harold Wright), London, 1933, 67-96. Also relevant to this essay is the requisite familiarity with commercial materials and their manufacturers that could permit a more effective apparatus, allowing the pursuit of deeper studies.
29. See J. Hughes, ' Plasticine and valves : industry, instrumentation and the emergence of nuclear physics', in The Invisible Industrialist: Manufactures and the Production of Scientific Knowledge (ed. J.-P. Gaudillière and I. Löwy), New York, 1998.1 thank John Krige for this reference.
30. P. Blackett, 'Foreword', in G. D. Rochester and J. G. Wilson, Cloud Chamber Photographs of the Cosmic Radiation, New York, 1952, quoted in Galison, Image and Logic, op. cit. (11), 123.
31. Blackett, 'Tizard and the science of war' (1960), reprinted in idem, Studies of War, op. cit. (6), quote on 103.
32. Later the Case Institute of Technology (an early centre for post-war academic OR work), and now Case Western Reserve University.
33. P. Morse, In at the Beginnings, a Physicist's Life, Cambridge, MA, 1977, 24.
34. See note 25 below.
35. S. Schweber, 'The empiricist temper regnant: theoretical physics in the United States 1920-1950', Historical Studies of the Physical Sciences (1986), 17, 55-98, describes the character of the American physics community in the early twentieth century.
36. On Morse at Princeton see Morse, op. cit. (22), Chapters 3 and 4, and on the physical layout of MIT, 119. On the early history of physics at MIT see T. Davis and H. Goodwin, A History of the Departments of Chemistry and Physics at M.I.T., 1855-1933, Cambridge, MA, 1933.
37. See Morse, op. cit. (22), 105-17. Blackett had spent a year in Göttingen with James Franck in 1925-6, much to the dismay of Ernest Rutherford, who was in charge of the Cavendish Laboratory where Blackett worked. See Nye, op. cit. (10), 46.
38. Morse, op. cit. (22), 102.
39. Morse, op. cit. (22), 137-8: 'I also knew that the theoretical techniques developed for quantum mechanics could be used effectively in extending these [acoustics] measurements, predicting other phenomena, and suggesting other experiments. The theory, buttressed by experiment, could be used to design equipment to analyze, reproduce, and control sound. The results might turn out to be useful, a new consideration for me.'
40. P. Morse, R. Boden and H. Schecter, 'Acoustic vibrations and internal combustion engine performance I. Standing waves in the intake pipe system', Journal of Applied Physics (1938), 9, 16-23. The NACA report on the experimental work involved, promised in the published version, was not completed until 1944, when it was issued under a restricted classification. See R. Boden and H. Schecter, 'Dynamics of the inlet system of a four-stroke engine', Technical Note No. 935, National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, Washington, May 1944. Available online at http://naca.larc.nasa.gov/digidoc/ report/tn/35/NACA-TN-935.pdf, accessed 8 December 2005.
41. Morse, Boden and Schecter, op. cit. (29), 16.
42. Morse, Boden and Schecter, op. cit. (29), 18.
43. The mission is re-created using materials from Incident Folder 2737, Series VI: Assessments of Individual ASW Incidents, Records of the Anti-Submarine Warfare Analysis and Statistical Division, Tenth Fleet (Finding Aid Al, Entry 350, Box 95), Records of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, Record Group 38 (RG 38), United States National Archives at College Park, Maryland (NACP), hereafter 'Incident 2737'.
44. Incident 2737, op. cit. (32).
45. Report of Anti-Submarine Action by Aircraft, Incident 2737, op. cit. (32). 'Propaganda'quote from the Atlantic Fleet Anti-Submarine Warfare Officer to the Commander-in-Chief, US Atlantic Fleet, 7 May 1943, Incident 2737, op. cit. (32).
46. Characterizations are taken from a survey of other incident assessments (see note 32 for location). The report card is a report from the Committee on Assessment of Damage to Enemy Submarines and is located in the Incident 2737 file, op. cit. (32).
47. ASWORG to Anti-Submarine Measures, 25 August 1943, Folder A16(2), Administrative Files, Records of the Anti-Submarine Measures Division, Tenth Fleet (Finding Aid Al, Entry 349, Box 3), RG 38, NACP.
48. This inference is drawn from the fact that the picture in Figure 2 (photo 171) in the Incident 2737 file was an enlargement, and the fact that documents in the file indicate the unusually good quality of the images and the desire to use them instructionally. In addition, two ordinary-sized photographs in the file have boxes drawn on them indicating a portion to be cropped and enlarged. The enlargements also appear in the file. Also note that I have further cropped Figure 2, which I hastily copied from the archive file using a digital camera. In the original image I took, the photograph is slightly askew and the overhead lights of the archives are reflected in its gloss. Such are the mundane decisions that lead to photographs losing analysability.
49. The discussion of military planning presented here is quite general and does not represent a methodology that was ever explicitly spelled out. I have garnered my own impressions of it from various archival files. Mission reports and critiques (Box B6) from the Curtis LeMay papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC have been particularly useful, as have the minutes of US Navy conferences on Anti-Submarine Warfare, Series II : Administrative Files, Records of the Anti-Submarine Warfare Analysis and Statistical Division, Tenth Fleet (Finding Aid A1, Entry 350, Box 47), RG 38, NACP.
50. The Lanchester equations, developed at the end of the First World War, do make crude calculations of outcome based upon the strengths of the opposing forces. OR scientists sometimes pointed to the Lanchester equations as a predecessor of their own work. See F. Lanchester, Aircraft in Warfare: The Dawn of the fourth Arm, London, 1916; and Morse and Kimball on Lanchester, op. cit. (1 ), Sec. 4.2.
51. Such statements appear frequently in post-mission critiques in the LeMay papers, op. cit. (38), although typically not all at once as in this example statement.
52. An example: 'General LeMay ; We can't afford to have leaders making these mistakes ... These mistakes all go back to personnel errors. We have in existence a lead crew manual in which a large number of mission failures have been analyzed. We have a doctrine which, if followed, will guarantee a successful mission. If you follow that lead manual and do the things stressed within, your chances of having a successful mission are about 99.4%. Even now, when we have a mission failure, we can trace it back to some member of the crew not following outlined procedure ... The weather was bad so that you could not fly a combat wing formation, but the rule is still in effect that if you can't fly a combat wing formation, come on home. The 4th wing came home and although they didn't get any bombs on Germany, they did not get into any trouble. The 45th got into trouble but were lucky and lost only a couple of planes. Impress on your air leaders that this is their problem.' Mission Report, 'Frankfurt (20/3/44)', LeMay papers, op. cit. (38).
53. 'Colonel Huglin; We have had more trouble trying to circumvent on mandrel. On the recent missions, most of our difficulty was in trying to get people on local VHP frequency. We have had no reports of mandrel interfering on Channel A. General LeMay: To Captain Barker: Find out why the mandrel is causing interference with the Splasher and Buncher Beacons and "gee" readings. 'Minutes of the Combat Wing and Group Commanders' Meeting, 27 February 1944, LeMay papers, op. cit. (38).
54. To aid ASW operations, an ASW School was established in Boston, and a central library on ASW reports was established, thereby serving to collate knowledge on ASW into a more formalized body of knowledge. See ASW Meeting Minutes, op. cit. (38), 17 November 1942, 7. OR work also involved considerable bibliographical effort, and Blackett pointed to information-gathering as a useful function of OR groups because officers did not always obtain comprehensive knowledge of a subject. See Blackett, 'Scientists at the operational level', op. cit. (6), 172. Post-war systems analysis seems to have also had a strong bibliographical element, which may help explain its value to the military, even though the conclusions of systems analyses were often rejected.
55. I am indebted to Erik Rau for pointing out that lawyers were also seen as skilled investigators, and they were frequently employed in United States Army Air Forces operations analysis groups. Scientists' technical proficiency was also an important factor in producing effective analyses, and lawyers' lack thereof sometimes led to criticism. On this point see Rau, 'The adoption of operations research in the United States', op. cit. (2), 70, 74.
56. Blackett describes the development of the camouflage studies in Blackett, 'Recollections of Problems Studied', op. cit. (6), 216-18. The original studies can be found in the National Archives of the UK: Public Record Office AVIA 7/1004. Compare ORS Coastal Command Reports 144 and 151, both written by W. R. Merton, the scientist assigned to camouflage problems.
57. Kimball's work on the optical analyser may be viewed as such a recommendation for improving reporting mechanisms. Pickering, op. cit. (3), has described the dissatisfaction of OR scientists with military reports as evidence of the scientific redefinition of a Foucaldian 'archive', and thus as a convergence between the military and science. I see no reason for improvements in reporting mechanisms to connote a special 'scientific' activity, whether initiated from within the military (as happened most often), or from OR scientists (as happened occasionally).
58. Blackett's own language on the relationship between science, OR and 'normal' military methods is somewhat vague, but revealing. In 1941 Blackett, 'Scientists at the operational level', op. cit. (6), 172, asked, 'To what extent is it useful to do analysis of operations in a more scientific manner than is done normally by service specialist officers?' (emphasis added). The language suggests that military methods were at least somewhat scientific. He went on to explain that officers were not trained in 'probability considerations and the theory of errors' (a point with which we will deal presently), and that officers were too busy to engage in 'detailed analytic work" (emphasis in original), which also suggests that officers, given more leisurely conditions, could also conduct 'more scientific' analyses. Blackett later remarked on military methods, 'During the war operational research workers attended the regular staff meetings at many operational headquarters and so learned the type of problem facing the executive officers and the normal methods by which decisions were arrived at. In this way they were enabled to spot problems capable of being tackled scientifically, which had either not been considered as relevant problems, or had been held to be too complex for scientific analysis.
59. ' P. Blackett, 'Operational Research', Operational Research Quarterly (1950), 1, 3-6,
60. reprinted in idem, Studies of War, op. cit. (6), 199-204, 202. In this article Blackett defines ' scientific method' loosely, and, as I do here, attribute the 'uniqueness' of OR primarily to the freedom OR groups enjoyed in choosing their own problems. He seems to suggest, by his language, that the military often, but not always, tackled problems using 'scientific analysis'.
61. While there are instances wherein tensions between military planners and outside advisers rose to the surface in criticism of outsiders' reports, in the reception of other reports military responses were critical, but unprejudiced. Similar statements could be made about scientists' views of military reports.
62. Because ideal missions were a direct construct of military planning, I am not quick to add the ideal mission as a subject of OR scrutiny, but it is possible to find examples where OR groups did redefine ideal expectations. OR studies of searching operations (such as for a U-boat) clarified certain ideal scenarios by assigning geometrically determined expectations to complicated search patterns. However, such purely mathematical questions are not uniquely identifiable as OR. The Applied Mathematics Panel (AMP) under the National Defense Research Committee also considered such questions. In fact, the AMP occasionally aided OR groups on certain mathematical problems. AMP projects 80 and 105, for instance, were in aid of ASWORG in dealing with problems of search. See material in Applied Mathematics Panel : Studies and Notes, 1943-6, Records of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (Record Group 227, Finding Aid NC-138, Entry 152), NACP.
63. See Waddington, op. cit. (9), 140-7, for a discussion of the statistical problem of disappearing contacts. The introduction of short-wavelength radar, for which the Germans had not developed detectors, later made radar use advisable again.
64. Blackett, op. cit. (47), 201.
65. See notes 6 and 47 above. Malcolm Llewellyn-Jones has demonstrated how OR statistical analyses could lend confidence to decisions arrived at through less rigorous means by showing how Blackett's argument in favor of large convoys was not the crucial piece of evidence resulting in that policy. See M. Llewellyn-Jones, 'A clash of cultures: the case for large convoys', in Patrick Blackett: Sailor, Scientist, Socialist (ed. P. Hore), Portland, OR, 2003, 138-58.
66. Blackett, 'Recollections of Problems Studied', op. cit. (6), 211-12.
67. On search theory see Operations Evaluation Group (OEG) Report 56, 'Search and screening', 1946, available online at http://www.cna.org/documents/ 1100005600.pdf, accessed 14 January 2006. The report credits George Kimball for much of the work, but it was written by Bernard O. Koopman, and was later adapted for publication as B. Koopman, Search and Screening: General Principles with Historical Applications, Elmsford, 1980.
68. P. Morse and G. Kimball, 'Methods of operations research', OEG Report 54,1946, available online at http://www.cna.org/documents/1100005400.pdf, accessed 14 January 2006,10. In the published version, op. cit. (1), this statement closes the introduction.
69. Pickering, op. cit. (3);
70. P. Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science, Cambridge, 2002;
71. and P. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America, Cambridge, MA, 1996, posit similar arguments linking advances in computing, mathematical developments such as game theory and cybernetics, and Cold War politics into a unified discourse.
72. Pickering, op. cit. (3), views both as cyborgs that erase the boundaries between military and science or between human and machine. P. Galison, 'The ontology of the enemy: Norbert Wiener and the cybernetic vision', Critical Inquiry (1994), 21, 228-66, groups fire control and OR with game theory as 'Manichean' sciences aimed at confronting beguiling 'others'. Mirowski, op. cit. (56), does not seem to recognize any difference at all between fire-control mathematics and what he terms 'American' OR (see esp. Chapter 4).
73. The best historical resource on fire-control technology is undoubtedly D. Mindell, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics., Baltimore, 2002.
74. Blackett and Morse certainly seemed to hold this view. I intend to deal with the role OR played in their post-war experiences in future work.