Planning and the proverbial "Squirrel!"

[Pete]

In all fairness to people who work in the operations research field, they do challenging work and their analyses provide useful points of view for assessing processes. However, the executive summaries of their reports should not be regarded as the revealed truth or as tablets that came down from Mount Sinai, they're merely another way of looking at things.

Operations research is said to have begun when the German army developed its mobilization schedules for deploying units using its railroads prior to the First World War. During World War II in the U.S. the technique was useful for coordinating the delivery of weapons and equipment with personnel accessions and individual training so that units could be activated quickly without lots of "hurry up and wait." That's what I believe MacNamara did during World War II.

However, when operations research is taken outside of organizational and manufacturing processes, such as when it is used for assessing combat operations, it becomes more problematic -- how do you quantify and weight all the different variables? How do you factor in the element of contingency and random events, the "sh*t happens" factor? MacNamara and his Whiz Kids found that out during Vietnam.