🚀 go-pugleaf

aerial bombing.
*
*   They were so accurate we stopped putting explosives
*   in the bombs and just aimed for people.

Communications, Command and Control. The above wasn't really the best
example of OR, but I did get to quote my dad again. ;-)

*   "The Future of War - Power, Technology, and American World Dominance in
*   the 21st Century", by George & Meredith Friedman, 1996, ISBN 0-517-70403-X
*   
*   A discipline named operations research had begun to develop prior to World
*   War II that aspired to use quantitative methodologies to develop a science
*   of management. [snip]
*   
*   For the physicists and mathematicians of the Rand Corporation, the
*   intuitions of common sense were utterly insufficient as a guide to
*   management. Mathematical precision was necessary, and operations
*   research promised to supply that precision. [snip]
*   
*   It had not jumped from the management of particular, limited areas of
*   warfare to the structuring of entire campaigns and wars. Operations
*   research had not penetrated to the very marrow of conventional warfare,
*   that is, not until an attempt was made in 1961 to revolutionize the idea
*   of war. This was done by an industrialist named Robert McNamara, who had
*   been president at Ford Motor Company.


Stafford Beer is a British cybernetician, and a 'research philosopher'.

In 1970, a Dr. Salvador Allende became president of Chile.

He was a democratically elected Marxist, with 37% of the vote.

Allende immediately embarked on a massive nationalization of
the banks and major companies/industries in Chile.

In 1971, Stafford Beer began a project for Allende
to put the Chilean economy under cybernetic control.

As far as I know, this is the only documented instance of someone
attempting this; deploying cybernetic controls nationwide.


*   "Brain of the Firm", Stafford Beer, 1986, ISBN 0 471 27687 1
*   
*   All of this involved a massive and continuing exercise in (what I should
*   call, in