A veteran science

This dissertation traces the intellectual trajectory of the field of operations research (OR) from its origins in World War II to approximately the year 1960. It explores how OR transformed from an adjunct to military planning practices into a profession encompassing military, theoretical, and practitioner subcultures. It pays particular attention to the influence of the wartime experience of scientists working in OR groups on later manifestations of the field. In particular, it argues that maintaining relevance to actual acts of policymaking both drove OR to adopt a canon of mathematical theory in order to distinguish it from more general consulting professionals, and that many of its institutional innovations were designed specifically to ensure that those trained in theoretical techniques could apply their skills to practical situations. This approach differs from other approaches in that it downplays any notion of operations research as a rationalizing agent in postwar policymaking. Prior explorations of the "expert" cultures in which OR is typically included stress that they reinforced the dominant American military-industrial power structure by creating tools of social control and by justifying policy decisions using the authority inherent in quantitative science. This dissertation argues against this historiographical approach, primarily by arguing against the division between scientific and non-scientific methods of policymaking. Because OR relied so strongly upon its compatibility with extant methods of policymaking, emphasizing the status of OR as a special scientific approach seems fruitless. This point seems especially true given that most OR studies were not expected to settle political controversies, but to make mundane day-to-day policymaking more robust. I offer an alternative analytical framework that eschews divisions between the rational and the intuitive, and replaces them with more appropriate divisions between the rational and the arbitrary. This framework focuses less on knowledge production and application, than on the trading of insights between distinct intellectual communities. The framework yields new information about why OR's proponents made the intellectual choices and built the institutions that they did, and what role OR historically played in military and industrial policymaking, and promises to shed new light on the nature of the policy-oriented sciences.