by Sam L. Savage
I am thrilled to announce that the Military Operations Research Society, MORS, has established a Community of Practice (CoP) in the discipline of Probability Management to be headed up by long-time supporters, Phil Fahringer of Lockheed Martin and Max Disla of the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA). I also wish to thank MORS members, Connor McLemore and Shaun Doheney whose efforts contributed to establishing the CoP. Learn more about the MORS Probability Management Community of Practice.
The CoP webpage has a Models tab with military operations research examples including the Top Gun ChanceOmeter which I will describe in a future blog.
For now I want to say a few words about the field of Operations Research, and my affinity for it. Operations Research, OR as it is called for short, grew out of the mathematics applied to the unprecendented logistical problems imposed by WWII. I was exposed to the field prenatally in 1944 when my dad was working at the Statistical Research Group run out of Columbia University. This group worked on such problems as whether a fighter should be armed with six 50 calibre guns or eight 30 calibre guns. One of the most famous ideas, today called survivorship bias, came from statistician Abraham Wald. He noted that when assesing battle damage on returning bombers you should not reinforce the places with lots of bullet holes because these were the planes that came back. Instead you should reinforce the places where you never saw a bullet hole!
Operations Research spawned many powerful analytical techniques in use today. The non-military version became known as Management Science, and today both of these have been subsumed under Analytics. There are academic departments of Operations Research at Berkeley, Columbia, Cornell, and Princeton, among others, and the one with which I am most familiar, at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, CA.
ProbabilityManagement.org has greatly benefitted through its contacts with NPS and a number of our volunteers have OR degrees from NPS. To learn more visit our Military Readiness page.
Copyright © 2023 Sam L. Savage