Blackett's War by Stephen Budiansky ****

Blackett's War by Stephen Budiansky is a World War II history from the perspective of submarine warfare and the evolving discipline of operations research (OR). Patrick Blackett plays a role on the British side, but many others contributed to OR and the fight against the German U-Boats. OR is based on the idea that scientists collecting and analyzing data can make contributions in any and every field. The book contains many examples applied the antisubmarine warfare (ASW), such as convoy size, use of aircraft, and depth charge tactics.

One of the early successes was changing the strategy for depth charges. OR analysis found that following the original strategy, “targets that were at the right depth were almost certainly in the wrong place; targets that were in the right place were definitely at the wrong depth.” OR depended on data analysis, statistics, and probability. Getting OR results accepted faced challenges from politics and tradition. The book includes many cases of clever scientists having their suggestions opposed for reasons of politics.

When I was in college, two decades after WWII, OR was still an important discipline. One of the successes of OR was queueing theory. Whenever you see a single queue for multiple bank tellers or a special queue for “10 or fewer items,” you have OR to thanks. Today OR is assimilated into business administration.

Any engineer or scientist will find humor in examples where tradition was demonstrated to be unfounded and counterproductive when the data was analyzed. For example, when scientists investigate the reported success of shore batteries downing enemy aircraft over the Channel compared to land-based batteries, they discovered no difference beyond the shore batteries inflating their reported kills due to the difficulty of verification over water.

The book also includes a history of code breaking and the question of bombing strategy, civilians or combatants, cities or military installations. On WWII strategy, the author vacillates between the importance of ASW (D-Day would have been impossible until the Battle of the Atlantic was won) and the suspicion that WWII was more lost by the Germans than won by the Allies.  

If you are interested in WWII history or scientists making fun and fools of military bureaucrats, you’ll enjoy this book.

OR is a mid-20^th-century management discipline similar to scientific management at the beginning of the 20^th century.