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Background
Dr Lindsey’s interest in OR had its origins in the Second World War, and was
derived from his personal experiences with the application of radar to air defence. 1 Many
countries had started investigating electronic approaches to target detection well before
the outbreak of war, but there were practical issues in getting it to be useful for the field. 2
During the Second World War, radar was so secretive that its official title was known as
‘electrical methods of fire control,’ and it was not discussed in public. 3 Although OR was
strongly associated with air defence, it did not take long before many of its techniques
were adopted for other applications in the army, navy and air force. The navy exploited
the benefits of OR more quickly because of its technical flavour, and the fact that it
collected and kept a lot of records, probably due to its isolation at sea. 4 Radar was soon
used for fire control as well as detection of both ships and aircraft. The design and
application of the radar equipment offered great opportunities for OR of a mathematical
as well as experimental nature.
One of the recurring challenges faced by the OR community was that of data
availability. The nature of complex problems involving uncertainty, multiple stakeholders
and conflicting goals frequently required preliminary studies even to get the data for tool
development. In the 1930s and 40s, analysts did not have the luxury of time and had to
make a best effort. Dr Lindsey recalled: “OR was always up against the challenge of
accessing reliable information and records keeping. Even today, there are always
changing players, numbers, rules and methods; what was practical in the 1940s was not
applicable by the 1950s. When analysts had enough time to collect reliable data, we had
to stop and ask ourselves—is it worth going further to obtain perfect information or will
‘good enough’ suffice?” 5 The handicap of continuous evolution of the data that is needed
for effective analysis of military problems irritated Dr Lindsey enough to redirect some of
his research onto the strategy of baseball, a contest for which the rules never change,
and for which there is a fervent collection and widespread distribution of statistics. 6
Canadian Army Journal Vol. 11.1 Spring 2008