The birth of the Soviet missile defense system. From the Battle of Britain to cybernetics
M-5
The best engineering and design forces of INEUM were involved in the development of the M-5: V.V.Belinsky, Yu.A. Lavrenyuk, Yu.N. Glukhov and others, work on the design and release of design documentation was launched.
Looking ahead, let's say that the pilot copy of the M-5 was built, perfectly accepted and, naturally, did not go into production, Brook was removed from the post of director of INEUM, and Kartsev was forced to leave for the Ministry of Radio Industry, where he was finally caught up.
History sounds suspiciously familiar, doesn't it?
Why was Brook flooded?
In order to move forward and understand the further adventures of Kartsev and the intricacies of intrigues around his machines, we need to retreat again, otherwise the motives of many participants will become incomprehensible.
The fact is that Brook's story is closely related to the fall of two more giants of Russian computer thought - Kitov and Academician Glushkov, whom we have already mentioned.
And here we are stepping on very shaky ground to understand one of the greatest myths of the Soviet Union - the myth of cybernetics.
Kitov, Berg and Glushkov were punished precisely for their cybernetic aspirations, more precisely, for their desire to build and research a system for optimal control of a planned economy using a computer network.
What is the myth here?
After all, everyone knows that in the USSR the persecution of cybernetics led to a huge lag in the field of computers, did Kitov and Berg come under pressure?
In fact, everything is much more complicated and we are even talking about a double myth, which we will try to deal with.
For this, however, we need to understand what the origins of cybernetics are in the West, what it is in general, how it developed and how, and most importantly, with what result it came to the USSR.
What do we know about cybernetics?
In the words of a classic - nothing, and even then not all. Everyone knows the persecutions against it, which seemed to almost ruin the Soviet computer science, someone heard about some biological, technical and other cybernetics, someone will remember Norbert Wiener, someone will say that this is an outdated name for computer science.
The paradox is that a huge number of books on cybernetics were published in the USSR, there were entire faculties of this science (and some, like the famous faculty of computational mathematics and cybernetics of Moscow State University, still exist, although the funny thing is that they never studied classical cybernetics at all!), but at the same time, what it is - no one really knows. Something close to a computer and very important, I guess?
Cybernetics in the modern sense of the word was born in the United States, so it would be appropriate to apply the classical Western definition of this science.
This is a transdisciplinary approach that studies the general features of regulated systems, their structure, capabilities and limitations. In fact, the non-philosophical content of this concept is contained in the discipline "Theory of automatic control". The philosophical part considers much more abstract issues, trying to translate the dialogue towards the universal laws of the development of society, economics and even biology (note that here its content is extremely small and does not bring anything new, in comparison with the traditional methods of these sciences, unless that, apart from the very idea that any self-regulating system is conceptually similar).
To understand what happened to Brook and Kartsev, why the M-5 project was closed and why the already mentioned academician Glushkov could not implement anything of our plans, we need to go back a little and see how the sciences of management developed in 1930-1950 years.
Naturally, World War II was the turning point. This conflict was as unique in its own way as the First World War. That war was the last, in fact, a classic total war - despite the fact that various technical innovations appeared during it, it is only partially appropriate to call it a war of technologies.
Poison gases, the first Tanks and airplanes, naturally, had a local impact on the course of the conflict, but in a global perspective, the outcome of military operations, as in the time of Napoleon, was decided by huge masses of infantry and artillery.
World War II in this capacity was radically different, especially for the Allies. There were no more millions of soldiers kneading mud and rotting for years in trenches from sea to sea behind ten rows of barbed wire on the western front. The Second World War was, first of all, a war of intellects and machines. Radars, bombsights, guided weapon and the crown of all is the atomic bomb. The war moved on to a fundamentally different plane, it was a competition between scientific and engineering teams, developing fundamentally new mathematical and technical tools for their use in battle.
A breakthrough in understanding the realities of the new strategy and tactics was made, first of all, by the Anglo-Saxons, and there is a reason for that.
England and the United States (although they conducted a brutal land campaign in the First World War), in fact, were naval powers, their favorable location simply forced them to rely on the fleet (and later on Aviation), instead of meat infantry battles (of course, there were battles, but they did not bring any result - according to the results of the First World War, it turned out that filling trenches with corpses did not give anything for victory, and the population at best begins to rebel, at worst - just ends).
As a result, both countries in the interbellum very quickly realized (in contrast to the continental powers) how and how the next global war would be waged and, most importantly, won.
In addition, before the advent of aviation, the pinnacle of the military high-tech, rocket science of the 1920s – 1930s was the navy. Some of the technical solutions used in the Iowa series battleships amaze even now.
The command of the Navy was forced to issue instructions reminding sailors that the external impression was wrong. The thick-sided monster surpasses any modern ship in maneuverability. Back in World War II, it was noted that the Iowa's tactical circulation diameter (740 meters) was less than that of the Fletcher-class destroyer ... In an effort to extend the life of the mechanisms, the Yankees never brought the power plant to full power. The value achieved in practice (221 thousand hp - a solid result, 1,5 times more than that of the nuclear-powered Orlan) corresponded to 87% of the installed power of the battleship's power plant. In afterburner mode and in the presence of a quarter of a million horses "on the propeller shafts," Iowa ", according to calculations, could develop up to 35 knots.
... The totality of combat qualities (unattainable for modern ships, combat stability, missile and artillery weapons and the status of large ships of the 1st rank) made Iowa worthy of modernization and extension of its service life. At the same time, the services are not in the role of a block ship or a floating barracks. The brightest stars of the first magnitude, the battleships were chosen to be the flagships of the battle groups. 50 years in the forefront - what ship in history has shown such a result?
... Everyone understood that in the event of the outbreak of hostilities, significant resources would have to be diverted to counter such a ship.
... The totality of combat qualities (unattainable for modern ships, combat stability, missile and artillery weapons and the status of large ships of the 1st rank) made Iowa worthy of modernization and extension of its service life. At the same time, the services are not in the role of a block ship or a floating barracks. The brightest stars of the first magnitude, the battleships were chosen to be the flagships of the battle groups. 50 years in the forefront - what ship in history has shown such a result?
... Everyone understood that in the event of the outbreak of hostilities, significant resources would have to be diverted to counter such a ship.
And the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 and the London Naval Treaty of 1930, in general, significantly limited the construction of ships of a comparable class, just as they now limit nuclear weapons - this alone makes it clear how serious a force at that time, and not without reason, was considered fleets.
Also, the war at sea required flexible thinking and fundamentally different tactics and strategies at all levels, which, combined with the enormous complexity and cost of ships, turned the fleet into an excellent forge of personnel, fully aware of the importance of the development of military sciences.
As a result, the lessons of the First World War were not learned by the continental powers: in terms of strategy, tactics and geopolitics, in their understanding of the world, they did not go far from the era of the Napoleonic wars. Neither the German nor the Russian empires even came close to development fleet at the level of Great Britain with its four hundred years of experience in the war at sea.
Practically tactical nuclear weapons by the standards of the 1930s - the battleship Iowa in all its glory (photo https://en.wikipedia.org).
In fairness, they are not to blame for this - life on the island and the geopolitics of the island, of course, are radically different from the continent. The British and Americans tried in 1914-1918 the classic war of the old school ("Die erste Kolonne marschiert ... die zweite Kolonne marschiert"), and they absolutely did not like it.
As a result, World War II, in fact, consisted of two parallel wars, completely different from each other. The Anglo-Saxons enthusiastically crushed the enemy with the help of radars, bombers, aircraft carriers and submarines, and on the continent the unfortunate USSR portrayed Verdun at Stalingrad and Rzhev.
In England, already in 1915, Lord Tiverton wrote an article "Lord Tiverton's System of Bombing", introducing the concept of strategic bombing. In 1917, the leading book Aircraft in Warfare: The Dawn of the Fourth Arm was published in England, written by the visionary and industrialist Frederick William Lanchester, a pioneer of the British automotive industry, four years ahead of the famous Il Dominio dell'Aria. Probabili Aspetti della Guerra Futura ”by the Italian Giulio Douhet.
A year earlier, Lanchester had developed the world's first system of differential equations for studying the relationship of forces in different types of combat (the so-called linear and quadratic laws of Lanchester, we have similar relationships were derived in 1915 by M.P. Osipov, describing the process of the battle between two squadrons, but due to the revolution and the general rather slow comprehension of the results of the First World War, his contribution was lost for many years).
It is no exaggeration to say that World War II became a war of aircraft - it was from the forties that aviation began to play a major role in conflicts of any level.
Practically all traditional methods and instruments of war - from battleships to fortified areas - were powerless against massive raids, technological superiority in aviation made it possible to punish the enemy, however, whenever and wherever, on our own terms.
In view of the above, the Americans and the British were most active in the development and use of aviation, and it is not surprising that it was they who invested a colossal amount of intellectual resources in the engineering and mathematical support of new methods of war. This is how the theory of automatic control, the mathematical theory of operations and the mathematical theory of games were discovered.
And from all this intertwined tangle in 1948, classical cybernetics emerged.
The idea of a war in the air was realized on the Western Front almost instantly, and what a coup took place in strategic ideas after World War II! Above is the original map showing cities within range of RAF bombers in 1915-1918. Red stars mark cities that were bombed by the Entente even before the Gotha raids on London. The first edition of Aircraft in Warfare: The Dawn of the Fourth Arm was published during the First World War. Below - books about theories that were never adopted by the continental armies (photo https://vfpuk.org/, http://www.lanchesterinteractive.org, www.amazon.com)
The hyperintensive development of technology in interbellum has led to the fact that, for the first time in history, man has turned out to be the most useless, limited and unreliable element of a combat vehicle, and most of all this has affected aviation.
The problem was altitude and speed, which the human senses were not designed for. It was easy to pilot the plane without any problems even for a non-augmented person; to fight at more or less the same altitude with an enemy of more or less the same speed is difficult, but also possible. Problems arose when it was necessary to hit targets from a long distance and with very different speeds, arising in the sight for a split second - in bombing (especially from high altitudes on targets less than a city) and in general attacking ground targets and in the opposite task - air defense in a wide sense of the word, from the protection of slow bombers from high-speed maneuverable fighters to the defense of cities and ships from air raids.
So, by about 1935, the destructive potential of aviation became apparent to the Anglo-Saxons, but there was a huge problem in its use.
Traditional methods of aiming an aircraft at a target (or weapons at an aircraft), based on weak human vision and hearing, as well as weak human computational abilities, could not work in the conditions of new heights and speeds. As a result, a range of outstanding technical and mathematical innovations were required to make massive airstrikes a truly formidable weapon, as well as to defend against these weapons.
Radar
First came the radar.
The history of this device is well covered and there is no need to repeat it, we only note that in the 1930s all technically developed countries experimented with radar technologies - Germany, France, USSR, USA, Italy, Japan, Netherlands and Great Britain, but only the Anglo-Saxons by the beginning The wars were able to deploy a full-fledged network of radars covering the coast, fully realizing that the coming war would be, first of all, an aviation war.
We are interested not so much in the radar technology itself (fortunately, it was developed almost simultaneously and almost independently by all participants in the future war), as in two amazing innovations, which only the British thought of in the 1930s, and the radar itself was absolutely useless without them.
We are talking about the first full-fledged air defense system and its mathematical support - the theory of operations. Traditionally, these topics are covered in domestic sources much worse, due to the fact that neither the USSR nor Germany, despite the presence of similar prototypes of radars even before the war, had not thought of a competent strategy for their use by the beginning of the conflict.
As a result, unlike the British, who were well prepared back in the thirties and successfully won their battle for the island, we and the Germans had to learn everything on the fly, the result is well known.
As soon as Hitler came to power, in March 1934 he immediately denounced the disarmament clause, and the British immediately drew the right conclusions from this.
In the spring of the same year, British physicist and engineer Albert Percival Rowe, assistant for armaments to Harry Egerton Wimperis, aviator engineer and director of scientific research at the Ministry of Aviation, prepared a report to the chief on the need to deploy a full-fledged air defense system. The proposal was immediately approved by the Minister of Aviation, Lord Londonderry (Charles Vane-Tempest-Stewart, 7th Marquess of Londonderry). The Minister commissioned a distinguished scientist, Rector of the Imperial College of Science and Technology, Henry Tizard (Sir Henry Thomas Tizard) to create and chair the "Committee for the Scientific Study of Air Defense."
Further history is well known - member of the Committee, Superintendent of the Radio Department of the National Physics Laboratory, Robert Watson-Watt, proposed the concept of a radar, and in 1936, the Air Force created an experimental radar station Boudsey and allocated a separate unit - the RAF Fighter Command with a research center at Biggin Hill in Kent to study how a radar chain could be used to intercept aircraft.
Thus began the deployment of the world's first full-fledged radio surveillance system - Chain Home, a network of radar stations on the east coast, by 1938 the number of radars reached 20, and in 1939 they were supplemented by the Chain Home Low system, capable of detecting low-flying aircraft.
As a result, the first problem was solved - augmentation of human senses to detect what people themselves are not able to detect.
The second problem was the creation of a fire control complex - even if the radars could show the target, this was not enough, it was necessary to appropriately aim at it, and the reaction speed and the computational abilities of a person here were also clearly insufficient.
The British and the Americans initially took fundamentally different paths here, which, in turn, led to two major theoretical breakthroughs.
The world's first air defense system
When the Chain Home system was deployed, there were no automatic ballistic computers yet, and the British were in no hurry to create them, realizing the complexity of the problem. Nevertheless, in parallel with the development of the radar network, they were the first in the world to build a full-fledged air defense system, albeit without computers.
How did they do it?
They used a small loophole in the unforgiving difficulty of targeting a fast moving target - it's easy to do if your speed matches the attacker, so they just sent interceptors!
By the end of 1937, the British had developed a complex of radar detection of an attacking aircraft and a radar tracking and guidance system for coastal defense air force fighters.
Naturally, such interaction was extremely difficult - like a clock, a mechanism consisting of the most vulnerable and unreliable links - people, had to work out, but as a result, the British were able to emulate a kind of human computer in their network.
At first, observation radar operators had to detect targets, determine their direction and height and give an alarm, then it was necessary, having predicted the enemy's crossing point, determine the nearest airbase in the range and send a link of fighters to the interception point, not forgetting about the enemy's radar illumination.
Controlled by Air Chief Marshal, Chief of RAF Fighter Command Hugh Caswall of Tremenhere, 1st Baron Dowding, the world's first integrated air defense system, known as the Dowding System, performed outstandingly in the Battle of Britain. Right-to-left, top-to-bottom: Dowding control chain for the air defense sector, and radars are not shown here, which were still officially classified at the time of publication. Operations hall No. 11 Group, known as the "Bunker of the Battle of Britain". There are numerous graphs on the drawing table. The sector clocks on the wall behind the map have colored 5-minute areas that correspond to the colors on the graphs. Above the clock is the main board, which displays the status of various airfields and their squadrons. One of the more advanced control points was established for No. 10 Group, based at RAF Box in Wiltshire. The ROC officer determines the coordinates of the enemy aircraft group, visually detected. A chain of radars on the coast. Transmitter Type T3026, later famous for its transistor computers by MetroVick (photo https://en.wikipedia.org).
Naturally, any computer, even a distributed one consisting of people and machines, needs a clear mathematical algorithm to work, but no one in the world has ever faced such a logistic optimization problem.
The British realized the urgency of the problem very quickly, but fortunately, in their historical background there were already examples of successful solutions to similar problems.
The pioneer of the study of optimization algorithms is the famous mathematician, mechanic and computer scientist Charles Babbage, who back in 1840 solved the problem of optimal organization of British mail, which led to the appearance of the famous Penny Post system, he also developed the optimal one in terms of load and throughput, Great Western Railway.
Naturally, research that can be attributed to the mathematical theory of operations was carried out not only in Britain, it is widely known, for example, the fundamental work of the Danish mathematician and engineer Agner Krarup Erlang "The Theory of Probabilities and Telephone Conversations", published in 1909 and laid the foundation for the theory of queuing.
In general, in theory, the British were well prepared to grasp the problem and solve it.
The Biggin Hill group, working closely with Boudsey scientists, conducted a series of experiments in 1936-1938 aimed at integrating early warning radar, guidance and control systems, fighter command and anti-aircraft artillery command.
Team lead analyst and mathematician Patrick Maynard Stuart (Baron Blackett), later - Nobel laureate in physics, noted:
The Biggin Hill experiments were the first step towards the creation of full-fledged Operations Research Sections (OCRs), which were eventually attached to the command of all three services.
The official publication of the UK Air Ministry - "OR in RAF", later noted that
the Biggin Hill experiments are historically important for two reasons.
Firstly, they led to the development of the concept that won the Battle of Britain and, secondly, they marked the beginning of an era of close cooperation between officers and scientists in the study of operational tasks, which achieved tremendous success during the war and has survived with us to this day. ...
Firstly, they led to the development of the concept that won the Battle of Britain and, secondly, they marked the beginning of an era of close cooperation between officers and scientists in the study of operational tasks, which achieved tremendous success during the war and has survived with us to this day. ...
For the first time in history, victory in a war depended as much on the available material resources as on the work of mathematicians and analysts.
From 1937 until the outbreak of the war, scientists from Boudsey and Biggin Hill took part in the annual air defense exercises conducted by the RAF Fighter Command. Rowe took over as Superintendent of Research Station Boudsey, pioneered the term Operations Research to describe their mission, and formed two teams.
A team led by Eric Charles Williams studied data processing problems from the radar chain, while a second team from G. Roberts studied the operational halls of fighter groups and the work of controllers.
In 1939, all groups were merged into the Stanmore Research Section, later the Operational Research Section (ORS) of the Fighter Command. By the summer of 1941, the Air Ministry recognized the value of the work being done in the RAF Fighter Command, and it was decided to create similar sections in all RAF units at home and abroad, as well as in the army, the Admiralty and the Ministry of Defense.
Most of the analysts and managers of British operations research programs were scientists (mostly physicists, but there were even a few biologists and geologists), engineers or mathematicians, for the first time in world practice. By the end of the war, ORS had grown to 1000 employees.
In the process, the British realized that the recruits at ORS were required not so much formal scientific training as a flexible mind, tuned to question assumptions, develop and test hypotheses, collect and analyze a large variety of data.
Dr. Cecil Gordon, a geneticist who developed flight plans for the RAF Coastal Command, wrote:
The complete disregard for the boundaries between disciplines, the willingness to explore any problems ... was a refreshing contrast to the rigid specialization that had developed in all other branches of science. ORS has brought back the atmosphere of the founding period of the Royal Society.
Like Gordon, many of the British and Commonwealth scientists who worked at ORS were outstanding people.
Coastal Command alone boasted four Fellows of the Royal Society besides the aforementioned Patrick Blackett: John C. Kendrew, Evan J. Williams, Conrad H. Waddington, and John M. Robertson). It was also decorated by a member of the Australian National Academy James M. Rendel. In the future, two of them - Blackett and Robertson, became Nobel laureates.
In general, the British, like the Americans in the case of the transistor, very wisely used the principle - bring together a bunch of outstanding people, give them money, set a problem and leave them alone, in the end they will come to you with the best possible solution in the shortest possible time.
Alas, this principle completely contradicted the idea of the party-socialist science of the USSR.
A diagram of the operation of the detection and countermeasures system in the Battle of Britain (photo https://www.battleofbritain1940.net)
Much of the credit for defining operations research and codifying its scientific rules, as well as defining the organizational and administrative structure of the British ORS, goes to the distinguished scientist Patrick Blackett.
In December 1941, shortly before leaving the RAF Coastal Command for the Admiralty, Blackett prepared a document entitled Scientists at the Operational Level, which outlined his vision for the use of science in military units. This document is considered by many to be the cornerstone of modern operations research, and Blackett is considered one of the fathers of ORS.
In fact, this wonderful man really was worth an extra army with his intellect. While working at the Royal Aviation Institute (RAE), he assembled a team ironically called the Blackett Circle, which developed methods to optimize anti-aircraft fire so that the number of rounds per shot down with their help decreased from 20 in 000 to 1940 in 4.
Thereafter, Blackett moved from the RAE to the Navy, first with the RAF Coastal Command and then with the Admiralty with some of the most distinguished men in British science.
Blackett mathematically optimized the size of the Allied convoys and the ratio of transports to escort vessels, which increased the carrying capacity of the convoys while increasing their safety; researched color perception to develop improved camouflage for anti-submarine aircraft, which led to an increase in the effectiveness of attacks on submarines by 30%, showed that maximum damage to a submarine in most cases can be inflicted by changing the depth sensors in bombs to trigger at 25 feet, instead of 100, as they were exhibited initially.
Before this change, on average, 1% of boats were sunk during the first attack, after that - about 7%.
Survivor's mistake
His most famous research was the discovery of a cognitive bias, later called "survivor's error."
Analyzing the planes returning from the bombing of German cities and looking like a sieve, the command asked the designers to add armor to the places with the maximum number of bullet holes. Blackett reasonably objected that it was necessary to add armor, on the contrary, to those places where there were no bullet holes, because this means that if they had been hit there, the plane would not have returned.
In the summer of 1940, inspired by Chain Home, the Germans tried to repeat the British success in the development of air defense, erecting the so-called "Kammhuber Line" from radars, searchlights, anti-aircraft guns and groups of fighters, however, its effectiveness was not very high.
Blackett analyzed statistically the ratio of the losses of fighters and bombers during the breakthrough of this line, as a result, the ORS department developed recommendations for the optimal density of the aircraft formation, minimizing the threat of German interceptors.
On land, the Operations Research Units of the Army Operational Research Group (AORG) of the Department of Supply were landed in Normandy in 1944 and followed the British forces in their advance through Europe. They analyzed, among other things, the effectiveness of artillery, aerial bombardment and anti-tank fire. As a matter of fact, they analyzed in general allthat caught their eye.
Among the scientific achievements of the theory of operations - a doubling of the percentage of hitting the target during the bombing of Japan due to the fact that the flight hours in the training were allocated not 4% of the time, as before, but 10%, proof that three is the optimal number for a group of submarines in the "wolf flock "; revealing the striking fact that glossy enamel paint is a more effective camouflage for night fighters than the traditional dull paint, and at the same time increases flight speed and reduces fuel consumption.
Naturally, the Americans did not stand aside and adopted the most valuable experience of ORS already in 1941-1942, and William Shockley from Bell Labs, the future father of the transistor, was appointed the head of the first research group under the command of anti-submarine forces!
Magneticist Ellis A. Johnson's pioneering work on mine warfare tactics for the Naval Ordnance Laboratory has been used with great efficiency in the Pacific. By the end of the war, the Operations Research Group under the command of the US Navy already numbered more than 70 scientists, and the Air Force command organized over two dozen operations research departments both in rear units and in armies fighting overseas.
The Canadian Air Force also showed interest in organizing and conducting operational research and, starting in 1942, formed three corresponding divisions.
The Axis military command did not use operations research methods.
There are many such examples, one thing is clear - by 1946-1947 the new mathematical discipline was fully formed and tested in practice, bearing colossal results.
Theory of operations
Modern theory of operations consists of deterministic models (linear and nonlinear programming, graph theory, flows in networks, optimal control theory) and stochastic models (stochastic processes, queuing theory, utility theory, game theory, simulation and dynamic programming) and is widely used in the study of strategy and tactics, planning the operation of urban systems, industries, in economic research and in planning technological processes.
After the war, these areas expanded significantly, especially in the United States, where operations research flourished.
The Naval Operations Research Group has evolved into an extended operations evaluation team under contract with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The United States Air Force also expanded its divisions, and in 1948, the United States Army Command, under contract with Johns Hopkins University, formed the Operations Research Directorate.
In 1949, the Joint Chiefs of Staff created a weapons systems assessment group, the first technical director of which was the famous physics professor Philip Morse (Philip McCord Morse, one of the main initiators of the creation of ORSA - the American Society for Operations Research in 1952 and the president of the American Physical Society), also known as the author of the first textbook on the topic, Methods of Operations Research, published by MIT in 1951. In fact, the book was published back in 1946, but it was secret, however, the neck was removed from it by 1948.
In the same year, the Air Force created a research division under the Douglas Aircraft Corporation, which later turned into the famous idea factory - the RAND Corporation. It was founded by Air Force General Henry N. Arnold, aircraft designer Donald Wills Douglas, and the great and terrible General Curtis Emerson LeMay, the Chief of Strategic Command of the United States Air Force.
The Beast LeMay, as the Japanese called him, the man who bombed Japan first in the Stone Age, and then North Korea (and almost bombed Vietnam, but he was not allowed to roam there), the author of the term itself, a furious anti-communist, the creator of the Operation Dropshot plan ", Where it was proposed to deliver the entire stock of atomic bombs in one massive attack, dropping 133 atomic bombs on 70 Soviet cities within 30 days, a genius strategist who is perfectly versed in the methods of warfare (about Lemey, as well as about the American strategic school in general. the world and early years of the Cold War in Russian there is practically no information, with the exception of small notes).
"If we lost the war, I would be called a war criminal." General Curtis Emerson LeMay, one of the greatest theorists of modern warfare (photo http://josephcrusejohnson.blogspot.com).
The stakeholder level speaks best of the value Americans placed on mathematical operations research and the resources they were willing to commit.
Likewise, although not as intensively, the front of operations research in Canada and Great Britain expanded.
At the same time, the Americans did not disdain technocrats in power, for example, the post of chief of the control and financial department of the US Department of Defense from 1961 to 1965 was occupied by Charles J. Hitch, president of the American Society for Operations Research, and in 1973, the head of the strategic research department RAND Corp James Rodney Schlesinger has been named US Secretary of Defense.
It is striking that in the USSR, with a planned economy, there were not even such think tanks close, top positions were occupied by locksmiths, and technocrats in the person of Kitov, Berg and Glushkov were crushed by all possible forces, and we will just talk about this further.
At the same time, we note that, again, in countries with market economies, in contrast to the USSR, the non-military application of the theory of operations also developed.
For example, in England, back in 1948, an informal Operations Research Club was organized, in 1953 it was transformed into the Operational Research Society (ORS), since 1950 the journal Operational Research Quarterly has been published.
Club members discussed the use of operations research methods in the service sector and in many areas of the economy, including agriculture, cotton, footwear, coal, metallurgy, energy, livestock, construction and transport.
The Operations Research Committee was established by the US National Research Council in 1949. Horace Clifford Levinson, a relativity mathematician and astronomer who, as early as the 1920s, discovered some aspects of the study of operations as applied to marketing, became chairman. In parallel with teaching and research activities, he fulfilled orders of the famous retail chain Bamberger & Company, for the first time in the world studying the buying habits of customers and their reactions to advertising, the impact of accelerated delivery on the acceptance or rejection of customers from parcels sent by mail.
Since 1957, the Societies began to hold international conferences, by 1960, a steady stream of books had formed on game theory, dynamic and linear programming, graph theory, and other aspects of operations research. By 1973, there were at least 53 university programs in these specialties in the United States.
So, we have unearthed the first of the roots of classical cybernetics.
As we can see, by 1948-1950, American and English society was completely imbued with new ideas of management and interaction, and also developed an advanced mathematical apparatus for applying these ideas and had already tested it in practice during the Second World War.
The second root from which cybernetics grew was the very theory of automatic control.
A little-known in our country, but widely revered in the West, a true visionary and genius, a man who did so much for the organization of science in the United States and possessed such authority that he was jokingly called the Russian word Tsar - yes, Tsar!
We are talking about Vannevar Bush.
As we mentioned at the beginning, modern warfare posed a major problem for people - a person was no longer able to effectively manage all new combat vehicles.
With the advent of radars, the problem of target detection received a fundamental resolution, but the problem of attacking this target was only partially solved. Anti-aircraft fire on teams from radar posts was extremely ineffective (remember the monstrous 20 shells per plane, even reduced by 000 times using optimization methods - this is a colossal waste of resources in terms of inefficiency), raising interceptor aircraft was a solution, but, as the experience of that in Germany, this decision was far from a panacea.
In addition, the interceptors helped if the case took place over land.
And the Americans had a problem much, much more serious - for them 90% of the war took place in the colossal expanses of the Pacific Ocean, warships were the main striking force, and protecting them from air attacks was an insurmountable task.
From the sad history of the Yamato and Musashi, everyone remembers how the collision of even the most powerful battleship, capable of destroying an entire battle group of cruisers and destroyers with 20-30 aircraft, ended.
As a result, the Yankees, of course, very quickly realized that the century of battleships had passed, in the war at sea the future belongs to the same as in the war on land - by air strikes, but this did not save them from the problem of protecting the ships already built. Willy-nilly, they had to do something that the British did not fool around with in the thirties - the theory of ballistic computers capable of aiming at attacking aircraft in real time by radar commands without human intervention.
Vannevar Bush played a decisive role in the development of this class of devices (and much, much more).
The very idea of devices of this kind was not new and also appeared in the navy.
On the ship, the team faced a problem of a nature similar to aircraft - to get from a moving gun platform into a similarly moving and actively maneuvering gun platform.
The standard methods of work of ground artillery, worked out by four years of the meat grinder of the First World War: they unhurriedly set up the gun, took out the shooting tables and slide rule, fumbled and, after zeroing in and adjusting, hit the fixed line of trenches - they did not fit here. In the case of the ship, all these operations had to happen extremely quickly, the Yankees had to solve the problem by creating the world's first classical cybernetic system using computers - a full-fledged feedback mechanism of unprecedented complexity. Capable of instantly detecting targets, predicting their trajectories, aiming at them, opening fire (and not with simple shells, but as they would say in the 1950s - cybernetic, with a radio fuse) and adjust it as the enemy tries to dodge the shelling.
The Americans brilliantly solved the problem, as a result, their air defense of ships deservedly became the best in the world, leaving the other parties to the conflict far behind.
About this, about Norbert Wiener, about how cybernetics penetrated into the Soviet Union, and what this led to, we will talk further.
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