Operations Research

The Operational Research Society https://www.theorsociety.com/about-or/history-of-or/

"The history of the centrality of “operations” can be traced to Operational (or Operations) Research (OR) in the U.S. and British military since the 1930s and especially in the war years of the 1940s: quantifiable analysis of military operations for purposes of optimization, something that then developed into the Cold War continuation of “speculative fab- rications of systems analysis”36 such as the RAND corporation in the United States. These are institutional-level “machine learning systems” that aim to formalize, train, and model based on available quantitative data. Learning itself becomes a formalized operation."

From: Jussi Parikka, Operational Images, Introduction, p. 13.

To Read: Combat science: the emergence of Operational Research in World War II https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160932705001134