I was reading up on Operations Research in the early 1950s, a time when human decision-making and automated/scientific decision-making were both seen as suspect in different ways. O.R. here was being positioned as an assemblage of the good parts of both, though I think that remains an open question…
From “Our Greatest Secret Weapon” a piece about O.R. by Lieut. Col. David Parker (Aug. 5, 1951) in This Week. I originally came across the citation in Rational Action: The Sciences of Policy in Britain and America 1940-1960 by William Thomas, summarized here