The Soviets actually pioneered a lot of this stuff in the 1920s and 1930s as part of their planned economy, but of course they didn’t have computers back then.

The Soviets actually pioneered a lot of this stuff in the 1920s and 1930s as part of their planned economy, but of course they didn’t have computers back then. They’d even tried to solve for the minimum-cost diet problem but had to reject it because it ended up some unpalatable combo of flour and vitamin-fortified margarine. Leonid Kantorovich had proposed a solution in 1939, but Dantzig’s simplex algorithm was the first formally proven and practical method. Logistics has always been the US Armed Forces’ forte, and this, along with other Operations Research breakthroughs from RAND Corporation is how the US built its edge.