The following paper is an electronically scanned version of an article that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post issue of February 23, 1952, nineteen months into the Korean War. The Operations Research Office of The Johns Hopkins University had already been serving as the United States Army's civilian-run contract research center for four years by that time, with a special focus on providing the Army with independent, objective, and scientifically sound operations research studies of national security and defense issues. Together with its successor organization, the Research Analysis Corporation, the organization served in this capacity for a total of 24 years, a time during which the nation went through some of the darkest periods of the cold war. We believe that the story told here has a timeless quality, and its story of the role of civilian advisors in improving military operational effectiveness is especially germane for today's practicing OR analysts. It would probably also be fair to say that the combined contributions of ORO and RAC played a large role in establishing operations research subsequently as a major paradigm for rational decision making throughout both the public and private sectors.
