The chief proponent of this new line of work was Seymour Deitchman, an emerging member of Secretary of Defense McNamara’s technocratic elite and a longtime nemesis of William Godel’s. Deitchman was convinced it was an engineer’s slide rule, not a soldier’s intuition, that would determine who won or lost battles. More important, he believed that people could be studied and their actions predicted the way engineers measure and track the flight of a ballistic missile.
