I've long been interested in Analysis of many kinds, and a private passion for history and military. But I graduated from the Cybernetics faculty of the Academy of Economic Studies here in Bucuresti, Romania.
A good part of the curriculum was "Operations Research" which has the classic topics (linear programming, some nonlinear cases; graph theory for optimization; scheduling etc) but almost nothing on conflict or military apps.

Today I met some marketing guys/ladies and was shocked by their wordy empirical jargon, quite un-analytic but definitely cut-throat greedy in attitude. The key element would be the "soft factor" of deducing what makes customers buy, or what would make it in a different hypothetical situation. And after this, the art of wrapping the "consulting report" into as sparkly cloud of glitz, to make the ordering company pay regardless of content usefulness ;-)

Wonder what of the modern State-of-the-Art "Operations Analysis" can be actually *applied* in modern business ? or at least make it less bad for innocent bystanders ? '-)