  An often-exploited feature of the operator product expansion (OPE) is that it
incorporates a splitting of ultraviolet and infrared physics. In this paper we
use this feature of the OPE to perform simple, approximate computations of soft
masses in gauge-mediated supersymmetry breaking. The approximation amounts to
truncating the OPEs for hidden-sector current-current operator products. Our
method yields visible-sector superpartner spectra in terms of vacuum
expectation values of a few hidden-sector IR elementary fields. We manage to
obtain reasonable approximations to soft masses, even when the hidden sector is
strongly coupled. We demonstrate our techniques in several examples, including
a new framework where supersymmetry-breaking arises both from a hidden sector
and dynamically.
