Logistics: The Key to Victory

Jeremy Black

• Publisher: Pen and Sword Military
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781399006026
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Logistics is an essential aspect of warfare and this is an original and much-needed contribution. All commanders know that an army (or navy) cannot operate without supplies yet most aspects of war studies emphasise strategy, tactics, weaponry and command. This book fills a gap in war studies with logistics as a huge subject at the centre of all conflict, globally and historically. The focus is on key conflicts, developments and concepts, illustrating the vital role of logistics with technologies changing but underlying issues remaining constant. Here is a world history of logistics - a veritable compendium - but within a detailed and comprehensive but concise text. Factors affecting logistics include, for example, climate, geography, food supplies, welfare of troops, payment, transport, communications, terrain and distance, but also government policy, stability and financial conditions. All are considered, including theoretical and practical factors of supply, from classical, ancient, early and medieval times, to modern eras of industrial warfare, especially with oil and steam, and scientific and technical advances - even cyber warfare and 'smart' weapons.

Chapter 1

To the Fall of Constantinople, 1453

Far from being a backward and inconsequential prelude, most of world history is included in an introductory chapter that closes with Sultan Mehmed II’s capture in 1453 of Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. Shaping such a period risks providing a misleading account through inclusion, omission or both. This problem is accentuated because logistics involves a range of characteristics and interacts with social patterns and developments, political systems and goals, and ethical norms. It is all-too-easy to focus on the technology, as in from ‘human porter to jet transport’, and to underplay the extent to which, although both significant and one of the causal factors in change, the potential of the technology and techniques of supply also owe much to social, political and ethical factors. In short, logistics is an aspect of the culture(s) of war.

The basic context of logistics was that of the immediate locality and, for much of human history, the hunting of animals and raiding of other human groups were the prime means of violence, a situation that in some contexts has persisted to the present.1 The British explorer John Speke, in his Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (1863), recorded the absence in parts of sub-Saharan Africa of any sharp distinction between raiding and hunting, which was partly due to the fact that non-tribal members were not viewed as full persons.

Hunter-gatherer societies would have taken food with them in such activities, but the situation changed with the development of agriculture and the related increase in population, permanent settlements, and the processing and storage of food. Linked to this came the transition from a warrior society to a soldier one, and this entailed a greater scale of activity and had implications for logistical requirements.2 In turn, the rhythm of campaigning owed much to the harvest, with soldiers in Japan, for example, keen to return home in order to plant and harvest rice, while, supervising their agricultural lands, the officers wished to oversee the process. At the same time, rice was also purchased. There was a similar annual pattern to campaigning in other areas, as in India, where campaigning followed the autumn harvest. This was also when the roads dried out and river levels fell, after the end of the monsoon rains, while temperatures became more bearable. In turn, the fighting season ended before the harvesting of the winter crops and sowing the summer ones.3 In Ethiopia, campaigning was after the harvest: from September to January. In southern England, in the late summer of 1066, part of King Harold’s army, then preparing to resist invasion by Duke William of Normandy, had to disband for the harvest. These were instances of a key element in the interrelationship of the logistics of war with that of agriculture, one seen with food and animal availability and with recruitment patterns, and in a focus on younger and unmarried men.

In the shape of granaries, food storage was the most significant logistical development in human history, for the movement of supplies is necessarily secondary to their accumulation, preservation, and retention. Granaries were used by the Assyrian Empire during its campaigns in Mesopotamia in the ninth and eighth centuries BCE.

In turn, the counter-logistics of the devastation of crops and destruction of food stores was widely used in Antiquity, for example by Athens against Sparta during the Peloponnesian War, and by Alexander the Great against the Triballians.4 The other key area of development was ‘value storage’ in the form of coinage, as it obviated some of the need for both storage and movement of supplies by a centralised bureaucracy, and substituted, instead, the more organic capabilities of networks. Coinage, like bureaucracy, were aspects of governance that relied on state formation, and these were key interacting developments for logistics, ones that occurred at different periods. Coinage made the hire of mercenary soldiers and the purchase of supplies far easier.

As with coins, another sphere of material change was wheeled transport which provided greater opportunities for logistical support, enabling armies, such as those of Classical Greece, to move food on carts, judging by the comments of Herodotus on the battle of Plataea (479 BCE). Animals such as sheep, food on the hoof, would also accompany the force. As much as possible was seized in situ (on the spot) which explains why the Greeks (and others) tended to fight at harvest time.

Maritime operations were more complex and could entail the use of merchants in order to hire, equip and supply ships. The value of maritime transport was seen by Alexander the Great’s greatest logistical disaster – the march across the Gedrosian Desert after he failed to link up with his fleet and, conversely, with the importance of ships on the Nile to Egyptian logistics5 as well as with William the Conqueror’s invasion of Scotland in 1072 which was supplied by a fleet sailing up the coast with the army.

On land and at sea, monetarisation was part of the logistical process, as it provided a way to commodify and move resources, not least for the benefit of armed forces. Thus, in the Achaemenid Persian empire (550–330 BCE), land was granted in return for military service, the land graded as horse-land, bow-land and chariot-land according to what had to be provided, with the information recorded in a census maintained by army scribes. When personal service was not required, a tax had to be paid in silver, which gave the government the ability to move resources more easily, the money being used in part to buy mercenaries.

The sophistication of that empire did not prevent its overthrow by Alexander the Great whose army was reliant on raising supplies from the areas it invaded as a key aspect of the process and role of war in the redistribution of goods from food to people (as slaves) and other forms of loot. His well-planned logistical system depended on able subordinates.6

The Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage (264–41, 218–01, 149–46 BCE) saw a major deployment of forces by the two combatants over the western and central Mediterranean. In the first war, the rival powers supported troops in Sicily from Italy and Africa, while in 256–55 BCE, the Romans established an army in Africa, although, after initial success, it was defeated. In the second war, the Carthaginians deployed an army under Hannibal to Italy where local allies were crucial for logistics and manpower, as was the related policy of despoiling the farmlands of Rome’s allies. In turn, ‘Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus,’ the ‘Delayer,’ made it difficult for Hannibal to obtain supplies in Italy and attacked his supply lines. Scorched earth policies were matched by attacking Hannibal’s foragers. Rome also used naval pressure and, eventually, the dispatch of an army to stop the movement of supplies from Africa.

This was a period in which what was later to be termed the operational dimension of war was already developed, and that despite the misleading tendency of regarding Napoleon as beginning operational art.7 Logistics has always had the tactical side but as the scale of war increased so the operational dimension became significant.

As a reminder of the full range of logistical means, Fabius, according to Plutarch, sought to win the support of the Gods by sacrificing a large number of farm animals to propitiate them. This was an element of the role of divine support, even sanctification, as an aspect of competitive validation and prestige in warfare,8 an element that remained significant across most of history. The logistics of such support does not tend to engage attention but was important. There was a demand for religious support, both on campaign and in the home base.

The Punic Wars were relatively unusual for Rome as naval logistics were crucial to them. More commonly, for the Romans, as for the Persians, roads, along which supplies as well as troops could move, were more closely linked to campaigning, as with the stone bridge built across the Danube to support operations in Dacia (modern Romania) in 101–6 CE. Moreover, empires maintained their roads, and roads enabled the use of wheeled vehicles which were far more efficient than pack animals in terms of the volume carried per horse. The Roman roads were built deliberately straight to facilitate faster journey times for moving troops and supplies, the two combining in the rations and equipment (weapons, armour, cooking gear, bedrolls) carried by soldiers, and to make it easier to handle wagons. Cuttings, embankments and bridges helped counter the impact of terrain. These roads were to continue to be important in post-Roman times. The Chinese were also great road builders, as was the Marya Empire of South Asia in the third century BCE. It constructed roads connecting Bengal with Eastern Afghanistan, and Patna (their capital) with South India. The Suri and the Mughal empires and later the British built upon this network.

However, the friction of distance encouraged the stationing of Roman legions for long periods in particular locations.9 The Vindolanda Tablets provide information on the Roman garrisons on Hadrian’s Wall and their supply. Each legion had a commissariat responsible for supplies. This had to interact with urban and provincial governments as well as with estate owners and merchants. These were the sources of the wagons and mules that were employed to move supplies, as the armies lacked sufficient numbers of them. Moreover, taxpayers moved food and other goods provided as taxes to warehouses.10 River and sea transport were much cheaper, easier and quicker for moving bulk goods, but had to be supplemented by road links for the legions on the frontier. Maritime logistics, however, played a role underpinning particular campaigns. River transport was also very important in China.

Grain supplies were more generally necessary for the articulation of the Roman empire, with movements by sea from Egypt, Sicily and Tunisia to the city of Rome. It was less expensive to transport a ton of grain to Rome from Egypt by sea than from fifty miles away in Italy by land. Movement by sea was also far faster because the cart animals, in the absence of fodder, would eat all that they hauled, in about five days. The supply to the army was an aspect of this, and there was probably an overlap in the systems employed, notably private contractors. Rather than there being a system that could be readily rolled out in all areas on an isotrophic surface, with an infrastructure of roads and bases created accordingly, there was an interaction between this template and the very varied geographical and climatic constraints of the empire. There could be failures, as in 49 BCE when the price of grain in Caesar’s camp in Spain rose to a great height. Sails offered a greater range than galleys and notably so if helped by regular wind patterns, as with monsoon winds in the Indian Ocean.

Late Roman Empire logistics were adequate to good, the occasional exceptions being some, but not all, campaigns outside the Empire, notably the Emperor Julian II’s campaign against the Parthians in which he advanced to Ctesiphon in modern Iraq in 363, an advance well supplied by a river fleet on the River Euphrates until the siege failed, following which he unsuccessfully tried to return to Roman territory via a different route after burning his fleet. Paying the troops could be a bigger problem than feeding them, especially after the third century CE when the quality of Roman coinage declined and inflation set in. The attempt to substitute pay in kind for coins did not work. Legionary forts were largely self-sufficient, with staples grown or acquired locally, although some long-distance trade, for example of olive oil from Spain, supplemented what was locally available. It has been argued that the mansiones recorded on the Antonine Itinerary and the Peutinger Table functioned as military supply storehouses as well as staging posts along the road system. Things became more complicated after 395 when there were two Roman empires, West and East, and the situation in the former speedily became chaotic, with the last Emperor deposed in 476, whereas the last in the East was killed in 1453 when his capital, Constantinople, was captured.

The need for information about threats in what increasingly for the Romans became a threat-response strategy helped ensure that information flow was a mechanism or element of logistics. Rapid, effective information flow was possible in pre-industrial times, as with the Mongol dak system, but the telegraph in the nineteenth century did make for a significant change. Like the Chinese, the Romans also benefited from the standardisation of weapons production. In China, Qin crossbowmen carried spares which allowed them to repair and replace parts on the battlefield.11 Such flexibility helped Qin forces gain an edge in the final stage of the Waring States period, with their wars of unification (230–221 BCE), although other factors were more significant, notably opportunistic sequential alliance-making and war-making with the other states.

The impressive, far-flung character of Roman logistics was matched in China by the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE). The support of large forces on the defensive posed a different logistical challenge to advancing beyond the bounds of current rule, because supplies could be a major problem. It was necessary if advancing into areas lacking settled agriculture to take supplies, as seen with the Romans, Qin (221–206 BCE) and Han China, and the Maryan empire which also appears to have relied not on seizing food and forage as it advanced, but, instead, on purchasing it or bringing supplies. This method, however, still required victory. Thus, Emperor Wu, the Han ‘Martial Emperor’ (r. 141–87 BCE), found supplies an issue in attacking the Xiongnu confederation of nomadic tribes in modern Mongolia. The anticipated logistical equation broke down as the Xiongnu, who preferred raiding, proved difficult to engage, a frequent problem in steppe warfare, but also in naval conflict. Once a sedentary army moved beyond agrarian land, it could no longer forage and had to cart its supplies, but did so subject to severe logistical limits.

As a result of the attitudes of Wu’s successor, Zhao (r. 87–74 BCE), as well as of logistical factors, there was a switch by China to a defensive strategy, which was easier to maintain. At the same time, there were logistical cross-currents, as in the Chinese need to look further afield in order to obtain the horses that appeared necessary so as to resist the cavalry of steppe people. Thus, the Han sought to strengthen China against the Xiongnu, in part to gain both allies and horses, by extending their military power in Central Asia in 101 BCE. Similarly, founded by invading Turkic peoples, the Northern Wei dynasty (439–534 CE), benefited from their control of the steppe, which ensured plentiful horses.

In contrast, armies from further south in China had access to fewer horses and therefore lacked the mobility and offensive shock power of the northerners, which enabled the Sui dynasty to conquer the south in 588–9.12 It had to adapt to (and adopt) the riverine-based maritime supply systems of the south. It was the greater ease of northerners moving onto the water than of southerners moving onto horses that largely created the north-south military gradient of China; although there was a use by the Song (960–127 CE) and Ming (1368–1644 CE), of flooding. Flooding was to be used in 1938 by the Nationalists against the Japanese, large regions in order to lessen the mobility of mounted steppe nomads.

At the same time, cavalry forced to the fore a need for adequate pasture, a factor accentuated when large forces were deployed. Cavalry were at their best at the start of any campaign and then progressively declined as problems in supply meant that horses lost condition and performance, and eventually starved unless rested. The resulting issues varied depending on the natural environment. For example, facing supply problems in the summer in the Near East when it does not rain, the Mongols could not deploy the overwhelming force necessary to offset Mamluk fighting advantages in the thirteenth centu...