History of Military Logistics

One of the difficulties of studying logistics is that both transportation and supply are subject to a wide range of factors outside the normal military experience. This presents a problem to historians trying to build a model of supply for a particular military operation. For instance, there is currently no model of supply for horse drawn armies, as Van Creveld postulated in his 1975 book "On Supplying War" that these armies drew much of their supply from the local countryside through which they were marching. The main issue was that soldiers drew a ration of 3 lb and their horses drew a ration of 20 lb, with a typical army having a ratio of 1 horse per 4 soldiers, this resulted in the horses needing almost double the weight of rations as the soldiers. Van Creveld's argument was that half the horse ration comprised grass which could be collected locally. However John Lynn in his 1993 book "Feeding Mars" challenged this assumption using an article by Perjes which claimed that a horse would need 50 lb of grass a day which would exhaust local supplies too quickly.

One method of exploring these issues, is to look at operations being conducted in extreme circumstances, as this reduced the number of contributing factors and can isolate particular components. For instance the Duke of Wellington's campaign in Portugal 1809-1811 was conducted over harsh terrain with poor roads that defeated the opposing French supply system. The British Army was forced to rely for transport on rivers, ox carts and pack mules which were slow and only allowed small loads at high transport cost. Nonetheless the Duke waged a successful campaign for a number of campaiging seasons. Similarly the campaigns of the American Civil War can be used to compared the composition of armies and different methods of horse transport. The Army of the Potomac was virtually immobile despite a large number of wagons and a horse to man ration of 1:4, yet the Armies in the West managed high mobility with even more wagons and a ratio of 1:2. Clearly numbers of horses were not the limiting factor.