Military Logistics: The Ox That Eats Its Cargo and the Patton Fuel Crisis

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Napoleon took roughly 600,000 men into Russia in 1812 and fewer than 100,000 came back, most lost to mud, typhus and lack of horse feed rather than Russian tactics. That disaster frames this history of military logistics, the business of moving food, ammunition and medical supplies. The word traces to the Greek logistikos, skilled in calculating, and to the auditing magistrates of Athens; in the 1670s Louis XIV created the maréchal de logis to plan where armies would march and sleep, and Jomini's 1838 book carried the term into English.

For most of history commanders had three imperfect options: live off the land, carry supplies, or ship them from the rear. Foraging left armies at the mercy of harvests and scorched earth, and baggage trains slowed them to a crawl. Rome learned that shipping grain across the Mediterranean was cheaper than hauling it 80 kilometers by ox cart. Canning, refrigeration, railways, motor vehicles and aircraft transformed supply, but also made armies dependent on an unbroken flow from the rear, as Patton's tanks found when they ran out of gasoline in France.

An ox-drawn grain cart marched far enough will see the ox eat everything it is pulling.
From the late 16th century, sieges were timed to the harvest cycle because besiegers would otherwise starve first.
Napoleon spread his corps across parallel roads so they could forage wider areas and then converge to fight.
The World War II airlift over the Hump and the 1948 Berlin airlift showed what air supply could achieve.
Lanchester's square law shows that outnumbering an equal enemy two to one squares, rather than doubles, the combat advantage.

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