History of military logistics

Early armies were equipped with weapons used for hunting like spears, knives, axes and bows and arrows, and were small due to the practical difficulty of supplying a large number of soldiers.

The nineteenth century saw technological developments that facilitated immense improvements to the storage, handling and transportation of supplies which made it easier to support an army from the rear.

At the same time, the advent of industrial warfare in the form of bolt-action rifles, machine guns and quick-firing artillery sent ammunition consumption soaring during the First World War.

[12] The Roman army ration included bread or biscuit, beef and veal, pork and sucking-pig, mutton and lamb, poutry, lentils, cheese, olive oil, wine or vinegar, and salt.

[17] The Olmecs used camales to prepare tortillas that could be retoasted and consumed en route,[18] whereas the Maya lacked a good, transportable food, which made long-distance forays difficult.

[45][46] There were technical and tactical components to this, like the shift from expensive armoured knights to cheaper pikemen, who could be mobilised in vast numbers, but the major factor was the growth of the European state.

If permanently assigned to a town or city with a working marketplace, or travelling along a well-established military route, supplies could be bought locally with intendants overseeing the exchanges.

In other cases an army travelling in friendly territory could expect to be followed by sutlers, whose stocks were small and subject to price gouging, or a commissioner could be sent ahead to a town to make arrangements, including billetting if necessary.

[49] Artillery in particular was reliant on this method of transport, since even a modest number of cannons of the period required hundreds of horses to move them and their ammunition, and they travelled at half the speed of the rest of the army.

[52] Improvements in metal casting techniques and the use of copper-based alloys like bronze and brass made cannons lighter and more durable, and therefore more mobile, but their production and maintenance required skilled craftsmen.

The network of Roman and Byzantine roads radiating from Constantinople provided good lines of communication, as did the Danube River, via the Black Sea and the port of Varna.

Ottoman troops could march 970 kilometres (600 mi) from Constantinople to Buda via Adrianople and Belgrade in six weeks, drawing provision en route from forty depots.

[54] By the mid-seventeenth century, the French under Secretary of State for War Michel Le Tellier began a series of military reforms to address some of the issues which had plagued armies.

These rations were supplemented as circumstances allowed by a source of protein such as meat or beans; soldiers were still responsible for purchasing these items out-of-pocket but they were often available at below-market prices or even free at the expense of the state.

Some of these magazines were dedicated to providing frontier towns and fortresses several months' worth of supplies in the event of a siege, while the rest were supported French armies operating in the field.

[57] Although living off the land theoretically granted armies freedom of movement, it required careful planning, and the need for plunder precluded any sort of sustained, purposeful advance.

It built upon experience learned from the supply of the very-long-distance Falkland Islands garrison from 1767 to 1772 to systematise needed shipments to distant places such as Australia, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone.

[75] During the Ulm Campaign in 1805, the French army of 200,000 men had no need for time-consuming efforts to scour the countryside for supplies and live off the land, as it was well provided for by France's German allies.

[72] France's ally, the Electorate of Bavaria, turned the city of Augsburg into a gigantic supply centre, allowing the Grande Armée, generously replenished with food, shoes and ammunition, to quickly invade Austria after the decisive French victory at Ulm.

[76] The French system fared poorly in the Peninsular War in the face of Spanish guerrilla warfare that targeted their supply lines and the British blockade of French-occupied ports on the Iberian Peninsula.

[102] During the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, railways enabled the swift mobilisation of the Prussian Army, but the problem of moving supplies from the end of rail lines to units at the front resulted in nearly 18,000 tons trapped on trains unable to be unloaded to ground transport.

[104] The Prussian use of railways during the Franco-Prussian War is often cited as an example of logistic modernisations, but the advantages of manoeuvre were often gained by abandoning supply lines that became hopelessly congested with rear-area traffic.

The distances involved, the speed of the advance, and the poor road network all contributed to the logistical difficulties, and shortages of spare parts developed for motor vehicles, which were in short supply in the first place.

[145] Resupplying the garrison of Malta was even more hazardous, requiring major operations,[146] as were the Arctic convoys that brought aid to the Soviet Union,[147] so much so that they had to be suspended in July and August 1942.

[159] The Red Ball Express was a success, but at a cost: overloading, careless driving, lack of proper vehicle maintenance, and wear and tear took their toll on the truck fleet.

[175][176] While wasteful in some respects, the procedure allowed for mounting of operations from widely scattered ports, avoided shipping congestion and long turnaround times, and eliminated the duplication of Army and Navy supplies.

[178] Bypassed Japanese forces in the South West Pacific Area were expected to "wither on the vine" and starve, but this did not occur; they cultivated gardens using local labour seeds and equipment imported by aircraft and submarines, which also brought in ordnance and medical supplies.

A standard steel container was designed called the Conex box that was capable of holding 4,100 kilograms (9,000 lb) and suitable for loading onto a semi-trailer or railway flat car.

[189] The second phase of deployment, from 8 November 1991 to 16 January 1992, involved the movement of 391,604 troops by air, the majority of whom travelled on commercial flights, and 326,223 tonnes (359,599 short tons) of cargo, representing 14.5 per cent of the total.

This greatly reduced the costs involved in storage and handling of items, but in the combat environment of the Iraq War, the drawbacks became all too clear when suppliers and transport resources could not respond to rapidly changing patterns of demand.