Thread by @BretDevereaux

I keep coming back to the metaphor of a 'playbook' when it comes to pre-modern logistics. I think it is much better than trying to think in terms of a logistics 'system.'

That's not to say that pre-modern logistics is dumb or underdeveloped though.... 1/21

The difference is that prior to railroads, steamships and trucks, logistics (which in that context mostly means the 4Fs - food, fodder, firewood and f-water - hey, alright, it sounded cooler than the 3FnW) is much more sensitive to local conditions. 2/21

The modern brute-force solution of 'transport everything from strategic supply reserves in the home country' isn't possible when overland transport is so expensive and naval transport may be unavailable due to geography, winds, sailing season, etc. 3/21

The good news is that unlike artillery shells or fuel, the countryside you are in already produces food, fodder, firewood and (f)water, so you can draw your supplies locally in the way that a modern army cannot.

The bad news is that you usually have to do so. 4/21

So you need a playbook which can react to a wide variety of possible location conditions. If you have friendly communities, you can use requisition or purchase to get supplies.

Btw, when you see 'general X opted to winter in <allied community>'... 5/21

...what's happening there is that he is making them feed and shelter his troops over the winter when foraging is difficult because the crops aren't grown yet in the fields. 6/21

This can work even in sparsely populated areas, if you can rely on local elites to gather up the food in advance of your arrival so you can roll in and pick it up without having to massively disperse the army. 7/21

If communities are unfriendly, you can do foraging - steal the food. Best done when the crops are ripe or nearly so in the fields. Wheat *plants* can't run away, but farmers carrying sacks of processed grain can - and they'll run into walled settlements you have to siege. 8/21

Taking fortified population centers can get you supplies, but only if you storm them - which is tricky. You need to be bigger enough than the settlement that you can just quickly build a ramp and roll on in, but not so much bigger that their stored food is trivial. 9/21

Finally, you have long distance transport, which basically only works if you are on a coast line with decent harbors, or a navigable river, *and* you have the coordination to get supplies from somewhere else moved to you in quantity. 10/21

And I do mean *quantity* - back of the envelope math suggests a single Roman legion (typically a sub-unit of a larger army) might consume 8.26 tons of food per day alone, which pops up above 10 tons when you account for fodder for animals. 11/21

So this ends up being a flexible playbook of common methods. The exact playbook may vary a bit one army to the next (one huge question that makes a big difference is, 'can your army harvest and then process and then bake raw grain?' or do you need bread made for you?)...12/21

But commanders in the field are constantly shifting the balance of methods to meet their needs. Given that ancient armies don't run out of food all of the time, they are also clearly engaging in long-term planning with rule-of-thumb assumptions that are fairly reliable. 13/21

Because, to be clear, this is a setup with relatively minimal margin of error. The limits of a pre-truck army's carrying capacity means that you can't carry more than a couple weeks supplies with you, so total collapse is never more than a few weeks away. Plan carefully. 14/21

Now, for the historian, the tricky thing is that no one tells us about this playbook. Even military manuals - your Vegetius and Onasander and so on - don't go into very much detail about the specifics of how an army did its logistics. 15/21

So we're left to sketch out the playbook by seeing what armies do in the field. There's a temptation to see that all as amateur ad hockery but remember the narrow margins for error and the complexity of the calculations being made here. 16/21

It seems little accident that Roman generals first started out as military tribunes (who seem to lead foraging expeditions away from the main army, by the by) and quaestors (who handle the pay-and-purchase side of the equation) before getting their own army commands. 17/21

Add in the duties of the aediles and also experience running large estates and it sure seems like Roman aristocrats get a lot of administration and logistics training before they reach the highest offices, which may go some distance to explaining the... 18/21

...Roman reputation for logistical excellence.

Anyway, if you want to read more about the basic concerns of overland food transport, check out: acoup.blog/2019/10/04/col… 19/21

And for a more or less complete beginner's logistics study of a fictional campaign, I've got you covered here: acoup.blog/2019/05/10/col… 20/21

And if you are wondering why I'm suddenly on about quaestors and food all of the time, well, my Patrons always get to know what scholarship I'm working on in the background because they get monthly updates: patreon.com/user?u=20122096 end/21