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by hinkley4 hours ago |
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upvoteby siofra3 hours ago|
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> Something often left out of fiction about war is how easily a moving army can overwhelm a local ecosystem, particularly if its supply lines sag. You might not even be their target, and yet you will be pillaged. No more easy hunting for you for years. No more quick trips for firewood, or tinder.

This is also why so many soldiers ended up dead outside of battle, and not from getting stabbed. Why Sun Tzu and Clauzewitz went on and on about logistics.

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upvoteby ManuelKiessling3 hours ago|
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Micro-nitpick: it‘s „Clausewitz“ with an „s“.
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upvoteby contingencies2 hours ago|
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While indeed an army marches on its stomach, it's easy to miss the fact that the entire field of operations research which now runs such modern marvels as international air transport and major data centers grew out of the field of logistics, which itself grew out of increasing complexity in once primitive military food logistics.
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upvoteby Archelaos4 hours ago|
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Why should the army leave a dead elephant on the road? They would butcher it themselves and take the meat with them (and the tusks). The locals may have found some large bones for their living room decorations (and may be some skin, if they were lucky).
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upvoteby lukan3 hours ago|
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Because they might be in a hurry to reach that mountain pass before the snow comes. Or to meet other goals set by the general and if already stocked up on supplies, it would be quite a burden to also carry an extra elephant (which was likely also carrying things before it died).
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upvoteby Archelaos2 hours ago|
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Quite unlikely. For an army on the move, especially one that had to cover such a long distance, a considerable portion of the troops was assigned to procure provisions anyway.

Bret C. Devereaux has written a series of three blog posts on the topic of pre-modern army logistics that explains that in detail. See: https://acoup.blog/2022/07/15/collections-logistics-how-did-...

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upvoteby HPsquared4 hours ago|
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And perhaps it's not so good even if you are being "defended" by the hungry army! It kind of resembles when a monarch comes to visit a noble; you would need to spend a lot on them and their entourage.
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upvoteby rtpg2 hours ago|
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Highly recommend the Age of Napoleon podcast, which has some good long sections about military logistics on this point during its earlier episodes on Napoleon's early career. Really helps to visualize the nuts and bolts of moving a bunch of soldiers around even across relatively small distances.
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upvoteby ahmedfromtunis4 hours ago|
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> You might not even be their target, and yet you will be pillaged.

Isn't this how Rome was sacked way back when it was just a city among many others in the Italian peninsula? If I recall correctly, this was a wake-up call for the city to start working on protecting itself adequately.

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upvoteby RupertSalt8 minutes ago|
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In 2008, I visited Manresa in Catalonia.

An uncited passage in Wikipedia explains how the French Troops, defeated during their Napoleonic Invasion (1808), burned and demolished Manresa on retreat, and the villagers simply rebuilt the buildings from the same rubble.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manresa

I can attest that many buildings downtown are definitely rubble-y.

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