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Collections: Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part III: On the Move

Bret Devereaux Collections, HDTMI, Total Generalship August 12, 2022 
44 Minutes

This is the third part of a three part (I, II) look at some of the
practical concerns of managing pre-industrial logistics. In our last
post, we outlined what 'foraging' actually entailed - how armies got
supplies both from friendly populations but also from neutral or
hostile populations. In particular, we focused on the considerable
damage that armies could not fully avoid doing (not that many tried
very hard) when moving over the countryside. Because of their limited
ability to transport supplies, armies were forced to draw those
supplies locally, to the considerable misery of the local rural
population. For the average peasant, an army came upon them like a
rolling calamity.

I want you to keep that misery in mind because we're going to shift
perspectives here to the perspective of the general in charge of
campaign operations, but in the back of your mind you should also be
thinking about what the calculations the general is making are going
to mean for the underlying populace that will have to endure his
decisions.^1 This week we're going to look at those decisions and how
the interaction of foraging and marching shapes where an army can go,
how fast it can get there and how large it can be. For the most part,
because of the limits of space, that is going to mean simply covering
the generalities of these concerns (with some models to walk through
the interactions); this post is already terribly long and in any
event getting much more specific than this is going to essentially
require looking at the specific details of individual campaigns.

And before we march onward, if you want to support my logistics, you
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A Good Road

The first concern for the general is to determine the route of march
and the options here might be surprisingly limited. Just how limited,
I suspect, often comes as a surprise to many modern students of
pre-industrial campaigns; these days when we travel we have GPS
route-finders that usually give several different possible paths,
from highways to back roads. Even in the days before ubiquitous GPS,
with a good road map, you could chart dozens if not hundreds of
possible routes in a long distance journey. In many games, this
freedom of movement is greatly amplified: marching armies, imagined
to be no longer restricted to roads, are effectively able to march
anywhere not bounded by obvious natural barriers (e.g. the more
recent Total War titles, Mount & Blade, and Battle Brothers). Roads
may supply a speed bonus (often a quite limited one), but are
otherwise optional. Historical armies were far more limited.

[20220811204819_1][20220811204819_1]Screenshot from Mount & Blade:
Bannerlord. The developers have actually added a lot more roads over
the past few updats but there are still villages (lower right)
completely unconnected by any kind of road or path. There is a speed
bonus on the roads but it is small enough that armies regularly cut
across country as you can see here.

Armies almost generally had to move over longer distances via roads,
for both logistical and pathfinding reasons. For logistics, while
unencumbered humans can easily clamber over fences or small ridges or
weave through forests, humans carrying heavy loads struggle to do
this and pack animals absolutely cannot. Dense forests (especially
old growth forests) are formidable obstacles for pack and draft
animals, with a real risk of animals injuring themselves with unlucky
footfalls. After all the donkey was originally a desert/savannah
creature and horses evolved on the Eurasian Steppe; dense forest is a
difficult, foreign terrain. But the rural terrain that would dominate
most flat, arable land was little better: fields are often split by
fences or hedgerows which need to be laboriously cleared (essentially
making a path) to allow the work animals through. Adding wagons
limits this further; pack mules can make use of narrow paths through
forests or hills, but wagons pulled by draft animals require proper
roads wide enough to accommodate them, flag enough that the heavy
wagon doesn't slide back and with a surface that will be at least
somewhat kind on the wheels. That in turn in many cases restricts
armies to significant roadways, ruling out things like farmer's paths
between fields or small informal roads between villages, though
smaller screening, scouting or foraging forces could take these side
roads.

[TabulaPeutingeriana][TabulaPeutingeriana]Via Wikipedia, a detail of
the Tabula Peutingeriana or the Peutinger Table, a 13th century copy
of a map of the Roman road system of an uncertain date, probably
fourth or fifth century. This wasn't a military map or indeed even
necessarily a practical map (it has been suggested that it might have
been a display piece), but it gives a sense of the complexity of the
Roman road system, constructed initially and principally to enable
the rapid movement of Roman troops around the empire. It also gives a
good sense of the limited 'spider's web' of good roads between major
settlements.

(As an aside: one my enduring frustrations is the tendency of
pre-modern strategy games to represent most flat areas as 'plains' of
grassland often with a separate 'farmland' terrain type used only in
areas of very dense settlement. But around most of the Mediterranean,
most of the flat, cleared land at lower elevations would have been
farmland (something you can see fairly clearly in the city maps I've
included here), with all of the obstructions and complications that
implies; rolling grasslands tend to be just that - uplands too hilly
for farming.)

The other problem is pathfinding and geolocation. Figuring out where
you off-road overland with just a (highly detailed) map and a compass
is sufficiently difficult that it is a sport (Orienteering). Prior to
1300, armies in the broader Mediterranean world were likely to lack
both; the compass (invented in China) arrives in the Mediterranean in
the 1300s and detailed topographical maps of the sort that hikers
today might rely on remained rare deep into the modern period,
especially maps of large areas. Consequently it could be tricky to
determine an army's exact heading (sun position could give something
approximate, of course) or position. Getting lost in unfamiliar
territory was thus a very real hazard. Indeed, getting lost in
familiar territory was a real hazard: Suetonius records that Julius
Caesar, having encamped not far from the Rubicon got lost trying to
find it, spent a whole night wandering trying to locate it (his goal
being to make the politically decisive crossing with just a few close
supporters in secrecy first before his army crossed). In the end he
had to find a local guide to work his way back to it in the morning
(Suet. Caes. 31.2). So to be clear: famed military genius Julius
Caesar got lost trying to find a 50 mile long river only about 150
miles away from Rome when he tried to cut cross-country instead of
over the roads.

[rubicon][rubicon]Detail from map 7.2, "Campaigns of Caesar, Crassus
and Pompey" from The Romans: From Village to Empire created by the
Ancient World Mapping Center. You can see the Rubicon River (quite
small) clearly labeled as well as its relative distance both from
Rome (where Julius Caesar was from) and Cisalpine and Transalpine
Gaul (where he had been the Roman proconsul for nearly a decade).

Instead, armies relied on locals guides (be they friendly, bought or
coerced) to help them find their way or figure out where they were on
whatever maps they could get together. Locals in turn tend to
navigate by landmarks and so are likely to guide the army along the
paths and roads they themselves use to travel around the region.
Which is all as well because the army needs to use the roads anyway
and no one wants to get lost. The road and path network thus becomes
a vital navigational aid: roads and paths both lead to settlements
full of potential guides (to the next settlement) and because roads
tend to connect large settlements and large settlements tend to be
the objectives of military campaigns, the road system 'points the
way.' Consequently, armies rarely strayed off of the road network and
were in most cases effectively confined to it. Small parties might be
sent out off of the road network from the main body, but the main
body was 'stuck' on the roads.

That means the general does not have to cope with an infinitely wide
range of maneuver possibilities but a spiderweb of possible pathways.
Small, 'flying columns' without heavy baggage could use minor roads
and pathways, but the main body of the army was likely to be confined
to well-traveled routes connecting large settlements. But which
routes to take? That leads to the next concern...

Carrying Capacity

The general now has to pick the route where the key question is
supply (particularly food supply) as we discussed earlier. Because of
the 'tyranny of the wagon equation,' there needs to be sufficient
food and fodder supplies along the army's route to sustain it as it
moves and accomplishes its objectives. Determining what routes are
viable is thus a complex calculation (some of the variables of which
will only be known to approximation), dependent on how fast the army
will move, the local population density, the efficiency with which
the army can forage or demand supplies from that population, the time
of year, the army's capacity to carry those supplies, how long the
army needs to spend doing actual combat operations (like sieges) at
the end of the march and most importantly how large the army is (and
thus its need for supplies). Because the army can carry some supplies
(frequently around two weeks) these variables mostly function as
questions of the 'rolling average' which, if they fall below a
certain level, will put the army into severe difficulties.

Let's take our sample Roman consular army as a starting point: a
relatively lean army with 19,200 combat effectives, 4,000
non-combatants and 9,800 animals which thus needs 61,850kg of food
and hard fodder daily. Such an army might be able to forage 10% of
the available food along their direction of march while still moving
at speed; for now we'll say the speed of march is 12 miles per day
(we'll come back to this in a moment, but that pace is not insanely
fast but fairly brisk). With a fairly chunky cavalry detachment
(2,400 cavalry) the army can probably forage out ten miles in either
direction of its zone of march, so it sweeps an area close to 240
square miles per day. If we're marching right around the harvest we
might assume that each person in the countryside has something like
250kg of wheat or equivalent food, including fodder.^2 Thus getting
the daily 61,850kg required means each day's 240 mile foraging zone
needs to contain at least 618,500kg of grain or a population of at
least around 10 per square mile.

Is that good? To get a sense of that we have to get a sense of what
kinds of population density were normal in pre-industrial and
pre-modern societies in the broader Mediterranean. Luuk de Ligt^3
accepts population densities for Roman Italy overall between 70 and
95 people per square mile (his figures are in square kilometers so I
am converting to keep consistency), but with tremendous variation
inside of that, with dense regions like the ager Romanus and Campania
around 110 people per square mile but places like Etruria and Umbria
as low as 20. Italy, however, was one of the densest populated areas
in Europe in the ancient and medieval periods (the other being the
medieval Low Countries); rural population densities in Europe more
broadly over large areas will have tended to range from 25 to 50
people per square mile, falling below that in rough upcountry regions
(e.g. the population density of Scotland in the medieval period may
have hovered between 10 and 15 people per square mile).

So right after the harvest our army of 19,200 effectives can go
almost anywhere there is a road or good path and rural settlement.
Great! Except of course the amount of food and fodder in the
countryside isn't static. Hay and oats - key sources of fodder for
our animals - ripen and are harvested beginning in May, wheat comes
in in June or July and barley in between the two. Consequently the
available supplies (food and fodder) peak in those months and
immediately begin falling. By October perhaps a quarter to a third of
that supply is gone (plus by this point carefully stored seed grain
is going back into the ground!); suddenly we're looking at something
like only 175kg of food supplies per person in the countryside, which
means our army needs a population density of around 15 per square
mile. Worse yet, if we plan to winter in the field (that is, we're
not dismissing the army home), we have to think about stockpiling for
the conditions in January and February when forage becomes very
scarce indeed. Realistically to do that, even with our fairly compact
army, we need a population density of 20-25 people per square mile in
order to build up winter stockpiles to last through the lean months.
At these levels, low density areas with lots of pastoralism and not a
lot of towns are effectively off-limits: the army would have to fall
back to denser farmland for the winter. And indeed, we see this exact
behavior in many ancient armies that stayed in the fields year round
that had to fight in less densely settled regions - they campaign in
the restless uplands and forests but always with an eye towards
dropping back to winter quarters in densely settled river valleys or
coasts.

But we've made some fairly favorable assumptions about our army: it
is fairly fast and fairly compact. We'll deal with the impact of
speed in a moment, but what if our army is bigger? Well, this is
initially fairly simple if we assume a constant movement speed:
double the size of the army and that doubles the food and fodder
requirements which requires double the population density. So a
double consular army of 38,400 effectives (plus 8,000 non-combatants
and 19,600 animals) requires 123,700kg of food and fodder and thus a
post-harvest population density of 20 per square mile over the
campaign area, rising to around 40 if the army doesn't want to have
to disperse in the fall. That army suddenly has some fairly severe
limits on where it can go outside of the couple of months right after
the harvest; routes that run through less densely peopled territory
are no longer options for that army.

But what if, instead of doubling the size of our fairly compact army,
we assume an army whose non-combatant load looks something more like
the Army of Flanders, where the non-combatants of the campaign
community might number around half as many as the combatants (and in
some cases equal their numbers). Suddenly our 19,200 effectives army
now has roughly 30,000 mouths to feed; managing the baggage of the
non-combatants probably adds a few animals too, perhaps bringing us
up modestly to 12,000 or so. Now we need 77,500kg of food and fodder
and thus summer population density of 13 people per square mile and a
year round density of 26. Doubling the size of this army doubles
those figures, requiring a harvest density of 26 and a year round
density of 52 - such an army would either be limited to campaigning
in only densely populated corridors or it would have to march divided
to sweep a larger area of foraging. As hard as it is to exclude
non-combatants from an army, they inflict much the same logistical
load as combatants, limiting the operational capabilities of the army
to which they are attached.

But that treats the size of our army and the speed of its march as
independent variables. Unfortunately for our army, they are not
independent variables, rather (with many other factors considered)
big armies move slower. The problem is...

Road Space

We've dealt with this problem before from other angles, but armies do
not move as a theoretical 'point mass' like in a physics problem (or
how they are represented in many video games), rather their elements
take up road space, one after the other. An army on the march is thus
not a battle line or a compact mass but a long, snaking series of
columns. That in turn has substantial impacts on its rate of
movement, because the front of the army has to march past the back at
the beginning of the march and the reverse has to happen at the end.

[image][image]Photo by R.B. Ulrich, detail of scenes 4 and 5 showing
Roman soldiers marching with their gear (carried in their packs you
can see above them on sticks) over a set of pontoon bridges over the
Danube River, from Trajan's Column. Armies, being very big, take up a
LOT of space.

So how much space might an army on the march take up? I'm going to be
drawing some numbers here from J.A. Moss, Manual of Military Training
(1914), because I happen to have a (well used) copy of the 1917
edition. It calls for a rank distance (the distance between the back
of the man in front and the chest of the man behind him) of 40
inches, which is fairly standard; adding in the width of the soldier
themselves and their pack each rank takes up around 1.25m (c. 4-5
feet) of road space. Formed six soldiers wide (which will, with
minimal intervals, get us to the width of most single-carriage
roadways, which what we are likely to be dealing with), our model
army's infantry component (16,800) would have 2,800 ranks to it
moving in column.

But we can't just march the army in one single mass like that.
Intervals between units are necessary for control (so that officers
can keep an eye on their whole units and ensure soldiers aren't
wandering off, straggling, injured, sick, etc.) and also to avoid
'accordioning' into each other as units 'tailed out.' Moss (1917)
assumes intervals but does not specify them; Lockwood, Organization
and Tactics (1895) offers the rule of thumb of allowing an extra 10%
road space for a battalion, 15% for a division and 20% for an army
corps. So instead of one infantry body of 16,800 men, we can divide
it into 35 cohort-sized 'battalions' of 480 men each. Each of these
battalions thus has 80 ranks taking up 100m of road space, plus an
extra 10m for a unit interval to the next unit. Our infantry thus
take up 3,850m or 2.4 miles of road space.

Cavalry takes up more space because horses are big. Lockwood offers
that each individual horse takes up a depth of 3 yards and a front of
around 1 yard (compared to 28 inches for an infantryman), so the
cavalry might ride in column four abreast instead of six. Once again
we also need unit divisions; for the sake of simplicity we'll use a
rough 'squadron' of 100 cavalry (a touch bigger than a typical
cavalry squadron but there is a lot of variation here too: the Romans
divided their cavalry into turmae of 30 each, which were quite small
units), which is going to form 25 ranks of four cavalry each
requiring 2.75m of road length (about three yards), so 68.75m plus
our interval (10%) makes roughly 75m per squadron. With 24 of these
squadrons to make our 2,400 cavalry they take up some 1,800m of road
space, or 1.1 miles.

[243836001][243836001]Via the British Museum, a drawing (1625-1664)
of an army marching out of a fortress, stretching out along the road
out of sight in both directions.

And then we need the baggage, which here is being moved by 5,000
mules and 2,400 spare horses. The mules will be a bit more compact
than the horses per animal, but we're still probably looking at
something like 2.25m per mule (and 2.75m per horse) set four abreast
on the road. That's 1,250 ranks of mules (2,812.5m) and 600 ranks of
horses (1,650m) for a total of 4,462.5m taken up by the baggage
train. In practice while a some of that will be in a large mass in
the center of the army (see below), a lot of these animals are going
to be split up into small groups at the tail of their units (each
infantry 'battalion' should have 80 mules - 45m of them - at its
tail). With so many possible configurations, it seems tricky to try
to calculate open intervals for the baggage train; perhaps (in small
bits spread over the army) they might add something like 440m
minimum, so their total road length is just short of 5,000m (3.1
miles). As for the non-combatants, our army is quite lean and many of
those non-combatants are in practice guiding the mules and the
horses; we can include them here for now.

So that's our army, a snake-like beast 6.6 miles (10,650m) long,
winding through the landscape. Now we can think about...

Marching Speed

Unladen human walking speed on flat terrain with long strides is just
over 3mph; it will not surprise you to learn that for a large army
marching more precision is required. Going back to Moss (1917), he
assumes the length of step of the average man is 30 inches (in
practice, keeping up with standard march rates and thus standardizing
gait is something soldiers will learn by training and experience) and
one of the chief jobs of a commander on the march is determining the
correct 'rate of march' - Moss even recommends the unit commander (at
the front since the front unit sets the pace for everyone behind)
time the pace every so often to maintain a steady marching pace. The
standard paces for marching under loads are between 88 and 110 steps
per minute, which come out to 2.5 to 3mph.

The army does not, however, move continuously at this speed. Moss
(1917) sets out the guidelines for rest: a 15 minute half after the
first three-quarters of an hour (with an effort to do this away from
settlements), followed by a 10 minute halt every 50 minutes (adjusted
to 45 minutes march and 15 minute halt in tropical or arid climates).
In very hot environments, Moss (1917) notes you ought to also halt
for three or four hours during the heat of the day (so around 1-3pm
in most cases), but we'll assume we're not marching in that hot of a
climate. But that means our formation, humming along at 3mph is
actually only moving every 5 minutes out of 6 or 3 minutes out of 4;
that means our actual average speed is 2.25-2.5mph, even though when
moving we achieve a 3mph march.

[525420001][525420001]Via the British Museum, a print (1650-1695) by
Gabriel Perelle showing officers (on horseback) looking over soldiers
(both infantry and cavalry) marching past fortifications. Note the
wide intervals between units.

But we also do not move for eight straight hours at this speed seven
days a week. Marching soldiers under load straight through the whole
day will, understandably, exhaust them; this may be necessary in some
cases (where it is called a 'forced' march), but it is rarely
desirable. After all, the army is supposed to fight at the end of
this and has to reach that destination ready for the exertion of
battle or siege. Moss (1917) recommends that "as a rule, foot troops
do not start before broad day-light; mounted troops, when
practicable, about an hour after broad daylight" (1219), in part to
avoid losing the valuable rest of the early morning hours and in part
because trying to move before the sun is fully up and visibility is
best is silly. Now that's obviously a time that is going to vary a
fair bit by latitude and time of year, with anywhere from 10-15 hours
of proper daylight to work with.

So let's say we are on the Mediterranean coast of Europe (I'm picking
Marseilles for my times here) in early May. The 'false dawn' is going
to start around 4:30 and we'll have enough light to actually do
things by around 5:30 or so; remember options for artificial light
here are very limited (laterns and campfires; torches^4 are more
common in fiction than actual use) so we need actual sunlight to do
much of anything. And there are things to do! Soldiers need to wake
up, eat breakfast, handle personal hygiene and dress, break down
their tents and the camp and fill canteens (the necessity of filling
canteens with water in the morning is something I have seen in every
infantry marching manual I have ever looked at for obvious reasons),
all of which takes time. In the United States army, 'reveille' - when
soldiers can be expected to actually fall in with units - is set at
either 6 or 7 am and its easy to see how this fits as that's almost
precisely the 'broad daylight' of marching, while using the dawn
hours to get ready. Cavalry needs an extra hour because, of course,
the horses.

[144809001][144809001]Via the British Museum a print (1535-6) by
Erhard Schon showing several armies marching out of their camps in
columns to besiege the city of Munster.

So it's 7am and we start marching! Well, not quite. Someone starts
marching. But the back of the army now has to wait for the entire
rest of the army to march past it in sequence. That's going to take
time! Recall our army is 6.6 miles long and moves at 2.5mph; it's
going to take a bit more than two and a half hours before the last
elements of the army begin leaving the camp in ideal conditions (this
factor shows up a bit less in 1800s manuals because by then it was
very common for armies to march divided; this was very rare for
earlier armies). So it will probably be almost 10am before the entire
army is moving. But now we have our problem in reverse form: the
front of the army must stop and set the camp somewhere the back of
the army can reach before the sun goes down. Night marches, as Moss
(1917) is noting even in the 1900s, are difficult and perilous. So
while the sun starts to set around 8:30 or so, we're going to lose
that two and a half hours again on the back end; the front of the
army must stop marching around 6pm at least so the rear of the army
has time to catch up before sunset.

In practice it is yet worse than this because of course we need to
set up the camp again at the other end of the march, which is also
going to eat precious time. And while the day gets longer in the
summer, soldiers do not magically become supermen of endless
endurance in the summer (if anything, as the heat rises, the reverse
is true: marches must become shorter) meaning that they need time not
merely to set up camp, but also rest, cook food, attend again to
hygiene, the maintenance of weapons and equipment and so on. You can
get more marching hours out of the day but only by eating up those
rest hours which the army needs to be combat fit. This is why, as
Moss (1917) notes, "forced marches seriously impair the fighting
power of even the best troops" (1225).

So we have perhaps a standard marching day: the army wakes around
5:30-6am. The front is formed up at 7am and properly starts moving
(after scouts and screens head out) at 7:30 or 8am, the back starts
marching at 10am in the best case; the army halts around noon to eat
(long marches on empty stomachs are a recipe for fatigue casualties;
I cannot stress enough that while physical fitness and training
obviously matter in all of this, heat, dehydration, hunger and
exhaustion do not care how many reps you can do and the general has
to get his whole army to the battlefield ready to fight). The back of
the army probably needs to be making camp by 5:30pm or so (to have
time to setup the camp - especially if it is a fortified camp -
before nightfall), so that means the front of the army has to stop
around 3pm.

So while some part of the army is probably moving at every point
between 7:30am and 5:30pm, the actual effective marching time -
initially 10 hours minus one for lunch - is reduced by 2.5 to just 6
or 7 hours if absolutely everything went right. At c. 2.5mph average,
our army would make 15-17.5 miles in a day. But of course everything
isn't always going to go right; if it's hot (in summer, recall) our
speed drops to 2.25mph and our distance in a day to 13.5 to 15.75
miles. If the roads are bad, we lose yet more time, especially if the
roads narrow at any point, forcing the army to stretch out even more.
I want to stress we are still mostly working with best-case
situations, but we're already looking at figures right around the
12-15 miles per day that most rules of thumb consider the upper end
of long-term sustainable marching base for infantry moving along good
roads.

Now let's fiddle with our assumptions a bit. What if the army carries
a lot more baggage? This could be because the army needs to carry
more supplies to get past areas where forage options are limited
(either by low population or by the presence of enemy forces) or
because the army is having to move a large siege train. If we, for
instance, remove our mules (so save 2,812.5m of road space, but lose
c. 650,000kg of carry capacity) and replace them with 700 heavy
wagons (c. 1,000kg carrying capacity per), we can expand our
logistics (because we've dropped from 5,000 mules to perhaps 2,800
horses and likewise the number of required non-combatants to handle
the mules has gone from 3,400 to just 700 wagoneers) and have some
space for a heavy siege train. At best we might cram each wagon into
something like 12m of road space (American Civil War rules of thumb
was 80 wagons to a mile, or each wagon taking up 66 feet or 20.1m),
so our new wagon train is now 8,400m long. That's 5.2 miles of
baggage alone, so now our army is a stunning 16,237.5m long (10
miles). In very good roads we might double up the wagons and get down
to just 12,037.5m or (7.5 miles).

Which in turn means our 'lost marching time' extends from just 2.5
hours to 3-4 hours (be careful not to double-count the loss, subtract
either from the front or the back to get the correct number of
marching hours, not both), leaving each unit with just 5-6 hours of
actual marching, reducing our daily rate of march to between 11.125
and 15 miles per day, under ideal conditions if everything goes right
and not one of those seven hundred wagons breaks down (of course the
same was true of having not one of 5,000 mules become injured or
stubborn as mules are wont).

Likewise, if we take our original army and double its size, either by
adding more combatants or by loading it up with more non-combatants
(now so numerous that they are not all simply handling the mules but
are filling up even more space in the line), that doubles its road
length demand out to 13.2 miles. That means our 'lost marching time'
is suddenly 5-6 hours leaving just 3-4 hours of total effective
marching time. Suddenly our army is crawling at between 6.75 and 10
miles per day - under best case conditions! - even though our 'start'
and 'stop' times have not changed at all.

In practice we're actually still being a bit too nice to our army:
we're assuming they march every day. But while humans can more or
less do that, pack and draft animals cannot. In practice for a
sustained march these animals need to be rested one day out of six or
so or the strain will render them useless in the long term. So our
lean, compact army is really moving around 12.5-14.5 miles per day
over a six-day average with one day of rest under normal conditions
(a bit faster if they push it, a bit slower if they don't) and our
double-sized army could be moving as slow as 5.6-8.3 miles per day.

The key observation here is that everything you add to the army slows
it down. A good general has some options to mitigate this (but they
all come with risk), but the fundamental rule remains. Adding more
baggage to carry artillery or supplies slows the army down. Adding
more soldiers to try to improve your chances of victory slows the
army down. Adding more non-combatants to the 'campaign community'
slows the army down, though remember from the earlier two posts,
depending on the organization of the army and the expectations of the
soldiers, some significant number of non-combatants may be
effectively unavoidable.

Sink or Swim

And now that we have our range we can return to some of our
independent variables and see how they collide. Recall that during
the summer our compact, mid-sized 19,200 soldier army could go
anywhere where the population density was at least 10 or so people
per square miles.

Now let's see what happens when we double the size of that army.
First, it's food needs, as we've noted, double from 61,850kg to
123,700kg of food and fodder, so the number of people it needs to
forage in a day (at a 10% forage rate) goes up from 2,474 to 4,984.
And you are thinking, "Yes, we've done this math and we know this
ends up with them needing around 20-25 people per square mile after
the harvest." Ah, but our forage area has also changed.

Because our army isn't clipping along at 12 miles per day anymore,
it's slowed down to an average of perhaps 7 miles per day. That in
turn means our foraging zone isn't 20 miles by 12 miles, but 20 miles
by 7 miles: we've gone from 240 square miles of forage to just 140.
So our required population density has actually leap from just over
10 to 35.6 people per square mile, more than three times as high
because the increased nutrition demand and decreased speed have
compounded. And that is, you will recall, the situation immediately
following the harvest. By October that figure is going to have risen
to something like 46 people per square mile; the year-round
campaigning requirement would be close to 70 people per square mile.

Those aren't impossible numbers, but they are going to pose the
general of this army with some difficult choices. What will not work
is overland external supply with more wagons; as discussed the
animals eat food and so adding more wagons just slows the army down
more and increases its food demands; that's the tyranny of the wagon
equation at work - the army cannot wagon its way out of a foraging
pit. One option is to forage more intensively to raise the percentage
of food in the countryside the army is pulling in; this poses twin
problems. The first is that doing so generally means either slowing
down or dispersing foraging parties for more effective searches; the
former may be counter-productive, the latter may be dangerous. In
either case, foraging beyond 10% is likely to cause fairly immediate
and sharp starvation in the countryside; pushing that number higher
is going to risk invoking Marshal Villars' warning from last time,
"If you burn, if you drive out the population, you will starve." Not
today, but tomorrow; if the army has to return home through this same
route or intends to operate in this area again soon, depopulating it
by over-foraging merely delays disaster. Nevertheless, faced with the
exigencies of war, many armies did just this, ruining the local
population to enable the movement of oversized armies.

Another option is to speed up, thus increasing the foraging area. The
march could be lengthened, but that is going to have negative impacts
not merely on morale but on combat readiness: after days of regular
long marches under heavy loads soldiers will begin to suffer from
exhaustion. Instead many generals opt to trim the baggage, trying to
get rid of every sort of excess thing; this is common enough that it
becomes a sign of good generalship in the ancient world - the good
general enforces discipline, compels his soldiers to get rid of
everything they carry that isn't strictly necessary, maintains morale
by doing the same himself and then for good measure kicks every
unnecessary non-combatant out of the camp. Unfortunately for our
general, we've already started with a very lean army, by
pre-industrial standards, so there isn't very much fat to trim (which
is partly why most actual armies, which were not so lean, marched at
speeds that tend to cluster at the bottom of these ranges we're
creating; the other big reason why is we're assuming pretty good road
conditions which will not have pertained generally). However a
general can also push an army by lengthening the marching day and
raising the pace; doing this for long periods will wear out an army
quickly, but for quick, short-term solutions to supply problems (or
for rapid operational maneuvering) there is a fair bit of flexibility
in daily marching rate. Morale ends up as a major consideration here:
motivated soldiers (either inspired by their general or their cause)
may push harder on the march, allowing the army to sustain a higher
rate of movement, sticking closer to the 10 or 12 miles per day and
thus alleviating some of the supply issues.

A third, more complex option is to march divided, splitting up the
army to move in several separate columns along different roads which
can both move faster (because they are now two smaller armies) and
can forage different farmers in different areas. The problem this
poses is simple: coordination. An equal sized enemy who remains
concentrated could engage one of those armies, win easily due to the
2-to-1 numbers advantage, then turn and obliterate the second army,
what is known as 'defeat in detail.' To avoid that the general in
overall command has to coordinate so that these armies march
separately but arrive at the battlefield at the same time. This
sounds easier than it is: the general may not know where the battle
will be (because he does not know where the enemy army is) and he has
to plan (at least) two routes of march which will get both armies to
the critical space with a margin for error measured in hours at the
end of a march which may be days or weeks (or months!) long. This can
be done, but it is very difficult and very easy to completely ruin a
campaign with a fairly minor mistake; in practice before 1800 or so,
most armies only operated like this if they absolutely had to.^5 In
practice the threshold where armies end up forced to split up is
somewhere above 50,000 effectives, depending on conditions.

Finally there is a fourth option available in only certain
circumstances: naval (or river) supply. This is, all things
considered, somewhat rare; most ancient and medieval polities were
not up to the task of supplying large armies by sea regularly at long
distance (though the Achaemenids, Athens, Carthage and Rome all do
this at one point or other and if you are thinking, "gee, those seem
like some of the highest state-capacity polities in the ancient
world" why yes, yes they do.).^6 Nevertheless ships and river barges
offer an escape from the tyranny of the wagon equation: the food
consumption of the crew is effectively trivial compared to the amount
that they can move. The result is that an army at a decent port with
access to the sea (directly or by navigable river) has access to
effectively infinite supply throughput, assuming that the supplies
can be assembled and safely shipped. The problem that most pre-modern
polities would struggle to do that is a separate issue, but a
significant one. One of these days we may come back and talk about
Roman naval and riverine supply in more detail.

Underlying all of this is a central fact about armies before
railroads: armies are like sharks, they must swim or they will sink.

Now Add Hostile Armies

Now so far we've been considering our army moving through a
countryside devoid of actual resistance, but of course the enemy gets
a vote! Foraging in enemy territory is a dangerous activity; troops
that are searching farmhouses or hauling large amounts of supplies
(or pillage) aren't going to be in fighting trim. In many cases they
may not even have their weapons and armor (e.g. Liv. 31.2.8; Caes. BG
4.32.5), since working light means being able to shift larger amounts
of forage and pillage. Moreover as we've discussed getting an army
into fighting formation quickly is hard; if your unit is foraging in
a village and an enemy unit suddenly attacks, the chances of
effectively defense are very low indeed. That's why foraging parties
had to be so large, so that some of the foragers could be on guard
while others were doing the actual foraging. The Roman historian Livy
has an interesting description of command failures leading to an
ambushed foraging party, noting that the commander, Gaius Ampius, had
failed both to sufficiently scout the area but also setting up
sufficient strong-points from whence armed soldiers could protect and
screen the unarmed ones (Liv. 31.2.8).

Of course those sort of arrangements are only going to work against
small parties of enemies (like their own foragers and scouts);
against the main force of an enemy army those scouts and guards
really function just to give the army enough time to retreat and
concentrate for a battle. Because of that 'defeat in detail' threat,
if the enemy's main field army is nearby and close enough in strength
to offer battle, it becomes necessary to keep your own army
concentrated; even if you don't intend to offer battle as situations
like that at Pydna show, battle may happen regardless. But of course
as we discussed back then, generals here have at best limited and
often badly out of date information about the composition of location
of enemy forces; a general thus has to balance his need to move and
feed his army with the knowledge that the enemy could show up at
almost any time.

That starts, of course, with marching formations. We've described how
it takes time for an army to get moving in the morning, but there's
an additional complication to this: the order of march isn't itself
random. Exact formations vary but there was a fairly standard setup:
proceeding the army was often a screening force of scouts (often
cavalry), followed by the vanguard (or 'van'), a combat unit or
several marching some distance in advance of the main force, often
with minimal baggage. The general himself often moved with the
vanguard because that's where information would be quickest come by.
Then came the main body of the army, typically with the baggage train
in the middle sandwiched between combat elements (which typically
composed the bulk of the army's infantry). Those combat units might
also (as above) have their own smaller baggage trains directly behind
them in the marching order or it might all be centralized in the
center of the army (the latter was the Roman practice). Finally there
was a rearguard, more or less a mirror of the vanguard. That layout
ensured the army could respond relatively rapidly to the sudden
appearance of an enemy in front or behind. For extra security, light
infantry skirmishers with minimal baggage might also be detached as
'flankers' moving off the road or along side roads so that the army
couldn't be surprised from those directions either.

Typical advice (this actually comes up in Moss (1917)) is that a
commander needs to both rotate which units are in the vanguard and
rearguard and that his subordinates need to rotate which part of
their command is at the front and back of their units, regulating the
pace. There are many silly things in the film Gettysburg (1993), but
one moment I just love is Chamberlain's exasperation on realizing on
top of an already difficult morning that his regiment has been
assigned to the front of the front brigade in the corps and so has to
assign flankers; that rotation would have been regular in most
armies. And what would have happened to create this scene, is that
the commander of the V Corps (Major General George Sykes) opted to
march with his first division in the front, which then its commander
(Brigadier General James Barnes) opted to put the 3rd Brigade in
front and its commander (Col. Strong Vincent) opted to put the 20th
Maine in front and of course its commander (our Professor of
Rhetoric, Joshua L. Chamberlain) would in turn have to pick where
each of his companies would go. The main concerns for smaller units
is that the front part of the unit regulates pace and the rear part
of the unit will need to deal with stragglers (including heat and
fatigue casualties) as well as keep up pace to avoid the unit
'tailing out' too badly as it marches.

[gettysburg-flankers][gettysburg-flankers]Also absolutely fantastic
shot composition where we can see the oak-paneled wooden acting of
the courier who sounds like he is reading his lines from an index
card, but where we can't see the faces of the characters we actually
care about and what they think about this information. Gettysburg
(1993) is a film that fills me with conflicting emotions is what I am
saying here and that's before we get to all of the Lost Cause rubbish
they inexplicably put in between the scenes involving Buford and
Chamberlain.

Foraging opportunities would also be shaped by the enemy presence and
this could be a crucial operational concern. Because foraging
operations were so vulnerable the presence of a large enemy force
could prevent them even if it didn't give battle. This is often what
is happening when one commander 'bottles up' another without ever
giving battle - by simply saying close to but out of reach of an
enemy army, the weaker or more timid force can massively complicate
their logistics. Roman efforts against Hannibal in southern Italy
after Cannae (so from 215-203) as a master-piece of this kind of
maneuvering. The Romans after Cannae had accepted that further direct
engagements against Hannibal were unwise, but on familiar ground and
close to their own bases of supply, Roman armies could operate freely
where Hannibal needed to forage to advance. By simply staying close
to him Roman armies could restrict his ability to forage and thus his
ability to maneuver at all, forcing him to remain close to his base
of support in southern Italy.^7 Of course such a strategy only
prolongs the conflict, but the Romans had other armies that were
chipping away at every other corner of Carthage's empire.^8

Armies in close proximity might still manage to forage by sending out
very large foraging parties (e.g. App. Pun. 100, Caes. BAfr. 68;
Bohemund's large foraging party that engages Duquq of Damascus during
the Siege of Antioch (1097-8) also seems to be an example) or by
pointedly sending their foraging parties away from the enemy force
(as with Antony and Octavian's foraging efforts between the two
engagements at Philippi in 42, App. BCiv. 4.122; given the size of
the armies this must have been a desperation move to extend their
operational endurance; they could not have been permanently supplied
on that basis). Still at best the presence of an enemy army might cut
the available foraging territory of an army on the march in half,
which for armies of even a fairly modest size is going to push the
required population above sustainable levels quickly. Of course that
is happening to both armies, which is part of why ancient and
medieval generals are so confident they can force their enemies to
battle once the armies get close: both armies, unable to forage
effectively, have ticking clocks in most cases. Exceptions do happen
(especially when one army has naval supply), but for the most part
the supply situation will eventually compel each army to either fight
or retreat.

Absent a full field army, a fortified site (like a castle) with a
strong cavalry detachment could achieve similar operational results
in restricting enemy forage opportunities. Indeed, as we've discussed
, this is how castles worked at the operational level: the presence
of troops (specifically mounted troops) in the castle made effective
foraging or administration of the land around it impossible for any
invading force that didn't also lay siege to the castle. Consequently
an army looking to maneuver in the region had to neutralize the
castle first or else swiftly march past it into less well-defended
farmlands that could be foraged effectively. Fortified cities and
hill-top towns (oppida) posed similar problems for Alexander the
Great and Caesar respectively: if captured or made friendly (either
by alliance or preemptive surrender) they were sources of supply, but
such a settlement untaken could create supply deadzones and serious
risks in the rear of the army. Indeed the emperor Julian gets himself
into precisely this problem with an audacious march into Persia
without fully securing the rear (Ctesiphon being too well defended),
ending up in a situation where the army could neither safely advance
nor retreat. Consequently even when the road was open there was often
no alternative but to besiege and take these strong points.

Managing Operations

All of which at last lines up most of the most pressing concerns a
commanding general has when considering the march of an army. Of
course the general does not have some of this information to the
precision we've modeled it here: he does not know the exact
population density of the regions he is going to march through and
instead is probably thinking in analog terms: some areas are 'rich'
some are 'sparsely peopled' and so on (which is to say a wise general
is going to want a pretty big 'margin of error' on those daily
foraging calculations); likewise the expected rate of march over a
long period must on some level be an informed guess rather than an
exact calculation.

Still, the general has to first select an objective (probably the
capture of a major civilian center which will bring with it the
countryside it administers), then figure a route of march to get
there. He probably has a decent sense of how much food and fodder his
army will need but at best an imperfect sense of what is going to be
available in enemy territory or where enemy armies might be; that
will demand improvisation on the march in response to changes in the
army's food supply. The army's rate of movement is variable, but
while pushing hard can solve logistics problems, it can also exhaust
soldiers, deplete morale or involve leaving heavy (but important)
baggage behind; marching fast to defeat in battle is a mistake many
commanders make (e.g. Marcus Antonius ('Antony') at Mutina in 43,
Crassus at Carrhae in 53, Antony against Parthia in 36, Harold
Godwinson at Hastings in 1066, Antony at Actium in 31. Antony does
this a lot. I confess I have never quite understood his reputation
among some historians as a 'great captain.').

Indeed it isn't uncommon to see skilled generals employing a variety
of solutions in response to conditions at various points in a
campaign. Once again, the reader who wants a vivid example would do
well to simply read Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico. Caesar
makes a dynamic mix of solutions to supply and movement difficulties,
especially since the terrain of Gaul largely cut Caesar off from
Mediterranean sources of supply beyond the very beginning of his
campaigns. Caesar often divides his army to accomplish multiple
objectives or to move quickly (although this comes very close to
disaster, e.g. Caes. BG 6.32-42 where Caesar splits his army up and
very nearly loses his camp as a result) and as noted always seems to
be arriving at rich farm country or prepared stockpiles of supplies
just as his own is running out (which in turn is allowing him to move
light with minimal baggage and thus move fast, Caes. BG 1.23, 1.34,
1.48, etc). Honestly a good, up-to-date logistics-and-campaign
history of Caesar in Gaul really is desideratum.^9 At the same time,
Caesar's motivational ability clearly also plays a role: both his
ability to get his soldiers to both maintain discipline and push
themselves on campaign but also his ability to retain their
confidence even during marches where food supplies might seem
dangerously low (though it's not clear if he let them know that;
Caesar showed special attention to the days set for regular grain
ration distribution possibly for this reason - knowing that missing a
day might not cause instant starvation but would cause his soldiers
to lose certainty in his leadership).

On the other hand, of course, in a contest against another other
thinking humans, victory often depends on riding the line of failure
as tightly as possible without going over; Caesar repeatedly comes
within sight of logistics disaster when making rapid movements - his
famed celeritas ('speed') - but always lands on sufficient supplies
at the last minute. As you might imagine from how the baggage train
slows an army down, a 'flying column' with just a few days food can
move very quickly, but of course must achieve its objective quickly
and return. Once again the element of calculated risk here is very
high; when Alexander learned that Darius had been seized by Bessus
(330BC) he launches himself in that direction with a flying column
with just two days supplies (hoping to capture Darius, Arr. Anab.
3.21.6-10; on this see Engels op. cit. 83). Had functionally anything
gone wrong (except for the one thing that did go wrong, which was
Darius died before Alexander got to him), Alexander would have been
in dire straits indeed.

Caesar was, of course, uncommonly good at this (with Dyrrhachium in
48BC being the one very notable time things don't quite work out),
but that disguises the complex web of calculation, map-reading (or
scout-reading) and guesswork that goes into it. Most Roman generals,
lacking Caesar's skill, tended towards more careful and methodical
campaigns which were the slow road to a certain victory; one of
Rome's notable advantages was the regularity with which it produced
reliable if unexceptional generals who managed the difficulties of
logistics and movement fine, if not exceptionally. It takes only a
brief glance at the difficulties of Marcus Antonius, Caesar's
protegee, to see why this was valuable: Antony tries again and again
to pull off bold, Caesar-like campaigns and really only succeeds once
(Philippi in 42). Antony has a reputation in the sources as
bull-headed and impulsive in contrast to Caesar's bold but
calculating nature and it really comes out in their campaign
abilities; Caesar's dice always seem to come up just right (too many
times to assign to pure chance) whereas Antony takes similar risks
and more frequently fails. The difference between their decisions was
often very small (indeed, in many cases Antony appears to be taking
the exact same risks) but at the ragged edge of the possible in
logistics, a slight miscalculation can bring catastrophe.

[what-is-happening][what-is-happening]Still from HBO's Rome, the
Battle of Philippi. Antony, on the left, is enjoying the experience
of having a bold lunging march out of safe supply to force a quick
victory against his opponent work for the one and only time this
gamble will pay off for him. Agrippa (right) is presumably thinking
about all of the ways he can exploit this weakness in Antony, a thing
he will do in 31 BC.

In the end, I think there is some good sense to Clausewitz' argument
(drink!) that warfare cannot be boiled down to mere numbers - there
being too many unknowns - and that what separates a serviceable
general from an excellent one is the ineffable quality of being able
to instinctively take in the situation and make the right risks, what
Clausewitz terms 'genius.' At the same time I cannot help but note
that for all of the flashiness of Caesar, the Romans rarely had
brilliant genius; what they had a lot of was workmanlike generals
whose military-political careers (those being conjoined in the Roman
world) had prepared them for the difficult administrative task of
making the army go, of managing marches, supplies, foraging and so
on. Roman elites serves after all first as military tribunes (who
frequently led foraging parties), then as quaestors (who managed
supplies and pay),^10 then later as praetors in command of smaller
armies before being consuls in command of big armies (and of course
the fact that all of these Roman elites also managed large estates
with huge - frequently enslaved - workforces must also have prepared
them). A steady supply of solidly adequate generals backed up by a
superior military system - mostly superior in mobilization rather
than actual fighting - was enough.

Meanwhile on the other end of the spectrum you have generals whose
over-sized armies seem to wallow, practically paralyzed by the
herculean effort to merely get them moving. As a younger student, I
always found myself puzzled by this - how hard can it be to just
march in a direction? Is the general just lazy? But what I hope you
can see in this series is that there is actually quite a lot going on
to keep a large army moving. A mediocre general (or a general with
medicore subordinates or staff) with a very large army may find
themselves overwhelmed by the coordination demands it imposes - who
marches where? When? On what roads? How do you make sure they don't
run into each other and that there is enough food locally for each
group? Who takes the front? At what rate of march? And what do you do
when invariably units that you cannot directly observe (because the
army is very big) move slower than you need or get lost? On top of
this the general has to be managing the direction of march and also
the supplies of food as well as the deployment of foraging parties.
The number and complexity of these moving pieces only increases as
the army gets larger, while the hours in the day for actually
marching decreases as the army train lengthens, and so the army just
crawls along, paralyzed by its own bulk.

Conclusions

Consequently, going back to where we began this series, while the
general of a pre-industrial army has at best only limited control
over how it fights in battle, his control over the army in the
marches before the battle is much more extensive and coordination in
this phase can shape the battle or siege to come. Because foraging
and supply concerns are directly connected to army size, a military
system (or individual commander) that is better at managing these
issues can push larger armies further out, opening up new
opportunities in the campaign space. By contrast a system (or
general) that is poor at this kind of thing will be forced to accept
either a smaller army or else may end extremely limited in options:
either unable travel certain key routes with insufficient supplies or
population or else functionally paralyzed by the size of the army
itself.

Of course related to this the general mismatch between the size of
armies and the states that fielded them in Europe during the early
modern period (esp. 1500-1700 or so) made those armies increasingly
destructive. As the transition to gunpowder warfare pressured states
to deploy larger infantry contingents in their armies, the logistics
systems which had worked in the late Middle Ages buckled under the
strain, leaving the soldiers in question to supply themselves
locally, with the catastrophic results we discussed in part II.
Consequently while the increased effectiveness of these large armies
was clearly welcomed by their rulers, by the mid-1600s it obviously
became clear to European monarchs and their generals that the
destructiveness of these forces had become an intolerable hindrance,
leading to the (re)establishment of centralized state logistics in
Europe which would in turn both motivate and feed off of increasing
administrative capacity which in turn leads towards the establishment
of the modern administrative state.

Finally, while this last post has been mostly focused on this
question once again from the perspective of the general, we must also
keep in mind that even well-run armies caused substantial misery
among the rural population as they moved. Even an army not trying to
cause damage, by pulling in such a massive amount of the local
surplus, could push local communities into hardship. At some point we
may come back to actual strategies of devastation apart from
foraging, but of course if armies could push peasants to the brink
merely by being around, they could do even worse if they actually
intended to cause damage (though ironically the upper-limit to this
sort of damage was often limited by the small size of these armies;
administrative capacity cuts both ways and the very things that have
made more modern armies capable of causing less damage merely by
existing have made them more capable of causing much more damage by
intent).

The 'background noise' of pre-industrial warfare was thus looted
barns and crowded roads; the army had to do these tasks in order to
sustain itself on the march, the general had to coordinate these
tasks in order to keep the army moving and the rural population had
to endure these tasks in order to survive.

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 1. I should note, I am going to refer here to our imaginary general
    with masculine pronouns. Women commanding armies in this period
    in the broader Mediterranean was not entirely unknown but it was
    exceedingly rare; even in most societies where women might rule
    in their own name it was very common for army command in the
    field to be delegated to a male subordinate (women commanding the
    defense in the event of a siege was more common, though still
    rare). Again exceptions exist: Artemisia of Caria, Aisha at the
    Battle of the Camel, Matilda of Tuscany, etc., but only a
    relative handful over a very long period with very many army
    commanders. So it seems reasonable to use masculine pronouns for
    an occupation that was in this period performed overwhelmingly by
    males, though that does not erase the small number of women who
    did command armies, thus this footnote. 
 2. Lots of adjustments here: they need 365-person-days of grain to
    survive per year, but there will also be fodder for animals and
    some small surplus for sale. On the other hand, the nutritional
    needs of an average soldier are much higher than the nutrition
    needs of the average rural person - which after all includes
    women and children with lower calorie demands (high activity
    adult male might require upwards of 3,500 calories per day where
    children, the elderly an less active folks might be below 2,000).
    I'm working my numbers from a model of a smallholding Roman
    farming family that I developed for my current book project. 
 3. In Peasants, Citizens and Soldiers (2012) 
 4. Of the actual flaming kind, not British flashlights 
 5. Unsurprisingly, one of the few ancient Mediterranean polities to
    do this with any regularity and success were the Romans. This
    comes out very clearly in Julius Caesar's campaigns in Gaul and
    also in the lead up to the Battle of Philippi, where in the
    latter case the armies were absolutely too large to march as a
    single formation. That said the Romans still only did this from
    time to time; for the far more common use of these kinds of
    operations in the pre-modern period one must look to the Steppe. 
 6. "Why is Athens here?" So the Sicilian Expedition is a really big
    (and very disastrous) overseas operation, but seems to have dealt
    with supplies locally. The reports of reinforcements include men,
    horses and money, but not massive amounts of food. In practice
    the Athenian army was of a size that could be supported on the
    relatively rich grain-lands of Sicily. On the flip side, one
    might argue that provisioning the city of Athens substantially by
    sea during the Peloponnesian War is a feat sufficient to merit
    inclusion in this list and I tend to agree; thus Athens'
    inclusion. 
 7. This effort is treated in detail in P. Erdkamp's masterful Hunger
    and the Sword (1998), which is, alas, very expensive. 
 8. Which matters, to be clear: soldiers need a 'theory of victory'
    to sustain morale. 'We bottle up Hannibal here until everyone
    involved dies of old age' is not going to inspire anyone to put
    up with hardship, but 'We hold Hannibal here while Scipio and his
    army sock it to the Carthaginians in Spain and Flaccus and his
    mates slowly reconquer southern Italy' is much better. 
 9. But this, this ain't it, chief. 
10. At least in the Middle Republic. Caesar's quaestors seem not to
    do this, curiously - something that may have to do with Caesar's
    manifest near total command and logistics independence on account
    of being at odds with much of the Senate. 

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Published by Bret Devereaux

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Published August 12, 2022

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50 thoughts on "Collections: Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part III:
On the Move"

 1. [5938b][5938b] Michael Alan Hutson says:
    August 12, 2022 at 11:34 am

    " flag enough that the heavy wagon doesn't slide back" flat

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     1. [87c59][87c59] Andrew says:
        August 12, 2022 at 1:16 pm

        My first read of that sentence was that it was something to
        do with flagstones and surface quality. It says only when the
        next sentence directly referred to surface quality that I
        realised it was a typo.

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 2. [46357][46357] Oplae says:
    August 12, 2022 at 12:16 pm

    Horses did not evolve on the Eurasian steppe; they actually
    evolved in North America before crossing over Beringia into
    Eurasia and then becoming extinct in North America.

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     1. [09e98][09e98] Arilou says:
        August 12, 2022 at 3:46 pm

        The ancestor of the horse did, but not modern horses.

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 3. [d1aa8][d1aa8] ECD says:
    August 12, 2022 at 12:16 pm

    Given the requirement to follow roads and paths was there ever
    any attempt to make false ones that didn't lead anywhere useful,
    or was that just too expensive and difficult to be worthwhile?

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     1. [ba117][ba117] GreatWyrmGold says:
        August 12, 2022 at 12:56 pm

        In practice, most roads before the modern era (and by length,
        most roads today, probably even in industrialized countries)
        weren't constructed per se, so much as they emerged from
        people consistently walking over the same stretches of
        ground. Making a fake road that doesn't go anywhere would be
        rather tricky.

        It's also twice invalidated by armies' tendency to acquire
        local guides, one way or another. On one hand, the guides
        would know which roads were fake. On the other hand, if the
        guide was so motivated, they could lead the army down the
        wrong road.

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         1. [09e98][09e98] Arilou says:
            August 12, 2022 at 3:48 pm

            Something that happens to spanish conquistadors in the
            New World with some regularity.

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         2. [836c8][836c8] cptbutton says:
            August 12, 2022 at 4:56 pm

            "Ivan Susanin was a Russian national hero and martyr of
            the early-17th-century Time of Troubles. According to the
            popular legend, Polish troops seeking to kill Tsar
            Mikhail hired Susanin as a guide. Susanin persuaded them
            to take a secret path through the Russian forests, and
            neither they nor Susanin were ever heard from again."

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

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         3. [705bb][705bb] Mary says:
            August 12, 2022 at 5:51 pm

            There's a Conan the Barbarian story where the guide does
            just that, into ambush, as revenge for his children's
            death

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     2. [da049][da049] Nate T says:
        August 12, 2022 at 12:57 pm

        An army is going to be led by local guides, who presumably
        would know which of the roads were useless.

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 4. [76728][76728] Brent F says:
    August 12, 2022 at 12:40 pm

    So there seems to be an interesting dichotomy at play between
    cavalry and infantry here, that the horsemen and his very hungry
    mounts take up the lion's share of the food requirements compared
    to the number of combat effectives, but the horseman's mobility
    to open up foraging range is also a big component of what lets
    the host feed itself. Does that dynamic get studies for why
    certain military systems had the force ratios they did?

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 5. [26085][26085] Matthew Neuendorf says:
    August 12, 2022 at 12:45 pm

    This brings to mind the so-called "shadow warfare" of the 10th
    century Roman armies in defense of Asia Minor against the Arabs.
    The idea was that you couldn't hold all of the passes with enough
    force to prevent an incursion, but you could track the enemy army
    just fine. By having each thematic force do its own thing,
    shadowing the enemy army independently of the others and taking
    care not to be caught by the invaders while staying close enough
    to prevent them from being able to forage or raid effectively,
    you limit the damage they can do and shorten their time in Roman
    territory. Then, once the enemy turns back, your forces rush
    ahead and combine at the pass that you've identified them as
    using, and confront them in battle there (or preferably stage an
    ambush), while their stamina, supplies, and morale are at their
    lowest point, home is just on the other side of the mountains,
    and they're laden with spoils.

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 6. [f1d47][f1d47] Patrick Sean Mullins says:
    August 12, 2022 at 12:48 pm

    "One of these days we may come back and talk about Roman naval
    and riverine supply in more detail."

    Yes, please! A treatment of the variables involved in water
    transport, and how they adjust the mathematics already presented,
    would be a real treat.

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     1. [ba117][ba117] GreatWyrmGold says:
        August 12, 2022 at 12:58 pm

        My intuition is that they don't adjust the wagon-equation
        mathematics, so much as replace (or at least supplement)
        them. Riverine logistics don't improve the ability of an army
        to "forage" the countryside, they reduce or eliminate the
        army's need to "forage" locally.

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 7. [ba117][ba117] GreatWyrmGold says:
    August 12, 2022 at 12:52 pm

    Footnote 1 is a perfect example of the sort of aside that can
    really only go in a footnote. I love it.

        In many games, this freedom of movement is greatly amplified:
        marching armies, imagined to be no longer restricted to
        roads, are effectively able to march anywhere not bounded by
        obvious natural barriers (e.g. the more recent Total War
        titles, Mount & Blade, and Battle Brothers).

    This might just be a factor of which strategy games I spent my
    childhood playing, but I'd point to Civilization as the big
    example. Roads are a nice bonus, they help you get units from the
    far corners of your empire to whichever side your current war is
    on, but they're frankly unnecessary. This makes some sense when
    exploring, but less once you start exterminating.

        In practice we're actually still being a bit too nice to our
        army: we're assuming they march every day. But while humans
        can more or less do that, pack and draft animals cannot.

    Reminder: Humans evolved to walk upright because it let them walk
    four-legged animals to death. (Standard disclaimer about nothing
    being 100% certain in paleontology, but I find the evidence
    pretty compelling. Less-standard disclaimer that we have other
    adaptations that help with that, but walking upright is much more
    dramatic than, say, persperation.)

        (caption about Gettysburg (1993)

    I move that someone who knows what they're talking about do an
    in-depth, Dan-Olson-style dissection of Gettysburg (1993).

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     1. [38418][38418] CeltAtom says:
        August 12, 2022 at 3:44 pm

        Here's a three-part review that I found informative: https://
        youtube.com/watch?v=tAL9J4VCt84

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 8. [da049][da049] Nate T says:
    August 12, 2022 at 12:57 pm

    An excellent series and leaves a lot of things to think about!
    Reading all this puts me in mind of EU4 and the supply limits
    that a province has. Going over those adds to the attrition an
    army takes, of course, but this series suggests it should also
    add some kind of creeping penalty to the province thus occupied,
    eventually leading to lowered development (and thus even less
    supply capacity in the future!)

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     1. [ba117][ba117] GreatWyrmGold says:
        August 12, 2022 at 1:02 pm

        My intuition says a big obstacle to that would be the AI not
        realizing they were despoiling their own provinces/allies
        provinces/provinces they intended to take. Every new mechanic
        in a grand strategy game where the AI and player are playing
        with (mostly) the same rules is another rule the AI needs to
        account for (unless the devs just let the AI cheat, which is
        suboptimal).

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         1. [ff2b3][ff2b3] Civile Bellum says:
            August 12, 2022 at 2:33 pm

            Even with supply and attrition rules today, the AI is
            given so many exceptions and bonuses as to very nearly
            make it a player-hindering-only mechanic. There are some
            ways for players to take advantage of it, but it almost
            only applies to defensive sieges in high-attrition
            provinces. Even that is questionable, because it often
            won't apply to the AI anyway.

            Besides, there already is a devastation mechanic where it
            can take years for provinces to recover. And ti's fairly
            well though-out, with some options to more quickly
            recover after warfare, and good reason to build some
            castles & etc.

            https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Province#Devastation

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     2. [76728][76728] Brent F says:
        August 12, 2022 at 1:17 pm

        The first Medieval Total War probably got this sort of thing
        much more correct than its sequels. Using a Risk board
        strategic map meant you had to follow predictable paths in
        marching which meant meeting engagements if both sides were
        prepared to risk battle. And any hostile army wrecked local
        infrastructure by marching through it, degrading the value of
        the province and could totally ruin decades to centuries of
        careful build up in a place that had changed hands
        repeatedly. Which in turn, gave besiegers an incentive to do
        the expensive act of bribing garrisons to hand over the
        castles because that reduced the destructiveness of the
        conquest.

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         1. [09e98][09e98] Arilou says:
            August 12, 2022 at 3:50 pm

            Newer total wars have actually tended to restrict
            movement a lot more (though usually with natural
            features) partially I suspect to make the AI better able
            to deal with things. If you look at the Three Kingdoms
            map for instance you can see how the game kinda funnels
            you often into fairly limited movements in alot of
            places)

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     3. [03ef2][03ef2] Tiercelet says:
        August 12, 2022 at 5:38 pm

        It does, in the form of the "devastation" province modifier.
        (Which reduces supply, goods produced, institution spread,
        and a lot of other stuff). The main source of devastation is
        looting by armies.

        Unfortunately this is not applied by friendly forces in
        controlled territory (only hostile ones or owner/allied
        forces sieging a currently-enemy-controlled province), but as
        the other comments point out, the AI is dumb enough about
        needless attrition without having another way to sandbag
        itself.

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 9. [82a47][82a47] andersstarmark says:
    August 12, 2022 at 1:01 pm

    Clearly the solution is to use the undead as soldiers.

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     1. [ba117][ba117] GreatWyrmGold says:
        August 12, 2022 at 1:38 pm

        That doesn't eliminate operational challenges, it just shifts
        them from "pillage enough supplies to keep the soldiers
        alive" to, say, "make sure you have enough necromancers per
        unit to stop individual zombies from getting lost and eating
        local peasants".

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     2. [eac03][eac03] ey81 says:
        August 12, 2022 at 2:11 pm

        I've actually derived a lot of solitary intellectual
        enjoyment from trying to apply what I know of military theory
        (mostly from Prof. Devereux) to the armies of the Night King.
        Issues of morale and cohesion, command and control, logistics
        and supply can be pretty interesting with an army of zombie
        types.

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10. [8391e][8391e] cwillu says:
    August 12, 2022 at 1:31 pm

    The phrase "all roads lead to Rome" takes on a new dangerous
    meaning: "All roads [can] lead [an army] to Rome".

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     1. [ba117][ba117] GreatWyrmGold says:
        August 12, 2022 at 1:38 pm

        "Danger" is just "opportunity" viewed from a different angle.
        Just ask Caesar.

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     2. [defau][defau] ad (@ad98832376) says:
        August 12, 2022 at 4:43 pm

        But also the reverse: All roads lead FROM Rome, and a Roman
        army can always march to your homeland.

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11. [1c772][1c772] Adam says:
    August 12, 2022 at 1:49 pm

    I doubt it would be a good use of the blog's time, but being a
    Stephen Donaldson fan, I would love to see an utter dissection of
    the long march in The Illearth War. Granted, even in the book, it
    doesn't go well; Hile Troy marches about a quarter of his army to
    death, but I suspect even that would be impossible in real life.
    And the cohesion and morale angles of it would be interesting as
    well, despite the aforementioned 'Marched us so hard that 1 guy
    in 4 is dead even before you take into account actually fighting
    the enemy' the army stays fanatically loyal to both each other
    and to their commanders. Granted, fighting against cannibalistic
    monsters under the command of an evil godlike entity tends to be
    a bit starker and more clear-cut than conflicts in real life, but
    still.

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12. [1c772][1c772] Adam says:
    August 12, 2022 at 1:59 pm

    Also, second, unconnected thought. It has a lot of other
    problems, but the early 90s Lords of the Realm 2 seemed to get
    some aspects of this right. Armies could move off the roads, but
    they were a LOT slower. (IIRC, all armies had 15 movement points
    a turn. Going on road cost 1, farms cost 6, and just kind of
    clear terrain that wasn't being farmed was 3 or 4. You couldn't
    go into forests or mountains at all.) And while the armies didn't
    have to move around to keep foraging, they did have to forage,
    and it could and frequently did devastate a county.

    You could get this especially nasty feedback loop going where the
    devastation of the county as armies marched through and trampled
    over things made it impossible to develop the county, even to the
    point of building a castle. (One castle per county). The castle
    enabled you to hold on to the county with a much smaller force,
    and also kept the populace less in the line of fire when someone
    wanted to attack and seize it. But without a castle, the area is
    very difficult to hold, which means that it's going to change
    hands more frequently and you're going to have larger armies
    camping out in the area, preventing the accumulation of food and
    population necessary to develop the place up, and often driving
    what civilians still live there to neighboring counties. It was
    not entirely uncommon to create a dead-zone after a while, where
    pretty much nothing and nobody lived.

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     1. [7d02e][7d02e] Hrotha says:
        August 12, 2022 at 6:08 pm

        LotR2 with feeding armies on was absolutely brutal. It was so
        hard to recover if you started losing your cattle. And you
        could also destroy enemy fields, effectively ruining the
        county for many years to come.

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         1. [1c772][1c772] Adam says:
            August 12, 2022 at 6:16 pm

            Honestly, I found that with the extra stresses of feeding
            armies, I couldn't afford much in the way of cattle.
            Grain fields (assuming you have max fertility, which you
            should) were much more efficient assuming you had enough
            manpower to bring in the harvest. Since health also
            tended to cap pop size, it was rare to be able to farm
            more than 4-5 fields even under optimal conditions. You
            then needed a couple of fallow ones to maintain
            fertility, but I'd only put in cattle to soak up "excess"
            fields after I had all the ones I could comfortably
            harvest with grain.

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13. [5938b][5938b] Michael Alan Hutson says:
    August 12, 2022 at 2:08 pm

    Re. how early in the morning light conditions allow preparing for
    march: Do we have examples where a full moon allowed an
    extra-early start or an extra-late halt? Or conversely, when
    heavy overcast cut back effective daylight hours?

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     1. [836c8][836c8] cptbutton says:
        August 12, 2022 at 5:03 pm

        I wonder how much the shorter day length is yet another
        reason why winter campaigns are usually a Bad Idea.

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         1. [705bb][705bb] Mary says:
            August 12, 2022 at 5:53 pm

            I suspect it's overdetermined

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14. [0ee4c][0ee4c] onodera says:
    August 12, 2022 at 2:15 pm

    I would love to see Napoleon's Russian campaign dissected from a
    logistical standpoint. Is there existing literature covering this
    topic?

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15. [d5bc6][d5bc6] Matthew says:
    August 12, 2022 at 2:39 pm

    Seems like all of this is an incentive to do the job with as
    small an army as you think will get the job done. Maybe you could
    recruit an army of 10,000 if you tried, but if 1,000 is "enough"
    for whatever purpose you have in mind (driving off raiders?) then
    just take those guys. They'll get there faster.

    All this seems to explain a lot about about the anglo-saxon fyrd
    system. If you're operating in your own territory, have a small
    professional force to march around to wherever the enemy has
    shown up and then a lot of locals you can call on to fill out the
    army (who being already present as the local farmers, don't have
    to be fed until they show up to fight). The viking raiders may be
    able to match your professionals, but they better gtfo before the
    fyrd congeals into numbers sufficient to crush them.

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     1. [defau][defau] ad (@ad98832376) says:
        August 12, 2022 at 4:52 pm

        And an intruding army is going to find a bunch of fortified
        towns held by the fyrd behind it. If it besieges them, it is
        not going to do much raiding. If it leaves them behind, it
        renders itself vulnerable.

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16. [c9d8a][c9d8a] edrial1 says:
    August 12, 2022 at 3:14 pm

    Do you have a link to that book review of yours? I know that
    you'd have probably put that in the hyperlink if you could, but I
    do want to shoot the shot here

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17. [c8f95][c8f95] Lars Raeder Clausen says:
    August 12, 2022 at 4:10 pm

    Three questions:

    How well do these calculations match up with real reports of army
    speed? Where what armies are at what days ought to be one of the
    better-documented bits.

    How much does random incidents slow down an army? In Squad Leader
    the board game I was struck by just how slowly a convoy of trucks
    could move, but figured it hot stopped frequently by breakdowns
    or confusion or other things. Were random stops just rare enough
    to not alter the calculations?

    And finally: can we have a high-contrast version of the blog? My
    eyes hurt after reading this much grey-on-grey.

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18. [a097a][a097a] James Carpenter says:
    August 12, 2022 at 4:14 pm

    You know with how often Bret metions the whole "doing reps does
    not stop you from dying of starvation and heat" if a actual
    genuine superhuman solider program actually existed and worked I
    think that would be the first thing to fix/improve

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     1. [03ef2][03ef2] Tiercelet says:
        August 12, 2022 at 5:48 pm

        I believe this comes up in Scalzi's Old Man's War, actually!

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19. [defau][defau] ad (@ad98832376) says:
    August 12, 2022 at 5:01 pm

    "what separates a serviceable general from an excellent one is
    the ineffable quality of being able to instinctively take in the
    situation and make the right risks,"

    Seems to me that "instinctive" in this sense just means "I don't
    know how he worked it out".

    As with this video demonstrating that:

    a) You have to counter steer in order to ride a bike.
    b) Everyone who can ride a bike does this.
    c) Hardly anyone knows that they do this.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cNmUNHSBac

    They learned to do it "instinctively", but they could not tell
    anyone to do it like that.

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     1. [705bb][705bb] Mary says:
        August 12, 2022 at 6:01 pm

        Metis vs techne

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20. [705bb][705bb] Mary says:
    August 12, 2022 at 5:56 pm

    Remember all the folklore about crossroads. Remember that the
    Romans and Greeks had a goddess of crossroads. Remember how those
    expected to rise as malignant undead were often buried at the
    crossroads.

    This springs from the great peril of taking the wrong way.

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     1. [5938b][5938b] Michael Alan Hutson says:
        August 12, 2022 at 6:24 pm

        "Don't stray off the track!--if you do, it is a thousand to
        one you will never find it again and never get out of
        Mirkwood; and then I don't suppose I, or any one else, will
        ever see you again." -The Hobbit

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21. [8f608][8f608] Tom says:
    August 12, 2022 at 6:00 pm

    "I confess I have never quite understood his reputation among
    some historians as a 'great captain.'"

    Is this a case of good captain, bad general? While at an
    operational and tactical level Antony seems to have been pretty
    hopeless, he does seem to have been remarkably good at
    maintaining morale among his troops, with his armies seeming to
    refuse to desert him even as his military and political prospects
    collapse (at various points), and only after Actium does his
    command ability actually seem to disintegrate. Perhaps a man
    better suited to junior officership, who was overpromoted...

    Which leads me onto another point, since that raises the question
    as to why a general as astute as Caesar promoted a man like
    Antony as high as he did (considering too that Antony was not at
    that point a particularly valuable political ally), and bearing
    in mind that Antony was not Caesar's first choice for the post of
    magister equites - how would you rate Antony-as-general against
    Labienus? Labienus's reputation seems to suffer to me perhaps
    unduly from what happened at Pharsalus, but I don't know enough
    about his performances as a solo general.

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22. [7d02e][7d02e] Hrotha says:
    August 12, 2022 at 6:01 pm

    I always sort of assumed that the brutality of the Thirty Years'
    War was due to ideological radicalization given the context of
    religious war. It's interesting to see the relation might go the
    other way around, and that radicalization may have followed the
    increased brutality of armies operating under these new
    logistical strains

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23. [3f376][3f376] Kevin says:
    August 12, 2022 at 6:24 pm

    I'm not fully understanding why this is an imperative: "So it's
    7am and we start marching! Well, not quite. Someone starts
    marching. But the back of the army now has to wait for the entire
    rest of the army to march past it in sequence." Why couldn't the
    order to March be passed along by voice commands in relays down
    the march column, or music signals, or even mounted messengers?
    That would allow components to begin march/end march/receive
    other orders relatively quickly. You don't have to wait until the
    guys in front of you move. In modern military drill, we see this
    all the time; a CO will start the sequence, e.g. "Battalion!" --
    which alerts the sub-commanders to repeat the command down the
    line to alert their particular sub-commands ("Company!" "Platoon!
    " "Detail!" Etc. ) Soldiers stand by or come to attention and
    wait for the follow-up command -- "Forward March!" or whatever.
    Then that component executes that command. You won't get a huge
    column moving in unison, but you could relay orders to the entire
    column much faster than sitting around waiting for someone else
    ahead of you to move, or form up, or stop, or prepare for action,
    etc.

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     1. [5938b][5938b] Michael Alan Hutson says:
        August 12, 2022 at 6:29 pm

        There literally isn't room for an army that stretches out for
        miles on the road to line up like that. And you could be
        underway in the same time it would take. Think of what a
        large parking lot and its exits are like after a large event.

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