[HN Gopher] The tyranny of the wagon equation
___________________________________________________________________
The tyranny of the wagon equation
Author : dTal
Score : 191 points
Date : 2022-09-06 11:37 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (maximumeffort.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (maximumeffort.substack.com)
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| This is known in mathematics as the Jeep problem:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeep_problem
| superjan wrote:
| In university, my colleague students were developing strategies
| to the "camel banana problem" for transporting n bananas by
| camel into the desert.
|
| https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/230/a-camel-tra...
| JAA1337 wrote:
| zardo wrote:
| To make this map to the real world, terrain must be taken into
| account. Obviously donkeys can haul more weight over more
| distance on flat ground than climbing a mountain pass.
|
| What's the approach to doing that? Make the delta and v terms
| functions of the terrain? Re-derive the equation based on energy
| rather than distance?
| smallnamespace wrote:
| Even easier: redefine distance, e.g. 1 mountain mile = 5 flat
| ground miles
| dragontamer wrote:
| There is an escape from the donkey in practice.
|
| Its called a boat, which can scale as big as possible and supply
| any number of donkeys across the entirety of the Mediterranean.
| thunderbird120 wrote:
| In practicality there was also another solution in the ancient
| world. If you're going conquering you're probably going
| somewhere with people to conquer. Those people probably have
| food. Just take theirs.
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| It's called foraging, it's what practically everyone did.
| It's a nasty business and you can't do it to the same people
| twice, because it typically involved killing and enslaving
| that people.
|
| https://acoup.blog/2022/07/29/collections-logistics-how-
| did-...
| toss1 wrote:
| >> "Just take theirs"
|
| That "Just" word is carrying a very heavy load . . .
|
| (The people whose food you are planning to forage will be
| objecting, likely with weapons)
| yetanother4968 wrote:
| More likely they are fleeing since they are largely unarmed
| peasants, who can't stand up to trained, armed, and armored
| soldiers.
| 988747 wrote:
| And when they flee they take some of their food supplies
| with them and hide the rest. Foraging army might be able
| to find some of it, but rarely all. Also, if you are in
| enemy territory it is entirely possible to completely
| miss some remote village. It's not like they have a
| satellite map.
| toss1 wrote:
| >>And when they flee they take some of their food
| supplies with them and hide the rest
|
| YUP!
|
| And beyond that, what they can't take or hide, they may
| very well burn to slow down the advance
|
| Just because you have advance spies and they report
| existing supplies, you just cannot count on having those
| available when the full infantry arrives.
| bombcar wrote:
| The underlying blog post goes into details on that, too. It
| is covered in "foraging"
| https://acoup.blog/2022/08/12/collections-logistics-how-
| did-...
| mellavora wrote:
| as long as you are near the shore-line, I can see that working.
| Though you might also need to be near a port;
| loading/offloading is less efficient without infrastructure.
|
| However, there may be other uses for the port, which suggests
| most of the good ports will have cities built around them.
|
| So yes, as long as you constrain your march to the area around
| friendly cities, boats work great
| tomjen3 wrote:
| You don't really need much infrastructure when you don't use
| containers for your boats.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > as long as you are near the shore-line
|
| Look at Bronze / early Iron age Mediterranean empires. They
| stuck to the shorelines.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Carthage#/media/File:C.
| ..
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/Greek_Co.
| ..
| marcosdumay wrote:
| They started moving inroad after they started making roads.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The blog posts by Devereaux (acoup blog) that spurred this on,
| are specifically about over-land logistics. Boats, of course,
| avoid this problem entirely -- assuming all of your targets are
| coastal or by rivers!
| Animats wrote:
| Caravans faced this problem, but the solution was commercial -
| the caravanserai.
|
| A serai is a corral for animals. A caravanserai is a truck stop -
| fuel, food, motel, parking. Caravans resupplied at caravanserai.
| The Silk Road was a chain of caravanserai. If there's enough
| local production to supply a caravanserai, caravans can take that
| route.
|
| The military version of this is a chain of supply bases. This is
| all too common. A gallon of diesel fuel delivered by the US
| military to outermost bases in Afghanistan could cost well over
| US$100. Part of the trip was made by transport aircraft, and part
| by helicopter, all of it consuming fuel. Bases have to be within
| helicopter range of each other. The main justification for the
| Osprey, which is a horrible kludge of an aircraft, is more range,
| allowing fewer bases to reach a goal.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| By no means an expert but my understanding is that if you can't
| make the logistics work for a military operation then the
| chances of failure are very high, maybe even literally 100%.
| chasd00 wrote:
| my 10 year old, out of the blue, told me once "artillery wins
| battles but logistics wins wars". Heh he's really into a
| couple youtube history channels.
| trhway wrote:
| Watch the Kherson region now - Russia has a 25K strong army
| on the right side of Dneper river there, and thanks to US
| supplied high precision rockets Ukraine has practically
| disabled the bridges leading there, so that Russian army has
| only minimal supply using ferries. The railway from Crimea to
| those bridges and ferries had also been constantly stricken
| (frequently the strike would be at a large military supply
| train riding there)
| schoen wrote:
| > If there's enough local production to supply a caravanserai,
| caravans can take that route.
|
| That's an interesting constraint; were there also extra-
| expensive caravanserai in places where that production wasn't
| quite local and some of those resources had to be trucked, er,
| caravanned in?
| samatman wrote:
| Sort of, mostly yes, but never fodder or water. This is the
| great advantage of the camel: if a camel train rolls into a
| caravanserai, and the available fodder at that oasis has been
| eaten, there's a good change they'll make it to the next
| oasis with thin, very unhappy, camels. Mules would just die.
| csours wrote:
| I had heard of caravanserai from the idle/progression Kittens
| Game. I wish I had looked it up earlier.
| vitiral wrote:
| Funny.
|
| However, I find some assumptions suspect. Unlike rockets, donkeys
| can consume fuel en-route by grazing. Armies can also consume
| fuel by hunting, plundering and being "quartered" by their own
| people. You can make "supply trains" by having small groups of
| military gather such resources from a closer distance.
|
| This is probably fairly accurate for camels and distances in the
| Saharan desert though, and you'd have to add the weight of water
| as well!
| qikInNdOutReply wrote:
| What about the vorbis strategy of placing supplies in hidden
| caches ahead of time without a return trip along the route?
|
| Imagine that applied to the rocket equation. Stationary fuel
| tanks attaching to the rocket mid rise..
| gibspaulding wrote:
| Stationary fuel tanks seem problematic for rockets since your
| rendezvous would have to happen at such high speeds. You'd
| either have to decelerate the rocket back to zero or
| accelerate the fuel to the speed of the rocket.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| There are some places that your relative velocity with a
| propellant depot may be near zero already.
|
| Natural staging points are not stationary, but they may be
| in fixed orbits, such as LEO (of a certain altitude,
| inclination), maybe a halo orbit of a Lagrange point
| (NASA's Gateway is in NHRO, which is similar), or a highly
| Elliptical orbit near escape velocity. And you can do this
| for Mars as well.
|
| By refilling at these staging points, you can chop up the
| rocket equation so you don't get hit hard by the
| exponential. You have to get fuel there in the first place,
| and to do that you can use slower, more efficient
| trajectories or solar-electric propulsion (much higher Isp
| but slower) or in situ propellant production. You can also
| have better cooling at these staging points, taking a mass
| penalty off your crewed vehicle and offloaded to the depot
| in the case of cryogenic propellants that may boil off over
| time without an active chiller.
|
| Propellant depots are a pretty powerful tool for expanding
| capability for space exploration. NASA picked SpaceX's
| Starship as the lander for their Artemis lunar missions,
| and that will fuel up using a depot in Earth orbit.
| philwelch wrote:
| Remember that all motion is relative. You can't model space
| travel as simply going from point to point. Instead, you
| transfer from orbit to orbit and have to match velocities
| wherever you go. Relative to the propellant depot you have
| to reach zero velocity, but the propellant depot will be
| orbiting something at a very high speed just like you are.
|
| You will likely have to go out of your way somewhat to
| reach a propellant depot, so you don't want your propellant
| depots at the bottom of heavy gravity wells or in hard-to-
| reach orbits. But it's still a viable strategy.
| JAA1337 wrote:
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| Well that was a strategy indeed but it can only go so far,
| additionally the same logistics apply to the food you place
| in the cache, you have to transport it there, the meat of the
| original article was, that really you are constrained in your
| movement by the terrains agricultural output, in high
| production terrain, your population and the enemies
| population as well will stockpile food for themselves that
| the army can draw upon, in places where the terrain is not
| suitable for high intensity agriculture the food available is
| much less and an army would quickly find itself exhausting
| all the stockpiles, in a matter of weeks, armies eat a lot of
| food.
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| The original blog goes into a lot more detail, including the
| mechanics, logistics and risks of foraging.
|
| The solution to getting around the wagon equation is ships,
| ships could carry tremendous amounts of food, with a minimal
| crew and thus minimum consumption, only problem is ships are
| expensive.
|
| On donkeys, typically armies used mules and draft horses
| instead of donkeys, because of behavioral and maximum load
| reasons, and grazing is not enough for mules and large horses,
| also on certain seasons there is not enough grass for animals
| to graze in the terrain either.
|
| The original blog has also a piece on nomad logistics, who used
| significantly smaller horses that can be sustained only by
| grazing, these armies were able to traverse a lot larger
| distances, hence the success of the mongol armies.
| antonymy wrote:
| >only problem is ships are expensive.
|
| Well not the only problem, there's also the fact ships are
| limited to water deep enough to carry them, so you can't go
| too far from the coast or navigable rivers. Granted, in
| Europe, there are lots of navigable rivers that make
| waterborne logistics fairly simple if you have the boats. Ask
| the Vikings.
| samatman wrote:
| This is mitigated by the fact that rivers are attractive
| places to live, so the odds that a target of conquest is on
| a navigable river are fairly high.
|
| Gets pretty bleak if this isn't true, and if your foe
| doesn't have to stay put, much worse. The Chinese tried to
| scour the horse barbarians of the hinterlands a few times.
| Didn't go well.
| dmckeon wrote:
| In the 1200s the eastern horse-hordes used frozen rivers to
| speed up their rate of advance and took much of the area
| west of the Urals by surprise.
| igorkraw wrote:
| The linked source blog goes into that:
|
| - grazing costs time, which increases the total amount of food
| that must be carried
|
| - foraging equally costs time, so foraging more means a slower
| moving army
|
| - but an army can only forage as it passes through terrain, so
| you _need_ to keep moving, otherwise your army will eat the
| area into starvation, then die
| Retric wrote:
| It's not quite that simple. Horses can eat much faster than
| they can digest so a few short breaks can represent a lot of
| food over a day. Further, horses eat significantly more than
| people. A 30% slower pace that requires 40% less food per day
| is a net win on distance but not time.
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| The main issue, is that the horses of agricultural
| societies are bred to a large size, and cannot survive by
| grazing alone, they need to have grains in their diet.
| Retric wrote:
| That's false. Horses doing heavy work can't survive on
| grazing alone, but they are perfectly fine when left
| alone in good pasture. Thus the phrase "put out to
| pasture," old animals where often given something of a
| retirement where they where left to take care of
| themselves rather than simply be killed.
| [deleted]
| geysersam wrote:
| But the horses here will be doing work. Carrying men and
| supplies. Or is that not heavy enough? Admittedly I know
| very little about horses.
| Retric wrote:
| I don't know that much about horses but it's something
| like:
|
| A normal horse left to graze in good pasture can get a
| calorie surplus per hour. That same horse doing work has
| a calorie deficit per hour based on how strenuous the
| labor. A horse can get into a maximum calorie debt before
| issues happen. Thus a few day of hard labor plowing a
| field isn't an issue by its self and having redundant
| horses is useful.
|
| In terms of the Wagon equation, taking a nearly empty
| wagon back is vastly less strenuous than taking a full
| one out. It may be that taking several times as long to
| get back significantly extends the total distance you can
| move the army from your base. It may also be that running
| a calorie deficit on the outbound trip and then grazing
| for days before the return trip is useful. But I doubt
| any army is would actually try and approach any kind of
| theoretical maximum as in practice flexibility is needed.
|
| Granted that's for the average horse, where extreme
| athletic performance means significant extra muscle mass
| and thus higher caloric needs independent of actual work
| being done. But the extreme athletic horses are expensive
| to maintain so likely used by messengers etc not wagons
| or farmers.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| There may be a small net advantage to grazing and
| foraging enroute but it certainly wouldn't double the
| available tonnage transported.
| watwut wrote:
| Foraging require enough of density of settlements en
| route. Cause that is what foraging is, taking food from
| locals by force. The bigger the army, the more and bigger
| settlements you need to burn and steal from.
| thenthenthen wrote:
| Im missing another option here, 'edible supply lines'; the
| donkeys can be eaten. Only meant as last resort ;)
| hinkley wrote:
| Humans are more resilient than we give them credit for.
| Compared to other mammals we have a lot of coping mechanisms
| for injuries that are missing from other species.
|
| There's a comedian who does a bit about how humans might be
| the bad guy in horror movies made by aliens, because we can
| scar in situations that would kill other animals, and we can
| run in intervals for far longer than most other mammals. We
| used them down, and that's probably part of our collaboration
| with dogs. We're all basically Michael Myers. We just keep
| coming, and as soon as you stop to rest, bam, there we are
| again.
|
| Point is, hoofed animals tend to get injured in ways that
| will ultimately kill them. At that point if you have a
| butcher handy, you can be both humane and efficient, without
| necessarily being in a starvation situation. We talk about
| agriculture being a pivot point in human development but
| nobody ever seems to talk much about the power of soup.
| gruez wrote:
| >because we can scar in situations that would kill other
| animals
|
| examples? Humans aren't exactly resilient or fast healers
| in my mind.
| mcguire wrote:
| I don't know what the OP has in mind, but if you break an
| ankle, you can splint it and hobble until it heals. If a
| large animal breaks an ankle, it's not going to heal.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > examples? Humans aren't exactly resilient or fast
| healers in my mind.
|
| Presumably they were referring to horses (and possibly
| donkeys?) having to be euthanized after a broken leg.
| Which is so well known, even "the Far Side" got in on the
| action[1].
|
| ---
|
| 1. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DKrF52OXUAUtJy3?format=jpg
| &name=...
| NeoTar wrote:
| I believe this was the 'official' strategy of some early
| arctic / antarctic expeditions. Kill the sledge dogs and feed
| them to the other dogs plus humans.
| cardiffspaceman wrote:
| That's also part of a sound, but not vegan, anti-scurvy
| strategy. Someone should do the first vegan trans-Antarctic
| trek. But I digress.
| ticviking wrote:
| In an acquaintances DnD game he often enforces encumbrance and
| logistics rules like this. Leading the players to realize, "this
| plan requires infinite donkeys doesn't it?"
| ballenf wrote:
| One commenter questions whether generals and armies were capable
| of the advanced math implicated by the harmonic transfer method.
|
| But they don't have to do any advanced math. They just take food
| for the fleet from a single donkey and turn that donkey around as
| soon as his food supply equals the food necessary for the return
| trip. Rinse and repeat. Right?
|
| The reality does get a bit more complicated because at least one
| guide is required for each donkey, so you really don't want to
| lose a man for every donkey that turns back, and instead do the
| maneuver in groups. You also need to feed the return guide.
|
| Optimizing under those conditions gets a lot more complicated I
| think.
|
| You could also use this logic for sherpa-assisted mountain
| climbing.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >because at least one guide is required for each donkey,
|
| Why? Can you not assemble them in groups like other pack
| animals?
| bombcar wrote:
| If you're sending them back one by one you need a guide for
| each.
|
| If you send them in groups then you're not as optimal (first
| donkey is unladen in 3 days singly, but two donkeys are
| unladen in 5 days, say, meaning you need to keep feeding the
| first until the second is done, or equivalent via load
| balancing).
|
| You could have trained donkeys that might self-navigate but
| that's moderately unlikely. Probably better to eat them or
| give them away free to the countryside.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Sure, if you're unloading from the donkey serially. But if
| you unloaded in parallel, no one donkey would be unloaded
| before the others.
| bombcar wrote:
| That still delays when you can send the first donkey back
| - and it continues to eat.
|
| If you unload from one and send back immediately, it eats
| 3 days, goes back.
|
| If you unload in parallel, you cannot be sending a donkey
| back in 3 days, so you must be feeding extra donkey.
|
| It still may get you an advantage overall, but it's not
| the maximum advantage.
| scrumbledober wrote:
| very analogous to airplanes running on fuel vs batteries
| tialaramex wrote:
| I was actually thinking it was like the Falklands.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Black_Buck
|
| The British were able to fly bombers from tremendously
| far away, with a chain re-fuel strategy where the re-
| fuelling tanker planes are themselves re-fuelled by other
| tankers which then turn back. Later iterations were
| optimised by thinking more carefully about who should
| transfer fuel, to who, and when, as in this example.
|
| Arguably Black Buck was pointless, it was certainly not
| pivotal in the outcome of the war, but the actual process
| was fascinating.
| jerf wrote:
| This analysis also quite reasonably assumes zero transfer time
| between donkeys, perfect knowledge to run donkeys to exactly
| their limit (which are identical between all donkeys), and zero
| overhead in general. That's all fine, it's an upper limit
| analysis. But the overhead will be biting you in the
| exponential regime, unfortunately.
|
| Another thing to remember about "the old days" is that they may
| not have computers and they may not have the Internet, but they
| have LOTS of time to think about more efficiency compared to an
| Internet commenter for whom this is merely a momentary side
| diversion for a few moments, and a lot more motivation. I feel
| satisfied with some of the answers to things like "How was
| Stonehenge built?" that have been found in the last couple of
| decades (or, if you prefer, "Can you show at least one method
| that could have been used to build Stonehenge?"), but I think
| one of the other lessons that was learned (at least by me) is
| that "take a modern person, give them one try in their busy
| lives to try the first thing that comes to their mind, and
| declare the task impossible when that doesn't work" isn't a
| very good way to understand the ancient world. They had _time_.
|
| Would an ancient have described the "harmonic transfer
| technique" in this way? Heck no. Could they have worked their
| way to it through trial, error, and much simpler thinking?
| Absolutely. Finding that solution doesn't require calculus.
| Calculus just supplies a very nice analysis framework and a
| fantastic communication tool between the post author and us
| readers.
| cwmma wrote:
| The diagram of the Quadruple donkey transfer reminds me of the
| fueling diagram for the Black Buck raids during the Falklands War
|
| 1.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Black_Buck#/media/Fi...
| sparkplug94 wrote:
| That's actually shockingly similar. I'm sure someone has
| studied the mathematics of fuel transport in much greater
| detail -- I wonder if it's a simple problem to optimize or
| something closer to the traveling salesman problem
| cwmma wrote:
| pretty sure it's a very simple problem, brutally simple even.
| deepnotderp wrote:
| A better analogy would be the Breguet range equation, as the
| rocket equation is explicitly about delta-V, not distance.
|
| https://aerospaceengineeringblog.com/breguet-range-equation/
| mabbo wrote:
| The author misses a key important point: you can also _eat the
| donkey_.
| 988747 wrote:
| But you can't feed the donkey to remaining donkeys.
| progre wrote:
| I'v seen donkeys happily munching down plastic bags and
| cardboard. I sure you could feed dried donkey meat to a
| donkey (not saying it's a good idea)
| 988747 wrote:
| And the effect for a donkey would be probably similar to
| eating plastic bags: They cannot properly digest it so they
| suffer from malnutrition, eventually die.
| zardo wrote:
| That would certainly extend your range, but it would be very
| costly in donkeys. Instead of needing 1000 donkeys to sustain a
| siege, you now need say 100 donkeys/day.
| andrewf wrote:
| Reminds me of that time the RAF _really_ wanted to drop some
| bombs on the Falkland Islands rather than leaving it to the Navy
| and its Sea Harriers.
|
| Diagram:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Refuelling.plan.black.buc...
| Full article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Black_Buck
| photochemsyn wrote:
| A text-based 'Oregon Trail'-style game could be built out of this
| concept, where the player starts with a fixed sum of money and
| has to buy enough donkeys and food, plus perhaps plan a route
| with optimal water and grazing potential, to reach their
| destination.
| h2odragon wrote:
| > Thus, the harmonic donkey transfer, using four donkeys, yields
| a maximum transport distance 1/12 * L0 longer than the pairwise
| donkey transfer.
|
| Upvote earned there.
| sparkplug94 wrote:
| Haha thank you! I'm the original author of the linked article,
| and I had a LOT of fun naming the donkey transfer algorithms I
| came up with.
| moron4hire wrote:
| Without digging into any math myself, I find it curious that
| it's 1/12th longer. That specific ratio, 1/12th, is also the
| basis for the Equal Temperament system for tuning Western
| musical instruments ("12-tone Equal Temperament, specifically),
| which _also_ represents a harmonic series.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament
| oakwhiz wrote:
| 1+2+3+...=-1/12 by certain definitions...
| csense wrote:
| Once your nation gets big enough, you can't supply frontier
| armies from the capital. You need to draw food from local
| sources. In territory you control, the peasants pay some of their
| food to the local fortress in taxes, and the fortress acts as a
| supply base for any army that needs to go through.
|
| Once you get past border action and deep into enemy territory,
| the tyranny of the wagon equation means it's down to "forage" --
| hunt / fish / gather resources from the wild, or steal food from
| the local population at swordpoint.
|
| One option is to pause your campaign until you can consolidate
| your gains and build or take over supply bases in captured
| territory.
|
| Another option is to change your tactics to recognize the limits
| of what a foraging army can achieve. E.g. avoiding sieges and
| terrorizing civilians / burning towns to try to force a
| surrender, or using a cavalry army or fast-moving elite infantry
| to launch a surprise attack in an unexpected location.
| crest wrote:
| This assumes that beasts of burden aren't edible...
| bombcar wrote:
| The underlying blog post (which is MUCH more detailed) goes
| into that (not sure which of the three went into it in detail)
| https://acoup.blog/2022/07/15/collections-logistics-how-did-...
|
| There are problems with eating the beasts, but in certain cases
| it _can_ extend your range, but not as much as you might think.
| endominus wrote:
| There's also an element of "burning the ships" in that idea;
| you extend your current operational range at the cost of the
| logistical capacity (in terms of carried food) of the future.
| In other words, if you eat all your horses and you're still
| behind enemy lines, your army is now in serious trouble of
| not being able plunder enough food to make it anywhere before
| starving and deserting.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| To add to that, we can, with our current technology, for a
| handful of billion dollars send a rocket to Andromeda that
| would arrive in 10,000 to 65,000 years.
|
| But if we want the rocket to be anything more than a pitted
| lump of metal when it arrives, say, sending information
| back, operating scanners, etc, the price jumps
| exponentially (assuming any useful technology we build
| could still be usable even after 100 years in deep space).
|
| It ultimately boils down not to the "Can we do it", but "Is
| it WISE to do it", and that is always either the more
| difficult or more expensive question to answer.
| credit_guy wrote:
| > send a rocket to Andromeda that would arrive in 10,000
| to 65,000 years
|
| Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away. You are
| probably thinking of sending some vehicle to the closest
| star, Proxima Centauri, which is just about 4.25 light
| years away. This is the same as 270000 AU away; Voyager 1
| has been launched 45 years ago, and it's at 157 AU from
| Earth, which means it traveled at an average speed of
| about 3.5 AU/year. At this speed it would take it 77000
| years to get to Proxima Centauri.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| Dang it, right, yes. Thank you for the correction.
| credit_guy wrote:
| Well, Xenophon and 10000 other Greeks found themselves deep
| into enemy territory, without supplies [1]. Somehow they
| managed to survive. They took some food by force, but
| mostly they used diplomacy and negotiation. Diplomacy is
| fairly effective when you have lots of weapons.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anabasis_(Xenophon)
| salawat wrote:
| Once more proving that violence is the original
| diplomatic currency.
| shalmanese wrote:
| > "Hierarchy, Vorbis said later. The Ephebians didn't think in
| terms of hierarchies.
|
| > No army could cross the desert. But maybe a small army could
| get a quarter of the way, and leave a cache of water. And do that
| several times. And another small army could use part of that
| cache to go further, maybe reach halfway, and leave a cache. And
| another small army . . .
|
| > It had taken months. A third of the men had died, of heat and
| dehydration and wild animals and worse things, the worse things
| that the desert held . . .
|
| > You had to have a mind like Vorbis's to plan it.
|
| > And plan it early. Men were already dying in the desert before
| Brother Murduck went to preach; there was already a beaten track
| when the Omnian fleet burned in the bay before Ephebe.
|
| > You had to have a mind like Vorbis's to plan your retaliation
| before your attack."
|
| - Small Gods, Terry Pratchett
| schoen wrote:
| I thought "that's a funny coincidence with the Vorbis file
| format name!" ... but then I thought maybe it wasn't a
| coincidence at all. And it wasn't!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis#Name
| chmod600 wrote:
| I read that Ghengis Khan did much better by making good use of
| grazing lands and timing the seasons.
| brazzy wrote:
| Yes - but that meant his entire army had to be cavalry, and
| could basically only operate on steppe-like land.
| nvader wrote:
| Bring war material with you from home, but forage on the enemy.
| Thus the army will have food enough for its needs.
|
| --Sun Tzu, The Art of War
| mcguire wrote:
| It works well enough to be a consistent strategy, but you have
| to be careful taking too much from a given piece of territory.
| Eventually, the locals start getting unhappy with you.
|
| And then there's things like the Thirty Years' War, where
| armies foraged their way through territories often enough that
| eventually there was nothing left.
| zardo wrote:
| > Eventually, the locals start getting unhappy with you.
|
| Pretty sure the locals are unhappy from the start of the
| foraging process, with all the stealing, murdering, and
| raping.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Unhappy is being used here to mean "unhappy enough that it
| affects you." It's not about concern for the mental health
| of the locals.
| watwut wrote:
| I think that with Thirty Years' War, it was not just
| "foraging"bur also religious cleansing. It was kind of
| genocide. They did not had word genocide yet, but generally
| it fits.
| [deleted]
| docandrew wrote:
| "Harmonic Donkey Transfer" would be a good band name or album
| title.
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