logistics

logistics, in military science, all the activities of armed-force units in roles supporting combat units, including transport, supply, signal communication, medical aid, and the like.

Fundamentals

In the conduct of war, war-making activity behind the cutting edge of combat has always defied simple definition. The military vocabulary offers only a few general descriptive terms (such as administration, services, and the French intendance), all corrupted by loose usage and none covering the entire area of noncombat activity. All carry additional, though related, meanings that make them ambiguous.

Logistics belongs to this group. Its archaic meaning, the science of computation (from the Greek logistikos, “skilled in calculating”), persists in mathematics as the logistic or logarithmic curve but seems unrelated to modern military applications. In the 18th century it crept into French military usage with a variety of meanings, including “strategy” and “philosophy of war.” But the first systematic effort to define the word with some precision and to relate it to other elements of war was made by Antoine-Henri Jomini (1779–1869), the noted French military thinker and writer. In his Summary of the Art of War (1838), Jomini defined logistics as “the practical art of moving armies,” by which he evidently meant the whole range of functions involved in moving and sustaining military forces—planning, administration, supply, billeting and encampments, bridge and road building, even reconnaissance and intelligence insofar as they were related to maneuver off the battlefield. In any case, Jomini was less concerned with the precise boundaries of logistics than with the staff function of coordinating these activities. The word, he said, was derived from the title of the major général (or maréchal) des logis in French 18th-century armies, who, like his Prussian counterpart, the Quartiermeister, had originally been responsible for the administrative arrangements for marches, encampments, and troop quarters (logis). These functionaries became the equivalent of chiefs of staff to the commanders of the day.

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Jomini’s discussion of logistics was really an analysis of the functions of the Napoleonic general staff, which he conceived as the commander’s right arm, facilitating his decisions and seeing to their execution. The mobility and gargantuan scale of Napoleonic warfare had left the simple old logistics of marches and encampments far behind. The new logistics, said Jomini, had become the science of generals as well as of general staffs, comprising all functions involved in “the execution of the combinations of strategy and tactics.”

This broad conception had some validity in Jomini’s day. He left an engaging picture of Napoleon, his own logistician, sprawled on the floor of his tent, marking each division’s route of march on the map with a pair of dividers. But as staff organization and activity became more complex, along with war itself, the term logistics soon lost its association with staff activity and almost disappeared from the military vocabulary. Jomini’s great contemporary, the Prussian theorist Carl von Clausewitz, did not share his conception of logistics, which he called “subservient services” that were not part of the conduct of war. Jomini’s own influence, which was enormous in his day, was mainly on strategic and tactical thought, particularly in the American Civil War.

In the late 1880s the American naval historian Alfred Thayer Mahan introduced logistics into U.S. naval usage and gave it an important role in his theory of sea power. In the decade or so before World War I the navy’s concern with the economic foundations of its expansion began to broaden the conception of logistics to encompass industrial mobilization and the war economy. Reflecting this trend, a U.S. marine officer, Lieutenant Colonel Cyrus Thorpe, published his Pure Logistics in 1917, arguing that the logical function of logistics, as the third member of the strategy–tactics–logistics trinity, was to provide all the means, human and material, for the conduct of war, including not merely the traditional functions of supply and transportation but also war finance, ship construction, munitions manufacture, and other aspects of war economics.

After World War II the most notable effort to produce a theory of logistics was by a retired rear admiral, Henry E. Eccles, whose Logistics in the National Defense appeared in 1959. Expanding Thorpe’s trinity to five (strategy, tactics, logistics, intelligence, communications), Eccles developed a conceptual framework that envisaged logistics as the military element in the nation’s economy and the economic element in its military operations—that is, as a continuous bridge or chain of interdependent activities linking combat forces with their roots in the national economy. Eccles stressed the tendency of logistic costs to rise (the logistic “snowball”) and, echoing Jomini, the essential role of command. Despite its logic and symmetry, however, Eccles’ overarching conception of logistics was not widely accepted. Official definitions still vary widely, and most ordinary dictionaries adhere to the traditional “supply, movement, and quartering of troops,” but neither has much influence on common usage, which remains stubbornly inconsistent and loose.

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