Logistics

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LOGISTICS

LOGISTICS is the application of time and space factors to war. If international politics is the "art of the possible," and war is its instrument, logistics is the art of defining and extending the possible. In short, it is the economics of warfare. Literally, it provides the substance that physically permits a military force to "live and move and have its being." As the U.S. Army's Field Service Regulations puts it, "It envisages getting the right people and the appropriate supplies to the right place at the right time and in the proper condition."

The word itself is derived from the Greek logistikos, meaning "skilled in calculating." Logistics has been a recognizable part of military science, together with strategy and tactics, since ancient times. Nonetheless, Baron Henri Jomini, the French writer on military affairs, appears to have been the first to have made systematic use of the term in this sense, in about 1838. One of the first to use the term in this way in a book in the United States was Henry B. Harrington in Battles of the American Revolution 1775–1781, published in 1876.

In the triad of war, a more or less sharp distinction exists for each segment. Military leaders usually see strategy as the planning and management of campaigns toward achieving the object of the war, tactics as the planning and waging of battles or engagements toward achieving strategic objectives, and logistics as the planning and management of resources to support the other two. Nevertheless, in a broader sense, these are all branches of the same entity. Frequently, the objectives of strategic operations and tactical engagements are themselves aimed at weakening the enemy's logistics, whether through bombing an industrial center, mining a harbor, or seizing key terrain to threaten a line of supply.

It can be argued, for instance, that most of the major strategic decisions of World War II, such as Europe first, the cross-Channel invasion of 1944, the landings in southern France, the return to the Philippines, and the bypassing of Formosa for Okinawa, were essentially logistic decisions. That is, military leaders based the timing, location, scale, and very purposes of those operations mainly upon logistic considerations. They evaluated comparative resources and determined that the seizure of Normandy or Marseilles or Luzon or Okinawa would facilitate further the support of forces by opening the way for additional bases and supply lines.

Logistics may be thought of in terms of scale as paralleling the scale of military operations. "Grand strategy" refers to national policy and the object of the war; "strategy," to the planning and management of campaigns; and "tactics," to the planning and management of battles or engagements. Parallel terminology may also apply to logistics. Thus, "grand logistics" refers to the national economy and industrial mobilization. "Strategic logistics" relates to the analysis of requirements and logistic feasibility of proposed campaigns, a determination of requirements to support a particular strategic decision, and to the follow-up mobilization and assembly of forces and the moving of them—with their supplies and equipment—to the area, with provision for effective resupply. "Tactical logistics" refers to the logistics of the battlefield: the movement of troops to the battlefield and the supplying of these troops with the ammunition, food, fuel, supplies, and services needed to sustain them in combat.

As a calculation of logistic efficiency, one may speak of "primary logistics" as those needed for the support of combat units, and of "secondary logistics" as those required to support the means to meet the primary requirements, or what the satisfaction of requirements in one category may create for requirements in another. Thus, in delivering a given amount of gasoline to an armed force, for instance, the amount of fuel and other resources needed to deliver that gasoline must be taken into account. During the American Civil War, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman reckoned that an army could not be supplied by horses and wagons at a distance greater than 100 miles from its base, for in that distance, the horses would consume the entire contents of their wagons. Air transportation occasionally creates greater logistic problems than it solves. During the Korean War, for each five tons of cargo that a C-54 air transport carried across the Pacific Ocean, it consumed eighteen tons of gasoline. To move a given 15,000 tons of cargo from San Francisco to Yokohama by sea required two Victory ships. By contrast, to move it by air required 3,000 air flights plus eight ships to carry the gasoline for the airplanes. On the other hand, other secondary logistic requirements are built up in the maintenance of long supply lines and multiple storage facilities. At times, a supply base, given to continuous proliferation, reaches the point at which it consumes more supplies than it ships out, and thus becomes a net drain on the logistic system. Another aspect of secondary logistics arises in the acceptance and manufacture of a new weapon or in the choice of one weapon over another for expanded production, in terms of the effect of the decision on the problem of ammunition supply.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jessup, John E., ed. Encyclopedia of the American Military: Studies of the History, Traditions, Policies, Institutions, and Roles of the Armed Forces in War and Peace. New York: Scribners, 1994.

Leonard, Thomas C. Above the Battle: War Making in America from Appomattox to Versailles. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Lynn, John A., ed. Feeding Mars: Logistics in Western Warfare from the Middle Ages to the Present. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993.

Van Creveld, Martin L. Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton. Cambridge, U.K.; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977; 1980

James A.Huston/a. e.