Comment by haunter
2 days ago
> If history provides the theory, the ongoing war in Ukraine offers a brutal contemporary lesson: Modern armies collapse when they run out of logistics, not when they run out of weapons.
Is this really a new lesson? I thought that was common knowlegede since WW2 especially with the events of the Eastern Front.
If you know your military history, it's a lesson military planners learn with essentially every war that is then forgotten when the next generation of military planners and politicians come along.
Both Russia and the US learned expensive lessons in Afghanistan fairly recently. And yet here they are engaged in conflicts in Ukraine and Iran that don't seem to go as they planned.
That was discussed in the article.
She specifically said "contemporary lesson" while citing the original WW2 lesson on logistics.
By contemporary lesson I assume she means similar lesson but more recent and keeping modern world/logistics in mind.
"Amateurs discuss tactics, professionals discuss logistics"
Napoleon
He learnt the hard way (as did all those who followed him into Russia)
Napoleon planned his Russian campaign extensively: he had supply hubs set up all over the Duchy of Warsaw, with feeder routers from Prussia keeping them full.
What he didn't anticipate was how bad the roads in Russia would be and how long the Russian army would retreat along them. You can't resupply an army that is marching on a narrow dirt road through a forest because it's blocking its own supply lines.
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