Tag: logistics

The composition of the baggage train varied greatly, depending on the time and place and the structure of the army to which it was attached. In [medieval] Iberia, for example, few wagons were used. Instead, each man-at-arms would have a mule carrying four to eight days’ provisions for himself and his servants, and the townsmen would have their own mules in smaller proportion. In England, France, and Germany, large wagon trains were the norm. A provision of one wagon for ten horsemen seems to have been fairly typical. Municipal militia contingents as well as lords had their carts, wagons, or mules. These might be numerous or few, depending on the anticipated duration, range, and purpose of the expedition, as well as the expectations of dearth or plenty in the campaign theater and the wealth of the community from which the force was drawn. One Swiss force of 440 men going to help break a siege marched with only two carts (though they were large, five-horse models): one packed with bacon, dried beef, oatmeal, barley, butter, and salt and the other with cooking gear, dishes, and tools, including scythes and sickles, as it was late June, time for the wheat harvest. A much higher ratio of wagons, around one per twenty or thirty men, was not uncommon, especially when tents had to be carried. The contingent sent by Arras to the French royal host in 1340 had six wagons drawn by nineteen horses for 200 footmen and two mounted constables, for example. Horsemen, especially nobles, required more baggage, both to support their more luxurious lifestyle and because of the need to carry a rolling reserve of bulky fodder and oats for the horses. Hence, considered as a whole, a mixed army, especially one with a large proportion of mounted men, might have as many as one baggage wagon per ten combatants, or even more.

— Soldiers’ Lives Through History, pp. 74-75

At the bottom of the scale is the small fief of a single knight. As a rough estimate, it takes the labor of fifteen to thirty peasant families, working a holding of forty to one hundred hectares, to support one knight, his family, and his warhorse. (A hectare is 10,000 square kilometers, or about 2½ acres.) On such a small manor, the knight lives little better than his peasants.

— Who Lives In That Castle?, Dragon Magazine #80

…[Nobles] brought with them to war a variety of noncombatants, including heralds, musicians, clerks, chaplains, cooks, body servants, smiths, carpenters, miners, barber-surgeons, physicians, and so on. In addition to these members of royal and magnate households, armies would usually have with them very substantial numbers of unattached camp followers—prostitutes, butchers, women selling provisions, shield merchants (shields being prone to demolition in combat), cobblers, and washerwomen, among other groups. Guillaume Guiart gives a nice picture of them in a French army camp of 1304 [C.E.], crying their cheeses and breads, dispensing wine from casks, baking tarts and pasties, and getting into trouble of various sorts. The number of noncombatants marching with the baggage was always large and could in fact be greater than the total number of fighters, though the army of the Free Companies in 1368, with 20,000 pillagers and women for 4,000 combatants, was doubtless an extreme case. Because all these people added as much as fighters to the logistical burdens of the army, and because some of them tended to cause disorder in the host, commanders often tried to keep them to a minimum, and it is interesting to note what that minimum was considered to be. The Crusaders against the Hussites ordained that no one below the rank of knight should have more than one servant and that no women should be permitted in the army. Charles the Bold ordered that no soldier in his ordinance companies should keep a woman privately in his quarters; instead, there were to be a maximum of 30 women “in common” for each company of 700 men. Richard I, for one difficult march, ordered all women to be left behind the army, except for 300 elderly women, considered necessary for washing clothes and heads and removing lice from the soldiers, at which task they were as skilled as monkeys.

Along with carts, wagons, and camp followers, the army would typically also be accompanied by large quantities of food on the hoof. For the start of his Murcia campaign, for example, James the Conqueror provided himself with 1,000 mule loads of wheat, 2,000 of barley, 3,000 cows, and 20,000 sheep. This would, of course, require large numbers of drovers and muleteers. The sources offer little clue as to how exactly these vast herds and flocks were managed, but they can hardly have been allowed to separate the rear guard from the main body; that would have been begging for defeat in detail. Most likely, the livestock, and often also the noncombatants who were not attached to the households of particular soldiers or contingents, were left to trail behind the army proper. This would have left them very vulnerable to attack by enemy cavalry, but they were probably usually given some protection by small escorts of men-at-arms detached from the army, and of course, despite being so-called noncombatants, wagoners, sutlers, and muleteers were normally armed and would fight to defend themselves, with some advantages provided by their wagons themselves.

— Soldiers’ Lives Through History, pp. 75-76

…What if the best ratio of supply to demand [for materials of war] is not found in the big city, which has to stay peaceful and organized to attract trade and reap taxes, where the state is strong, and men, arms and magic are regulated…? What if instead the deals are to be found on the borders of civilization, where swords and mail are regularly looted from the slain? Stocks in the house of war have to be high, for any day now a warlord could strut by looking to garrison a castle or equip a company. And if magic items are bought and sold, the ones useful in a fight are more likely to command a good price in a place where the line between life and death is as clear as the sea’s horizon.

— The Price of a Hauberk in Gomorrah – Roles, Rules, and Rolls

For over a year, my attention on the Xenoverse/Rhydinspace has been on Xenograg rebuilding his depleted retinue. Not just rebuilding but expanding it to a size not seen since the Monastery of Arra.

Things are different now, though. Not so much with Xenograg as with me. The monastery-as-warband predates my getting married, buying a house, building a retirement nest egg, and being the primary breadwinner for a (very small) family through easy and rough economic times. My perspective has changed, and I regularly notice how different I see the matter of Xenograg’s responsibilities to his ever-growing extended family. Not just the St. Germain’s but a new generation of retainers.

I used to see these non-player characters (NPCs) solely through the lens of the Dungeons & Dragons rules. Primarily, via their weekly/monthly costs. I did not see the value for quite a long time. Then my game master gave Xenograg three henchmen, at once, to help him survive in what is now called a “duet” campaign. I quickly learned their value both mechanically (e.g., combat) and as a spur for actual roleplaying.

One thing that game master did not include, though, was logistics. Like many roleplayers, he was not interested in the realistic challenge of how Xenograg would manage with three more mouths to feed. His simple solution was ensuring Xenograg always had sufficient wealth to render the issue moot.

I kept that same conceit all the way through the Monastery of Arra. I paid lip service to the realistic necessities by including affectations in my roleplay: Xenograg commenting about being low on funds, regularly monitoring the monastery’s cash flow, fretting the cost of keep construction, needing to take a loan, et. al. But he always had enough.

Good times. Simple times. It is not that I want this gritty realism in my roleplay, now. I just feel that it needs to be there. And that it will have upsides, too, creatively.

Caring for the 3,000-4,000 horses that formed part of William the Conqueror’s army in 1066 [C.E.] required some 8,000-12,000 horseshoes and about 75,000 nails a month, for about 8 tons of iron.

— Al Nofi’s CIC #174 – Strategy Page

The great limitation on the equipment of the Army of Flanders in the sixteenth century [C.E.] was financial: a pike and body-armour (the corselete) cost 30 florins in the 1590s, a musket cost 10 florins, a 24-pounder cannon cost 1,000 florins. With prices like this, there was never enough money to arm all of the soldiers all of the time. There was only limited concern about this: sixteenth-century strategists believed that wars should be fought with men, not material…and faced with a choice between feeding their men or equipping them, they always chose food. Eight hundred men could be fed for a month with the money required to cast one cannon; a pike-man could be given bread for two years with the price of his corselet.

Only gradually did the Army systematize the supply of weapons to its men, deducting the cost of arms, powder and shot by [installments] from their future wages….

Arms and armour were…provided on credit to the troops by contractors engaged by the government. This was essential since few men could afford to purchase their own firearms (a musket cost 10 florins in the 1590s, more than a musketeer’s wage for a month), but it was perhaps shortsighted to charge the powder and shot used by each man against his account—it was hardly an encouragement for a marksman to use his weapon! In their defence the government argued that the musketeers and arquebusiers already drew a slightly higher wage to cover the cost of using their guns, but of course this was only effective when wages were actually paid….

— The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road 1567-1659, pp. 48-49, 165

…While local peasantry, paid or pillaged, usually furnished food and horses’ forage, a major expedition or siege or fleet at sea required organized supply of biscuit, smoked or salted meat and fish, wine, oil, and oats and hay for the horses. Ordinarily knights ate white bread made from wheat, meat in the form of beef, pork, and mutton, and drank wine daily. The common soldier received wine only on feast days or in active combat; otherwise he drank beer, ale, or cider, and ate rye bread, peas, and beans. Fish, cheese, olive oil, occasionally butter, salt, vinegar, onions, and garlic also figured in the rations. Poultry was so widely consumed and easily obtained that it was not recorded. Sugar, honey, mustard, spices, and almonds were kept for the wounded and sick and the privileged. On active duty, soldiers did not fast but were allotted fish as substitute for meat on the twelve “thin” days a month. The more continuous war became, as it did in the 14th century [C.E.], the more organization and money it required.

— A Distant Mirror, Chapter 6

Going to war with [medieval knights] was a costly affair, in many cases bringing belligerent princes to bankruptcy. A knight would rarely embark for battle without the six horses which he was permitted, or his page apprentice to help him on with his armour. Providing enough food, shelter and material for a large number of these knights and their attendant foot soldiers was…a far more complex and sophisticated job of administration than is generally imagined. The logistics were considerable, involving smiths, armourers, painters, tent-makers, fletchers (arrow-makers), cordeners (leather-workers), bowyers, turners, carpenters, masons, wheelwrights, saddlers, purveyors (of food), quartermasters and farriers. There were also surgeons, chaplains, legal and clerical staff, trumpeters and pipers, and, most important, cooks.

— Connections, p. 57

While not exclusively, the bulk of this logistical challenge is people. Squires, retainers, and hirelings, oh my!

The first important break from the conventions which dominated medieval warfare was the triumph of the Swiss pike-squares over the mounted knights of Burgundy in a series of pitched battles (1475-7 [C.E.]). The lesson of Morat, Grandson, and Nancy was immediate, important and ineluctable: victory in battle could be won by infantry over cavalry. This shift in military effectiveness removed a crucial restriction on the scale of warfare in Europe. Since a warhorse was not only expensive but also a mark of social rank the size of a cavalry-based army was necessarily circumscribed by the dimensions of the social class which was entitled to go through life on horseback: the knights. There was no such bar to the number of men who could be recruited and issued with a helmet and sixteen-foot pike. Accordingly the eclipse of cavalry by infantry meant that victory in war after the 1470s came to depend not on the quality of the combatants nor on the excellence of their armament, but on their numbers. A government bent on war had now to mobilize and equip every man who could be found.

— The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road 1567-1659, p. 5

Emphasis mine.

Armies are like prize fighters training for a bout: They reach a moment of supreme preparedness—muscles taut, reflexes swift, determination fixed at the highest pitch. But with a lull in activity they start growing flabby. This is what happened to [the Duke of] Parma’s invasion force [in 1587-8 C.E.]. All through that dismal winter, as the snows and freezing rains held the battalions in camp, the war machine began to disintegrate. Provisions were consumed at an alarming rate—Parma had to send the cavalry inland to scavenge—and budgeted funds began to give out. As spring passed, the men went unpaid and unfed, and they began to sicken and to desert. “We are bound to conclude that the delay is for God’s greater glory,” Parma wrote in exasperation to Philip, “but the Enterprise, once so easy and safe, will now be infinitely more difficult, and will incur a much larger expenditure of blood and trouble.”

— The Armada, pp. 70

Every captain in an early modern army held enormous power over the rank and file of his company. In absolute charge of discipline he could flog, fine, or otherwise humiliate his men whenever he chose; because he alone decided who should perform sentry guard and other onerous duties, the captain was free to victimize the men he disliked and excuse his friends…. [Without] interference from above, [a Spanish Empire] captain chose the two sergeants and eight corporals of his company (the cabos de escuadra or corporals were in charge of twenty-five men and received a wage-bonus of 3 escudos each per month), and he distributed at his pleasure 30 escudos of treasury bonus-pay among his men. As if this were not enough, the insolvency of the military treasury made the company captains into money-lenders and welfare-officers as well. Every company had a chest (caja) kept by the captain and used by him to advance subsistence wages (the socorro) to necessitous men when no money arrived from the treasury. The captains were also responsible for ransoming, re-arming, or re-horsing any of their men who had the misfortune to lose their liberty, their weapons, or their mounts. Naturally when the treasury did contrive to pay an [installment] of wages the captains expected to receive it first in order to deduct the sums already advanced “on account”. The scheme was excellent in principle, but it assumed that all captains were honest and scrupulous men. Of course they were not…. “The arrangements for paying the troops played right into the eager hands of the captains, who took full advantage of the generous opportunities afforded them.”

— The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road 1567-1659, p. 160

Corrosion from perspiration, skin oils, blood, and exposure to the elements are the problems we need to know well. In the case of carbon steel, these culprits can cause severe discoloration and rust very rapidly if neglected. I own swords that literally will rust before your eyes if left un-oiled. During a take giri (bamboo cutting) demonstration my students and I were performing, I had a drop of my perspiration land, unnoticed, on one of my Rapier (thrusting sword) blades. In just a few minutes, I was shocked to see a bright orange spot of rust on my hand-polished sword. This is a very serious problem the martial arts student must know how to combat. Even breathing on an un-oiled sword blade can begin the dreaded process of corrosion. The edge is the thinnest part of a cutting implement and the most vulnerable to neglect. If allowed to rust, a razor-sharp weapon will become dull in a short period of time. Genuine katana [are] famous for their polish and [mirror-like] finish. This is not for merely cosmetic appearance. Steel has microscopic surface irregularities that can collect moisture and corrosive elements. A finely polished blade has smaller irregularities and sheds blood much more easily than an unpolished one. Hence, the more corrosive agents that collect in the pores, the more tarnish and rust will accumulate.

— Care And Feeding Of Swords – Austin Bujinkan Tanemaki Dojo

Thank the gods for the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, else I could not have linked to the source blogpost.

The cavalry revolution originated in the Middle East about 900 [B.C.E.] and had several implications. First, making war from a galloping horse was a dangerous occupation. In order to be effective, the warrior on horseback needed both hands free to wield a weapon; yet letting go of the reins seemed to guarantee that the fighter would end upon the ground, bruised and helpless. The only alternative was to guide the horse with one’s feet and legs, perhaps using the voice to direct a trained horse. Training both horse and rider took time and practice.

Moreover, a horse was expensive, and not everyone had the leisure time to practice. A horse could consume as much grain as 6 to 8 persons, and the owner was responsible for mating and training the animal. Furthermore, the horse was not very useful aside from its war-making capabilities: its meat and milk could not compare to the cow’s, and it could not pull a plow until the Europeans invented the horse collar about 1000 [C.E.] Therefore, civilized societies that utilized the horse extensively tended to have specialized fighters. In some cases, the warriors might be aristocrats, in others, slaves; but always the big question was how to pay for such an expensive military system.

— Heavenly Warriors, p. 15

In Book I of Thucydides’ history Pericles outlines the limitations of the Peloponnesian adversaries. They had no capital. Unlike the Spartiates, most of the allies in the Peloponnesian coalition were agrarians who needed to farm at precisely the time it was best to fight. In contrast, Athens was a sophisticated polis with vast sums of coinage in both circulation and as specie on reserve. Pericles’ adversary, King Archidamus of Sparta, agreed, and so warned his rural Peloponnesians that they were not equipped to fight a long, multifaceted war with even a seasonal militia. This new conflict, he warned, was quite different: “War is not so much a matter of men as of monetary expense.” He proved absolutely right.

The great irony of the war was that the very requisites for victory—an enormous fleet, money for rowers’ pay, and officers deployed overseas for long periods of imperial service—were inimical to the historic assumptions of rural and isolated Sparta, which heretofore had had no monetary economy. Persia finally filled the void, gave Spartan generals untold amounts of gold, and made up losses in men and materiel almost immediately. As long as Greeks were killing Greeks, the satraps of the Persian Empire were happy to subsidize the carnage.

Yet in the war’s aftermath, with the Persian subsidies gone, the implosion of the Spartan empire was directly attributable to its new financial responsibilities of administering a fleet and distant subject states that were so at odds with its old insular moral code. Money and manpower, not always just courage and class, quite literally won wars. The Peloponnesian War offered another bitter lesson, one that would also arise during the transition of Rome from republic to empire. Consensual government started in Greece as a limited enterprise. These constitutional states were predicated on a civic militia cloaked in amateurism and localism, and determined to protect the property of a minority of its citizens. But as the invective of Athenian conservatives from Plato to Aristotle illustrated, war over decades and across thousands of miles required mobilization, weaponry, and capital—and only the new resources of a more centralized and powerful state could meet those vast burdens.

— A War Like No Other, pp. 303-304

Emphasis mine.

The Assyrian army in the Sargonid period had a potential magnitude of several hundreds of thousands of troops, although a call-up of the entire force for a campaign was extremely rare. Supreme command of the army rested with the king and, immediately under him, the “field-marshal”…. The army was divided into units of various sizes and types; but the basic division was the “company”…of fifty men under a “captain”…and this unit was in turn broken down into files of ten men. An officer carried a mace as a symbol of his authority.

The levying of troops was the primary responsibility of the captains, each of whom had a certain number of villages under his command, and the captains were in turn responsible to the provincial governor. By the Sargonid age there was also a standing army which was under the direct authority of the king, no doubt created as a counter-balance to the potential misuse of military power by the provincial governors. The king also had his own bodyguard of infantry and cavalry. The troops recruited within Assyria proper were spread around the empire as much as possible, since they were the most loyal, and they constituted the chariotry and cavalry divisions. The infantry consisted largely of foreigners, mainly Aramaeans. Some foreign groups became specialized units. For example, the Ituaeans, an Aramaic people, were entrusted with special tasks such as escort duty throughout the empire.

Garrisons and barracks were scattered over the empire, but the military headquarters was a massive armoury in the Assyrian capital. Here was stationed a large portion of the troops, animals, and equipment of the standing army, and there were, in addition, royal apartments for the king to occupy when he wished. At each New Year there was a grand inspection at the armoury when the king reviewed his troops and their equipment….

— The Cambridge Ancient History, volume III, part 2

The establishment of permanent units hastened the almost universal adoption of the proprietary system, which had already begun to replace the vestiges of feudalism and of free companies. The permanent colonel was the proprietor of his regiment, accepted by the king as a permanent officer and authorized (personally, and through him his captains) to raise men. Initially, with armies being raised only for a campaign and disbanded afterward, the troops raised by the proprietary system were volunteers, more or less carefully selected from the available and willing manpower. But as the armies became permanent, the standing units were not disbanded and were kept up to strength by regular influx of recruits, usually provided by the crown. This, combined with the financial considerations in maintaining year-round units, gave the crown increasing rights of supervision over the administration and training of the regiments, and thus somewhat restricted the proprietary right previously exercised by colonels and captains.

This proprietary system could be profitable. A commander was paid for the number of men he mustered, as well as for their weapons, equipment, and subsistence. In addition to the profit to be derived from economical exercise of his proprietorship (to say nothing of the possibilities offered by parsimony and fraud), an officer could sell his proprietary interest when he retired. Thus officers’ commissions were valuable, and could be purchased. This custom of purchase of commissions continued in some armies—notably that of England—long after the proprietary system itself had disappeared.

— The Encyclopedia of Military History, p. 527

…Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century [C.E.] society than the physical destruction of war itself. The governing fact was that medieval organization by this time had passed to a predominantly money economy. Armed forces were no longer primarily feudal levies serving under a vassal’s obligation who went home after forty days; they were recruited bodies who served for pay. The added expense of a paid army raised the cost of war beyond the ordinary means of the sovereign. Without losing its appetite for war, the inchoate state had not yet devised a regular method to pay for it. When he overspent, the sovereign resorted to loans from bankers, towns, and businesses which he might not be able to repay, and to the even more disruptive measures of arbitrary taxation and devaluation of the coinage.

Above all, war was made to pay for itself through pillage. Booty and ransom were not just a bonus, but a necessity to take the place of arrears in pay and to induce enlistment. The taking of prisoners for ransom became a commercial enterprise. Since kings could rarely raise sufficient funds in advance, and collection of taxes was slow, troops in the field were always ahead of their pay. Loot on campaign took the place of the paymaster. Chivalric war, like chivalric love, was, as Michelet said of the whole epoch, double et louche (a provocative phrase which could mean “double and squinting” or “equivocal” or “shady” in the sense of disreputable). The aim was one thing and the practice another. Knights pursued war for glory and practiced it for gain.

— A Distant Mirror, Chapter 4

Emphasis mine.

We can dimly make out what seems to have been an agricultural revolution in al-Andalus during this period [circa 1000 C.E.]. An increase in productivity was made possible by more intense exploitation of the land. Irrigation, in particular, enlarged the growing season of the year—you can raise four vegetable crops a year on well-tended irrigated land in Mediterranean Spain—and eased dependence on unpredictables such as the weather. Higher and more stable incomes were the result, and with greater prosperity came greater confidence….

More varied crops did more than just diversify gastronomy. (Think of the bleakness of a world without lemons or spinach.) A better, more varied diet means a healthier population. Hard wheat, the main constituent of pasta, grows in drier conditions than soft (bread) wheat and stores for a prodigiously long time because of the low water content of the grain. Al-Razi (d. 955) tells us that around Toledo it would keep in store without decay for upwards of sixty years; it was transmitted in inheritance from father to son like other property. Crops such as this helped to stave off the threat of famine. Prosperity meant earlier marriage, larger families, diversification, opportunity, leisure.

— The Quest for El Cid, pp. 19-20

The Seljuk empire depended for its functioning on the granting of land, or the revenue that could be raised from that land, in return for annual tribute or military service to the Sultan. The fief, or iqta as it was called, was seen by the ruler as payment for services rendered and the grant was nothing like so absolute as in Western feudalism. The fiefs could be swapped around and all that mattered was that the changes should not be brought about in a way to cause anyone to lose face or, what amounted to much the same thing, money.

— Saladin In His Time, p. 28