Supplying War¶
van Creveld, M. (1977). Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton. Cambridge University Press.
Cited by¶
6 citations across 6 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Operational Overextension
- In military operations — the canonical case — a force advances beyond what its supply train, communications, medical evacuation, and replacement flow can sustain, documented from Napoleon's Russian campaign to Operation Barbarossa to Market Garden.
This sourceDocuments how campaigns from Napoleon's Russian campaign to Operation Barbarossa outran their logistics, the canonical military overextension cases.
- In military operations — the canonical case — a force advances beyond what its supply train, communications, medical evacuation, and replacement flow can sustain, documented from Napoleon's Russian campaign to Operation Barbarossa to Market Garden.
- Operational Reach
- The support tail — fuel, ammunition, food, spare parts, replacements — flowed from railheads far to the west, and the support-decay function was brutal: as the spearhead drove east, supplies had to cross ever-longer distances over a road network that degraded to mud, and across a rail-gauge break (German trains could not run on the wider Soviet gauge without re-laying track), so deliverable tonnage at the front fell sharply with distance from the last converted railhead.
This sourceAnalyzes the logistics of Operation Barbarossa, including the Soviet rail-gauge break and falling deliverable tonnage with distance, fixing the culminating point short of Moscow.
- The support tail — fuel, ammunition, food, spare parts, replacements — flowed from railheads far to the west, and the support-decay function was brutal: as the spearhead drove east, supplies had to cross ever-longer distances over a road network that degraded to mud, and across a rail-gauge break (German trains could not run on the wider Soviet gauge without re-laying track), so deliverable tonnage at the front fell sharply with distance from the last converted railhead.
Domain-specific¶
- Line of Operation
- But by the December drive on Moscow (Operation Typhoon) the Centre axis had outrun a supply system hampered by the Soviet broad-gauge railways and worn-out vehicles: the advance culminated short of the objective and was thrown back
This sourceVan Creveld's logistics analysis of Barbarossa - the semi-motorized army's transport and rail constraints and the unsupportability of the drive on Moscow; the Soviet counteroffensive that threw the advance back is campaign history from other work.
Supported in partVerified against the source
- But by the December drive on Moscow (Operation Typhoon) the Centre axis had outrun a supply system hampered by the Soviet broad-gauge railways and worn-out vehicles: the advance culminated short of the objective and was thrown back
- Operational Art
- The standard reading of the German 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, is a case of culminating-point neglect.
This sourceLogistics history whose Barbarossa chapter traces the campaign's supply over-extension and failure before Moscow.
Supported in partVerified against the work's full text
“the [operation] supplied, once it got away from the im- mediate vicinity of the borders of [German]-controlled”
- The standard reading of the German 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, is a case of culminating-point neglect.
- Operational Pause
- By naming both the deliberate pause and the culmination it forestalls, the doctrine reframes the planning question from "are we still advancing successfully?" to "how close is our sustainment margin to the point of no return?" — a crucial shift, because forward progress can lag the actual depletion of supply and combat power by days or weeks
This sourceVan Creveld's documentation that fast-moving formations repeatedly outran their supply and communications.
Supported in partVerified against a saved copy of the source
“the Panzergruppe had already {{{outrun}}} its service of supply”
- By naming both the deliberate pause and the culmination it forestalls, the doctrine reframes the planning question from "are we still advancing successfully?" to "how close is our sustainment margin to the point of no return?" — a crucial shift, because forward progress can lag the actual depletion of supply and combat power by days or weeks
- Staging Area
- The hardest thing a theater logistician must reconcile is that the rate at which materiel can be prepared, configured, and moved into position bears no fixed relation to the rate at which an operation will consume it — equipment readies on the timeline of sealift, depot throughput, and force generation, while combat demands it on the timeline of the order to commit.
This sourceVan Creveld's study of the effect of logistics upon strategy over the last centuries, in which supply capacity limits what campaigns can be sustained.
Supported in partVerified against the work's full text
“general staff officers half a [generation] to work out, was logistically impracticable!”
- The hardest thing a theater logistician must reconcile is that the rate at which materiel can be prepared, configured, and moved into position bears no fixed relation to the rate at which an operation will consume it — equipment readies on the timeline of sealift, depot throughput, and force generation, while combat demands it on the timeline of the order to commit.
Verification¶
Does it exist? Not checked yet. This entry carries no identifier to resolve. It was extracted from the citation as written in the article, normalized, and deduplicated against the rest of the registry.
Does it back the claim? Read against the text for 4 of 6 citations: 4 supported in part. Each verdict is shown under its citation below, with what in the work backs the sentence.
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