Logistics

A SCIENTIFIC APPROACH TO WAR? ANTOINE-HENRI JOMINI (GREAT STRATEGISTS) By William Johnsen, Conrad Crane and Jacqueline Whitt, September 5, 2019 https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/special-series/great-strategists/scientificapproach-to-war-jomini/

WJ: If you could encapsulate it down, it's that war is based on the offensive and it's massing the appropriate number of troops and bodies at the decisive point, and engaging with high level of energy, which he never quite really defines, but it's bringing the most massive amounts of troops concentration on the decisive point. And he has a long series of principles for determining what those points are and how to get them. Interestingly enough, Jomini is also the first person that really talks about logistics, and he sees it not necessarily as we do today, which is partially the supplying of war and warfare. But for him, logistics was also the ability to mass on the battlefield. For Jomini and as well as I think for Clausewitz, the idea, for them, military strategy was the movement of forces on the map, bringing them to bear in the appropriate theater of operations at the decisive point. That's much more Jomini, but it's this idea that you have to mass. It is the offensive and logistics is what allows you to bring all of those things to bear at the critical point.