"An army marches on its stomach": Sustaining the future force in a contested fight

The Napoleonic Wars saw a period of nearly 20 years of warfare across Europe.

By 1810, the French conquered or forced into alliances nearly all of Continental Europe excluding Portugal, the Balkans, Romania, and the Russian Empire.

To accomplish this, Napoleon assembled the Grande Armée , an unprecedented force of more than 600,000 total troops at its height.

Such a large force, of course, presented challenges in feeding, equipping, and supplying the units. So, Napoleon devised a system of units and logistics that would allow flexibility and speed—the Corps d’Armée .

There are important lessons from how Napoleon fed and fought his army for the U.S. military of tomorrow.

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Why are these lessons important?

I’ve written before about some of the challenges and innovations that we can expect on the battlefield of tomorrow.

• Transparent Battlefields : Defining the problem
• Tools of the Transparent Battlefield : Understanding some of the sensors
• Building the Future : The power of additive manufacturing at the edge of the battlefield
• Powering the Future : Meeting the increased energy demands of modern military forces
• New Ways to Fight : What to expect in the Army Operating Concept for 2040

These are a few good, previous editions to review to help understand the problems of the future fight.

In short, the massive proliferation of various sensors on the battlefield means that we will have a far harder time hiding what we’re doing. There’ll be less secrecy and therefore less security. We will have to operate under the presumption that every action, every movement will be seen by our adversary.

This reality, coupled with the development of conventional weapons with great capabilities (e.g., hypersonics ) further means that we will not be able to mass forces in a traditional sense. An aggregated force becomes a massive target.

At the various combat training centers used, there’s a tradition of “uncoiling” the force as they deploy from the rotational unit’s bivuoac area—think safe space—and into the exercise area. This uncoiling for a brigade-sized element can take up to 36 hours . That’s 36 hours that an enemy could be directing continuous kinetic strikes against the core of the unit. That’s a lot of damage.

So, one school of thought suggests that to mitigate this threat, we should disaggregate the force and disperse to far smaller elements (e.g., a platoon of four tanks), as this reduces the attractiveness of a formation as a target.

Of course, logistical challenges accompany this disaggregation and dispersion.

Back to the Future

Previously, I mentioned that Napoleon developed the Corps d’Armée concept to allow greater flexibility and speed.

Prior to the Napoleonic Wars, armies had regiments as the largest subordinate organization. Cobbling together a force of regiments resulted in a massive, but ponderous force. These inflexible forces faced several the same challenges that face a brigade at a combat training center.

To address this inflexibility, Napoleon listened to Pierre-Joseph Bourcet ’s advice in Principes de la guerre des montagnes, emphasizing the need for dispersion followed by rapid concentration of forces at the decisive point before the enemy could do the same.

…a general will do well to divide his army into a number of comparatively small bodies, …which …is indispensable and safe provided the general who adopts it makes such arrangements that he can reunite his forces the moment that becomes necessary.

Mass is generally considered an important principle of war . Current and future technologies allow us the ability to mass effects, even as we fight in a dispersed manner.

An army marches on its stomach

There’s an old adage, often attributed to Napoleon that “an army marches on its stomach” meaning that a force can only go so far as its logistics allow. If you don’t keep your force fed and supplied, they are unable to proceed further.

Today, we call this concept Operational Reach .

Napoleon extended the operational reach of his forces through the adoption of foraging—units would hunt for food, or take it from conquered towns—sometimes with mixed results. Same thing with their supplies, they fabricated what they could and took what they could.

Today, the laws of armed conflict prohibit pillaging and plundering, as well they should. But our forces operating in a similarly disaggregated and dispersed manners as Napoleon’s army will still require supplies, often over incredibly long ranges. When factoring in the transportation costs of getting those supplies, the total cost can sky rocket. For example, during operations in Afghanistan, it cost upwards of $400 for a gallon of fuel (and we averaged a consumption rate of around 22 gallons per soldier, per day—or 2.2M gallons per day at the peak of the surge).

As such, it becomes critical that we invest in the ability to use locally-available resources to the greatest extent possible.

We must maximize our ability to locally create: power and energy; fuels, oils, and lubricants; manufactured repair parts, and much more.

We must also develop technologies that allow us to move these materials around the battlefield while minimizing the risk to our forces. Autonomous delivery will be important in reducing requirements for service members to move about the battlefield exposing themselves to hazards, as they haul or escort supplies.

Summary

Technological shifts are creating a battlefield that will be increasingly hostile to aggregated, large-sized forces. We will have to disaggregate and disperse smaller units to mutually supportable distances, while still massing our effects at the time and place of a commander’s choosing.

This disaggregation will present additional challenges to our logistical and supply capabilities, increasing significant risks if we do not invest in the ability to conduct some sort of exploitation, utilization, and creation in-situ, creating what the force needs from locally-available resources. We also need the ability to move that materiel around safely.

There’s a lot of work to be done to adapt to the future battlefield, and it will be wildly beneficial to use history as a lens to understand the theories and principles that we still will require.

Keep building!

Andrew