“Mobility is the true test of a supply system.”
Capt. Liddell Hart: Thoughts on War (1944)
Logistics historically stems from ventures carried out primarily in the area of military operations. Information about it can be found in descriptions of events from the distant past, including those depicting the war strategy of Alexander the Great.
Even in that period, his subordinate commanders used various forms and methods of supplying fighting units. This depended primarily on the type and nature of the logistically supported formation. It was handled differently for infantry units than for cavalry or the fleet. However, in all these cases, the speed of task execution played a fundamental and decisive role. This was because delays were unacceptable in the context of the Macedonian way of waging war. It was characterized first by a rapid pace of march and second by a dynamic attack.
The military pedigree of logistics is also confirmed in the works of the 10th-century Byzantine Emperor Leo VI. He defined logistics, alongside strategy and tactics, as the third art of war. Meanwhile, the creator of modern military logistics is considered to be the Napoleonic army officer, General Antoine Henri de Jomini. In his treatise titled “Summary of the Art of War,” he set out the principles of operation and the goals that should be achieved during its activities.
The conditions of the battlefield that had to be met during the First and Second World Wars had a particular impact on the dynamics of the development of logistics, both in the theoretical and practical areas. It should be emphasized that already during World War I, in addition to traditional means of transport such as ships or trains, aircraft—specifically airships—were also used for tasks involving the movement of soldiers, equipment, and weaponry. This was also a period of rapid development of a new direction in logistics. Its characteristic feature became the use of aircraft and air communication and transport routes for transport purposes.
However, the truly gigantic development of this field of military science occurred during the years of World War II. The hostile powers struggling on the battlefields at that time were forced to create powerful logistical structures whose task was to deliver supplies to the fighting troops. Taking into account the lengths of the front lines and the fact that the war was fought on different continents, the use of transport aviation for these purposes became an obvious matter. It is also characteristic of this situation that one of the symbolic dates of World War II became January 23, 1943. This was the day of the last takeoff of a German Luftwaffe transport plane from Stalingrad, which was besieged by the Red Army. In the plans of the German command, it was intended to deliver about 500 tons of supplies to the surrounded troops by air daily. In the final stage of the fighting, this amounted to less than 50 tons. It is worth recalling that Field Marshal Erhard Milch, the first director of Lufthansa, which was founded in Germany in 1926, tried to fix the catastrophic air supply situation for the troops defending themselves in Stalingrad in its final stage.
In the sphere of non-military activity, the development of air transport, which was to become one of the basic elements of civil air logistics in the future, falls into the periods after World War I and World War II. In peacetime, there was a decisive reduction in the use of airships in favor of increasingly safe and technically advanced airplanes.
In the mid-1920s, both in Europe and overseas, there was a culmination in the growth of the use of airplanes for the commercial transport of cargo, parcels, and mail. In 1927, William Edward Boeing founded an air transport company in the United States called “Boeing Air Transport,” operating between San Francisco and Chicago. This company became a precursor to the future power of American air logistics (in the mid-1990s, American civil air transport accounted for one-third of this activity on a global scale).
The efficiency of air transport used for the civilian population and the importance of the airport handling and storage infrastructure included in it became clearly visible during the events that began on the night of June 23 to 24, 1948. That night, the Soviet occupation authorities ordered a blockade of the western sectors of Berlin. As a result of these actions, the city’s road and rail transport and supply system was completely paralyzed. During the blockade, which lasted until May 12, 1949, the transport aviation of the United States and Great Britain, by creating an air bridge, managed to guarantee the efficient functioning of the city and ensure decent living conditions for its inhabitants. As part of operations “Vittles” and “Plainfare,” about 280,000 flights were performed, during which about 2,325,000 tons of supplies were transported to West Berlin, including 1,500,000 tons of coal.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 2/2011.