eli5: How did old militaries (such as ancient Rome) manage to keep fed and hydrated thousands soldiers in long military campaigns over long distance and time?
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See how the Russians are doing it? Yeah, not like that.
They would have supply caravans following them. They would also live off the land around them in some cases.
Combination of supply lines with livestock etc. and confiscating local goods. It beat the previous methods, which usually involved living off the land.
There are a number of ways armies fed themselves and they usually used any or all of them as the situation permitted or demanded.
1) Supply trains – The army would bring food and water with it on the march, and several days behind them would be even more wagons carrying food and supplies, and on and on so you had a continual shipments of food, water, and anything else you needed. Obviously this tactic relies heavily on both the safety of the area and on the wealth of the army to pay for all this.
2) Foraging – Here the army uses some of their soldiers to hunt wildlife, gather wild plants, and even sometimes harvest crops if/when the original owners fled. This is a great way to supply your army cheaply, but this gathering will slow your army down and when you have several thousand men you very quickly drain the local area of any “free” resources.
3) Requisition – The army just takes the civilian population’s supplies. Sometimes the army would provide a monetary compensation, but even when they did you were are the general’s generosity to get a fair price. And even then you can’t eat money.
4) Pillaging – Basically requisition but without the possibility of compensation and with the addition of property damage and murder. Primarily reserved for when in enemy territory and you didn’t care about local reputation.
Just like today a huge amount of effort went into logistics. Commanders knew that an unsupplied army was a weak army and used that to their advantage whenever possible.
Awesome question! I just watched a show on how the roman legions would survive..they ate pretty well and brought most supplies with them..but also relied on the people they were conquer ing to supply food as well..and alot of Romans got PAID for helping out troops ..so there was pretty much another army of people fighting to supply them with food,water,and even women/boys for sexual purposes
Ancient Rome was a continent bestriding entity. Millions upon millions of people lived in the Roman Republic/Empire. There was a vast bureaucracy in place throughout the Roman Republic/Empire to manage it. This gave the Roman government and thus the army a vast pool of resources that they could work with, something that after the fall of the Western Roman Empire wouldn’t be seen again in Europe for many, many centuries.
You went from Rome being able to support an army in the hundreds of thousands to small medieval kingdoms who couldn’t support much of anything.
they stole it usually, but as armies got bigger and traveled further they would create ‘logistical trains’ of supply wagons. the length of the passage for which was the primary limiting factor of speed and distance of an invading force. see basically every attempt to conquer Russia after the huns.
The Russians defeated Napoleon without a single direct attack. They removed food supplies along the road. Scorched earth. They picked off foraging, hunting squads. He rode in with what I think was the largest army ever. A million, and walked out with some 20 000 survivors.
You would think the Russians would have learned from their own history.
In addition to what others said, one reason for the success of the Roman empire was their infrastructure. They were able to send supplies through their network of well made streets – many of which we still use today!
As with today the front line soldiers are and were a small% of the total army.
Romans were amazing at logistics this is the key to an army. Different specialist soldiers cooks, mechanics, joiners, engineers, bridge builders etc etc all accompany the force (before or behind depending on role) and they do their specific jobs to help the army.
Just look at a town, for it to succeed we have teachers, road builders, bin men and a 100 other jobs to keep the town running, same as an army.
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