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1 internautes sur 1 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
5.0étoiles sur 5
should be required reading for everyone, Sep 14 2003
Par Un client
I am amazed how much history made sense after reading this simple and short book. They should make every high school student (and everyone older who is mildly interested in history) read the first 40 pages of this book.As children, we have a simplistic conception of war as a series of battles where everyone is willing to go anywhere to fight to the death in order to determine an absolute winner. Actually meeting the enemy on the battlefield is as easy as telling the bully to meet you by the swings after school. Teachers of history do very little to dispel this misconception, which is quite pathetic because we fail to understand much of the significance of the history we are taught (which in high school and early college focuses heavily on military conflicts). What this book does in the first 40 pages or so is clearly illustrate how logistics (transporting food, water, and equipment) SEVERELY restricts WHERE you can go, HOW (and how fast) you can get there, HOW LONG you can stay there, and HOW MANY soldiers you can take with you. These constraints will obviously impact the generals' decisions on when to fight and how to fight. The problems of logistics will limit the length of the conflict and even who you can choose to fight with. Reading the book made me truly understand the saying, "an army travels on its stomach." Reading the book, I could finally appreciate how logistics must have shaped the outcomes of key points in history; and how technology (ships, land transport, rise of agricultural surplus which can feed a traveling army, etc.) can facilitate and limit warfare. Once again, I can't help but be utterly amazed that logistics does not get more attention by historians and by teachers. This short little book will do wonders for your appreciation and "rounding out" of the history that you were taught in school.
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de Martin van Creveld
de J.D. Pendry
