Overview

An army, Lewis Mumford once observed, 'is a body of pure consumers' and it is logistics that feeds this body's insatiable appetite for men and materiel. Successful logistics - the transportation of supplies and combatants to battle - cannot guarantee victory, but poor logistics portends defeat. In Feeding Victory, Jobie Turner asks how technical innovation has affected this connection over time and whether advances in technology, from the railroad and the airplane to the nuclear weapon and the computer, have altered both the critical relationship between logistics and warfare and, ultimately, geopolitical dynamics. Covering a span of three hundred years, Feeding Victory focuses on five distinct periods of technological change, from the preindustrial era to the information age. For each era Turner presents a case study: the campaign for Lake George from 1755 to 1759, the Western Front in 1917, the Battle of Guadalcanal in 1942, the Battle of Stalingrad from 1942 to 1943, and the Battle of Khe Sanh in 1968. In each of these cases the logistics of the belligerents were at their limit because of geography or the vast material needs of war. With such limits, the case studies both give a clear accounting of the logistics of the period, particularly with respect to the mode of transportation - whether air, land, or sea - and reveal the inflection points between success and failure. What are the continuities between eras, Turner asks, and what can these campaigns tell us about the relationship of technology to logistics and logistics to geopolitics? In doing so, Turner discovers just how critical the biological needs of the soldiers on the battlefield prove to be; in fact, they overwhelm firepower in their importance, even in the modern era. His work shows how logistics aptly represents technological shifts from the enlightenment to the dawn of the twenty-first century and how, in our time, ideas have come to trump the material forces of war.

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9780700629145

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Reviews

Jobie Turner's findings--developed through five concise case studies that span two centuries--will be valuable to historians and military professionals alike. Thoughtful and thought-provoking, Feeding Victory: Innovative Military Logistics from Lake George to Khe Sanh deserves a place next to Martin Van Creveld's Supplying War. --Kevin C. Holzimmer, author of General Walter Krueger: Unsung Hero of the Pacific War An innovative approach to the subject. While each case study in itself can be regarded separately, taken all together Turner shows the eternal challenges that logistics poses for the conduct of war in any age. --Richard L. DiNardo, author of Mechanized Juggernaut or Military Anachronism? Horses and the German Army of World War II There are practicing military logisticians, and there are scholars who study military logistics. Only rarely does one find a military professional (in this case a US Air Force mobility commander) who is also a first-rate historian of the art and science of supplying combat forces in war and the ramifications for past, present, and future strategy. This is a unique work that deserves the widest audience. --Richard R. Muller, professor of history, US Air Force School of Advanced Air and Space Studies Feeding Victory is a welcome and thoughtful addition to the understanding and importance of military logistics. No other available book accomplishes what Colonel Turner achieves through his careful and insightful attention to the importance of military logistics from the French and Indian Wars to Vietnam, to what has changed, and to what remains the same. --Vice Admiral (ret.) Mark Harnitchek, former director of the Defense Logistics Agency and former vice commander of US Transportation Command In Feeding Victory: Innovative Logistics from Lake George to Khe Sanh, Jobie Turner cogently argues what most other historians merely assert: that those military forces better supplied and fed win. Blending different sources and perspectives across centuries, Feeding Victory explores the means and manners by which armies have achieved this paramount advantage and gives renewed meaning to the oft-ignored truism that amateurs study strategy but professionals study logistics. The chapter on Guadalcanal alone is worth the book's price. --Thomas Alexander Hughes, author of Admiral Bill Halsey: A Naval Life and Over Lord: General Pete Quesada and the Triumph of Tactical Air Power in World War II

Author Information

Jobie Turner, a colonel in the US Air Force, is the commander of the 314th Operations Group, Little Rock Air Force Base, Arkansas.

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