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The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was archived by FrB.TG via FACBot (talk) 30 November 2023 [1].

History of military logistics

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Nominator(s): Hawkeye7 (discuss) 18:55, 31 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I split this article off from Military logistics, which I am still working on. This is one of those high-level articles that a traditional encyclopaedia has, but where the Wikipedia is deficient. I have tried to make a start with this article, which I created by splitting the history section off from the parent article, rewriting, and adding material, mainly to the front and the back. Almost all the article is now my work.

There are good reasons why these sort of top-level articles do not get the attention that many readers would expect, the major one being that they are so hard to write. This article has to cover 2,000 years of military history. Ideally, it would be a summary of its subarticles, but none of them currently exist. The task of this article is therefore to cover important developments without getting into to much detail, and it degenerating into a catalogue of battles and wars. A conscious effort was made to avoid making the article Euro-centric, and to incorporate examples from around the world. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 18:55, 31 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

UC

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Chucking in a few peanuts, mostly on the really old stuff, for now:

  • Feudalism in the lead: something of a dirty word among medieval scholars, who haven't really been happy with the idea of "Feudalism" as a single coherent Thing for a few decades now. Certainly, the idea of calling it "a system" (rather than, at the most charitable, a series of slightly-ad-hoc systems with some similarities but also important differences) is really quite dated. Articles and books on big topics like this often end up with blind-spots when it comes to the specifics of individual disciplines: suggest something like "in medieval Europe, responsibility for military logistics was often delegated to the magnates of individual households (and mercenary companies?), who would supply their own troops".
    It comes from a 2021 source. Deleted that from the lead. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:14, 2 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • After the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century there was the shift from a centrally organised army to a combination of military forces made up of local troops: if we're (admirably and correctly) going to avoid Eurocentricism, we need to put sentences like this into geographic context: I doubt the fall of Rome had much impact in China or North America.
    Changed as suggested. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:14, 2 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Thinking a little on this, I'm not sure the basic point here is valid. Firstly, the Roman empire didn't (all) fall in the fifth century, and the Byzantinists are now getting increasingly comfortable and consistent at calling their subject the "(Eastern) Roman Empire" until the 15th century. Secondly, the Roman army wasn't straightforwardly a single, centralised organisation in the fourth and fifth centuries: units were increasingly tied to the areas in which they served and recruited from those areas, particularly from children of soldiers - in many ways not all that different to your textbook "feudal" model (see lots of work on this at Banna (Birdoswald). Thirdly, I'm not sure what the distinction here is between a "centrally organised army" and one "made up of local troops": isn't everyone local to somewhere? Professional troops were fairly rare after 500 Thinking on it, that's not true either: professional militaries, perhaps, but they were also pretty rare before that, and certainly people serving by obligation were part of the show in the "late Roman" army and indeed very much the norm outside the high Roman professional army and perhaps some of the Hellenistic monarchies. UndercoverClassicist T·C 21:14, 2 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • On the same note, the lead still reads as pretty Euro-heavy to me, especially in the second paragraph, which is explicitly about Europe only but also the only material on a three-century period.
  • Is there anything to add to the lead about logistics post 1948?
    Added a bit more. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:14, 2 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'd like to see something done about gendered language in the very early sections: for instance, Neolithic armies ... rarely exceeded 20,000 men (given how little we know about Neolithic warfare in general, I don't think we can say that all Neolithic societies had no fighting women, or indeed no alternative gender categories), and A king or warlord might use his army...
    Changed to more gener neutral terms. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:14, 2 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I still see rarely exceeded 20,000 men in the lead. More generally, there's a fairly regular use of "men" for "soldiers", "warriors", "troops", "combatants" and so on, which I think should be avoided. Yes, it's a commonplace/cliché in (particularly older) military writing and yes, it's more-or-less accurate for most of our time periods, but we don't do that for other situations where the same is true: nobody would write about the "privileges granted by the Roman senate to its men", for example. Given the general nature of this field I think this is a case where we have to be particularly proactive about systemic bias. UndercoverClassicist T·C 21:14, 2 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • On which: 20,000 seems very big for the time we're talking about: I'd be interested to know what that's based on. The biggest mass-death sites I've seen from the Neolithic have bodies in the low hundreds, which doesn't really seem to fit with armies that massive wandering around. I'm also curious about where all these people are coming from, and who's feeding them when they're on the move: a really big Neolithic site had a population of a couple of thousand people total.
    I was looking through Prehistoric warfare to see if I could find a better source.
  • Roman soldiers are generally called legionaries in English (see Ngrams); legionnaire is best kept for the French.
    Heh. Because I'm reading a French language source and not thinking. Corrected. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:14, 2 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Seems odd to pass over the whole Mycenaean/Classical world until Alexander, and then devote an entire paragraph to the guy. There's also a bit of a buried lead here: if Philip was banning carts, it implies that someone was previously using them. (There's another problem here: we say that Alexander banned carts, but then that he used them to lug his siege engines around: this sounds like the commonplace in classical military historiography where the historian has a virtuous commander force the soldiers to carry their own gear to restore discipline or general manliness) In particular, I'm sure much work has been done on how the Persian armies of Xerxes and Darius I were supplied.
    Do you have a suggested source? I have amassed a library of books and journal articles on logistics but have nothing on the Persians. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:14, 2 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Those in the field will know better, but some that come up on a quick search:
Again, I'm not suggesting putting everything in here, but this article needs to be a judicious summary of that everything, and therefore we need to start from a position of knowing what the whole topic looks like before we can summarise and cut down. UndercoverClassicist T·C 21:14, 2 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Suggest pointing out that the Romans were by no means the first to construct a network of roads for military and other logistics: the Persians got there a few centuries earlier.
    Added the Persians. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:14, 2 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Appreciated, though we now have the weird situation that the Romans get all the focus and the credit, whereas the Persians - who did it first - get relegated to being one of many in a list of "and the rest". I think this is another respect in which taking another swing at this section with the (Graeco-)Persian context in mind would help. UndercoverClassicist T·C 21:14, 2 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Again, on Eurocentrism: we make a brief gesture to China, India and South America about roads, but otherwise our conception of Antiquity basically happens between the Alps and the Euphrates: we did briefly wander into Persia, but only when we had some Macedonian armies to follow there. We've named a whole lot of influential commanders, empires and societies from Greece, Rome and areas often associated with them: what are the equivalents (say) in Egypt, the Far East and the Americas?
    There is a whole paragraph on logistics in medieval America. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:14, 2 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    There is, but nothing for the pre-medieval period (the meaning of Antiquity intended in my comment above). UndercoverClassicist T·C 21:14, 2 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Moving a bit outside my area, the Medieval section is curiously early Medieval (and quite strongly Carolingian): in particular, it makes a slightly odd move to Crecy, then back to the ninth century, then to the Mongols (though it isn't massively clear on the chronology of the latter two), then out to the wider world (good), then back to Big Charlie. Given that the Early Modern section doesn't pick up until 1530 (a rather late date, in my view: I think most would use 1453 or 1492), it's odd that the High and Late Middle Ages have received so little treatment: there's loads in Anne Curry's recent-ish book on Agincourt, for example, on how the English and French were supplied, and that's very different to the "king calls the lords, lords call their vassals and sort their own provisions" model that we sketched in the lead.
    Do you mean Agincourt (2015) or The Hundred Years War (2023)? Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:14, 2 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I've only read Agincourt, but I'm sure her newer book has equally good if not better material. UndercoverClassicist T·C 21:14, 2 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think our sketch of "the Vikings" gives them too much coherency (as if we've written from Alfred's perspective rather than Guthrum's): Viking was something you did, not something you were, and Scandinavians hardly spent the whole period getting along and working together.
  • Did anything interesting happen in western Asia and north Africa during the early medieval period?
  • I notice at the moment that the "Antiquity" section has six sources cited, only two of which are 21st century: that's a big topic divided between very few voices/perspectives.

Certainly looking at these two sections, I wonder if there's an element of WP:WRITEITFIRST here: there's a difficult balance between summary style and comprehensiveness to be struck, and it might be difficult to establish it without a bigger, more detailed and more global account of military logistics in the ancient and medieval worlds. UndercoverClassicist T·C 17:18, 2 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Being a top-level article, it calls out for subarticles, but they do not currently exist. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:14, 2 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Well, yes, but more importantly, it calls out for being a judicious, well-balanced, (as far as possible) error and systemic-bias-free summary of what those articles would or should say. There's no problem if those articles don't exist (yet), but for an article like this to be FA quality, it does need to be written with a good, up-to-date understanding of what its field is. For this one, as you'll know much better than me, that field is massive and has the problem of being both extremely broad and having depth and details which are extremely important. I'm going to stick down an oppose at the moment, purely because of how long I can see this review is getting already: it isn't fair to turn this into an extended peer review and I do think the sections on Antiquity and the Medieval period need a fairly major rework to make them up to date with current scholarship and representative of the world picture. I don't think that sort of rework is within the scope of a normal FAC; however, I am absolutely open to revisiting that !vote if the situation does change. UndercoverClassicist T·C 21:14, 2 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Unfortunately, we have no other mechanism for review and comment. Our only options are to provide reviews here or leave the article as it is. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 22:14, 2 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Query Hawkeye7, could you glance over the article Operations Research (particularly the World War II section), and the sources there, and have a look at whether your sources give OR (known as Operational Research in the UK) a due-weight role in the evolution of logistics during WWII and ongoing ? The role of OR in military logistics, particularly in WWII, has always been emphasized in the field, and it has a large place in West Point Military Academy training. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 11:27, 9 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

All of the examples in the article concern operations, but I can add a sentence or two about OR and logistics. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:15, 9 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Added a paragraph. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:37, 15 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Closing comment. Sorry Hawkeye but this has been open for more than four weeks now and hasn't gained a single support and even has an oppose. I don't think it makes sense to keep this open any longer now. The usual two-week wait before a new nomination will apply. FrB.TG (talk) 16:24, 30 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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