patrick.net

AmericanKulak says

Good Generals study Strategy; Brilliant generals concern themselves with logistics.

That has been a proverb since Alexander and Sun Tzu. The pack mule has always contributed more to victory than the charger.

I'm bad with words. Isn't having good logistics a part of a good strategic whole?

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An army runs on food, water and bullets.

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DhammaStep says

I'm bad with words. Isn't having good logistics a part of a good strategic whole?

More important than strategy. Get thar the fustest with the mustest outweighs any other consideration.

If you've got 50 shells to put down range, and the enemy only has 20, you'll win sooner or later, no matter what.

It doesn't matter if you enemy has 10 Tigers that can each knock out 5 Shermans, if you bring 100 Shermans to the battlefield.

"Guns and Butter"

Also, I think the WWII ratio was 7:1 -->> 7 Support Troops for every Soldier in the Field

AmericanKulak says

If you've got 50 shells to put down range, and the enemy only has 20, you'll win sooner or later, no matter what

laughs in Taliban

DhammaStep says

laughs in Taliban

Also logistics. Like Vietnam, the US Military Intel grossly undercounted the number of "Part Timers" and "Moonlighters" in the Taliban, just like the did with part-time cadres in South Vietnam. Just because somebody doesn't live and sleep in an NVA bunker complex as part of Regiment 321, doesn't mean they aren't a combatant.

The US never brought enough boots on the ground, or recruited the RIGHT kind of people in the large numbers needed. One of the reasons the Taliban kept coming back is that the US never employed the huge numbers of people for semi-permanent pacification, they would leave some areas after a few months and the Taliban would come right back, often with extra fun for any collaborators.

What makes insurgencies so hard is that you have to have enough troops be everywhere, without too many too annoy, and you can never leave a pacified area as it rapidly "De-pacifies" as soon as you draw down.

There's videos on Youtube of reporters embedded with part-time Taliban who drive Taxis during the week, and on Saturday night come out to play. Or who are "on call" with instructions to run to the sound of the guns.

"But Malaysia!" In the Malay insurgency, the communists overwhelmingly recruited from Chinese and half-Chinese, a minority. The British had the majority of the Malay population working for them with the explicit promise of full independence at the conclusion. And the Malays saw the Chinese as Central Europeans see Jews: Money-Grubbing Yet Communists Who Took Over the Country.

So yes, logistics again.

Your premise is that somehow logistics is separate from strategy. How do you define the words "strategy" and "logistics"?

Strategy details the desired outcome, the conditions by which the outcome can be met, and how to reach that outcome in the broad strokes.
IE the Japanese Strategy for Submarines, broadly, was to use them as "Snipers" against Capital Ships. The American Strategy was as Commerce Raiders. Because the Japanese never had enough escort ships, and most of their cargo ships were smaller on average, well protected convoys were never a serious issue, so the US rarely employed Wolfpack TACTICS against the Japanese.

Tactics details specific advantages/details that will be exploited to reach the objective.

Logistics are how resources are supplied at the right time to the right people to deploy tactics in support of the Strategy.

Strategy can include Tactics and Logistics, just like an Overall Business Plan can talk about Funding and Marketing. But nobody would say Marketing and the overall Business Plan are the same; typically a business plan would not go into fine grain detail about Marketing every quarter for quarters on end

In a hypothetical Minecraft Civil War, the logistics advantage lies with the resistance, due to the massive supply of firearms and the massive size of the country, and that Team Blue supporters are isolated in a handful of counties with the hinterland where all the food and raw resources are is not.

While they do have port access, those ports are easily damaged and the Blue Team would lack the physical asset control to pledge for loans. The terrain they'd have to control is wide and varied. Florida is larger (though less varied, no hills or mountains but a great deal of wetlands and rural areas) AND more populous than South Vietnam. Just Florida, alone.