Persian Invasion of 480 BC - articles

[Sean Manning]

The problem is worst for armies inland, because grain can only be hauled from a radius of a few dozen miles before your pack animals and bearers are eating most of their load carrying it to the troops.

I don't think this is true. I myself have hiked a dozen miles with just a small bag of snacks. A mule with a cart, or a man with a cart, could haul enough food to keep himself going for hundreds of miles, without any foraging at all. I'm not sure what the distance is before you've eaten your food, but the milage has to be much greater than a just a few dozen. Pioneers in the early United states could journey for thousands of miles in a covered wagon with no roads at all and very little knowledge of what they were up against. Not all of them made it alive, but many did. The logistics problems of a large army are just the current paradigm of thought, based on pure theory. I haven't seen evidence to convince me.

It is a scientific fact that a healthy man needs at least 3 lbs of wheat or the equivalent a day when doing heavy labour. If he gets less than this, than he slowly starves. Historical precedents support this. This was the weight of a ration in the American Civil War, for example, even though the Union could afford to include a significant amount of meat in the diet. I bet you were hiking for one (or at most a few) days, in mild weather, with modern shoes and lightweight gear of alloys and synthetics. Try it with 60-80 lbs of gear on your back, for weeks on end, and I suspect you'd want more to eat each day. It is a matter of historical fact that well-attested field armies don't rise over 100,000 people except in very unusual circumstances.

Noncombatants in the enemy camp were dealt with when looting it. The results were similar to, and just as ugly as, the sack of a town. See Xenophon's account of Cunaxa, where the Persians reached the Cyrian camp and were held off for a short time by a few camp followers who grabbed weapons, or the Alexander historians' accounts of the aftermath of Issus where Alexander protected the captured household of Darius III.