Ivan Goes to Paris

A new book out that revisits Bonaparte's disastrous campaign against Mother Russia:
http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Reviews-Essays/Russia-Against-Napoleon/ba-p/2359. The take here is that contrary to Tolstoy, it wasn't the noble Russian peasant that carried the day against trained professional soldiers but rather the sorry state of French supply lines along with some fairly well executed logistical plans on the part of the Tsar's military which proved to be the reason that the Russkies eventually watered their horses in the Seine.

More so than people want to think, it often comes down to which army could feed its men and "could get them there first" (see Forrest, Nathan B.). Lee's inability to succeed with his invasion of the North at Gettysburg may have come down to a lack of water on the second day of the battle in July, 1863. During the action at Little Round Top, a detail of men carrying the empty canteens of the Alabamians walked right into a Federal picket and were captured. Could be that successive charges by men exhausted and delirious with thirst were the reason for the failure to take the objective and secure victory as much as or maybe more than Chamberlain's famous and desperate charge that made him a legend. That's what makes things so precarious, expensive, and historically untenable in Afghanistan--logistics. How long can you sustain an army in the field in such a place? The answer is certainly not forever or even that long.