Wikipedia:Peer review/Military logistics/archive1

Military logistics


I've listed this article for peer review because... I am unsure of whether the article covers the topic or not. The history section is now a summary of a long article (WP:SUMMARYSTYLE). Suggestions as to what else the article should cover and ideas for improvement sought.

Thanks, Hawkeye7   (discuss)  19:19, 23 June 2024 (UTC)


 * Sticking strictly to comprehensiveness, though I'm happy to do a more fine-grained nit-pick if it would be useful. I sympathise that resources may be hard to come by, but at the moment I think this is very much an Anglo-American take on the subject.
 * The "Etymology and definition" section has three long definitions that are all, basically, American in origin. It's interesting that, for example, we quote Rogers at great length, but not Jomini, when the former is a far more influential military thinker. At the risk of making a milhist cliché, did Clausewitz have anything to say on the subject? Did the Warsaw Pact have its own definition, alongside that of NATO?
 * On that Farrow quotation, I suppose I'm not totally clear what role it's filling. If it's there as a historical curiosity, it would seem to be in the wrong place (with the definitions/etymology, rather than with the history of thought on the matter), and perhaps something of an island -- we would want similar comments from much older military thinkers (Vegetius, Xenophon, Sun Tzu...?) on the importance and methods of supplying an army. On the other hand, if it's there as a definition - to help readers understand what Military logistics means -- I'm not sure that it says anything not also said by Lutes or NATO.
 * The "supply options" section is written partly in the past tense, creating the impression that modern military forces never, for example, employ looting.
 * Most of my comments from the FAC on History of military logistics about comprehensiveness and inclusive language apply to the History section here -- apart from a very quick reference to the Maurya Empire (which is then rapidly lost in a brief discussion of Roman transport costs), the only mention of something outside Europe is an American operation in China. Napoleon gets a whole paragraph while nothing in Africa or the Americas is mentioned at all.
 * The "Models" section seems to be pretty much a statement of American/NATO doctrine and categorisation. Most of the sources cited are either adjacent to the US military or explicitly discussing its operations.
 * A relatively small thing, but I notice that we have eight images, all of which seem to be of modern US forces.
 * I had a flick around the corresponding articles in other languages (by the power of Google Translate) -- the English article is unquestionably the best of them, but there are details in e.g. Russian, Chinese, Spanish and German which might be of some use -- if only their selection of images. UndercoverClassicist T·C 08:25, 18 July 2024 (UTC)