Napoleon[edit]
Until the Napoleonic wars, the military supply was ensured by looting, requisition or private companies. In 1807, Napoleon created the first Train regiments, entirely dedicated to the supply and the transport of the equipment. However Napoleon typically tried to live off the country—he called it "war feeding war." However it made his army vulnerable to the scorched earth policy conducted by the Russians in 1812, which burned the food supplies Napoleon (and the Russian peasants) had counted upon. The French system failed as well in Spain, in the Peninsular wars, where the supplies found in the occupied territory were insufficient for French needs. The French scrambled to find alternative sources in the face of a guerrilla war that targeted supplies, and the British blockade of Spanish ports. Logistical operations largely took center stage in French strategy. The need to supply a besieged Barcelona made it impossible to control the province and ended French plans to incorporate Catalonia into Napoleon's Empire.[10]
The first theoretical analysis was by the Swiss writer, Antoine-Henri Jomini, who studied the Napoleonic wars. In 1838, he devised a theory of war on the trinity of strategy, ground tactics, and logistics.