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What Actually Wins Wars? Could it Be Logistics?

“Infantry wins battles; logistics wins wars.” This statement is attributed to World War I commanding general John J. Pershing (although I have yet to find the source). Military logistics means getting soldiers and equipment in place for battle or replacing casualties and destroyed equipment.

In 2015, Phillips Payson O’Brien wrote a book about World War II that supports Pershing’s claim. He began his book by saying, “There were no decisive battles in World War II.” [1]

“Industrially and technologically, the war was primarily a competition of aircraft development and construction,” he wrote. [2]  The Allies won the war because they were able (in 1944, especially) to use air and sea power to destroy substantial production and transport of airplanes.

O’Brien’s analysis of World War II is controversial, of course, but his thinking sheds light on earlier history and alerts us to the future.

Let’s Start with the American Revolution

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Saving America’s Forests?

It makes a good story. In the late 1800s demand for wood was insatiable—for houses, for ships, for fuel, for railroad ties. Americans were logging trees all over the country, then moving on to another forest, leaving ugly cutover land behind them. President Theodore Roosevelt expressed fear of a “timber famine.” Trees are being destroyed, he said, “far more rapidly than they are being replaced.”[1]

George Vanderbilt (grandson of the “robber baron” Cornelius Vanderbilt) came to the rescue.

Vanderbilt’s mansion near Asheville, North Carolina, was built on land that included about 125,000 acres of forest, much of it already logged. Vanderbilt hired a young man, Gifford Pinchot, to manage the lands around the Biltmore estate,  with the goals of making money while restoring and protecting the forest. Pinchot hired a German forester, Carl Schenck,  to work for him. Pinchot went on to be the first head of the U.S. Forest Service, and Schenck started the first forestry school in the nation.

“Pinchot implemented a management plan that improved the forest while returning a profit to the landowner, the first of its kind in America and served as a national model,” states the National Forestry Foundation on its website. [2]

But Wait!

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Why Not Start a Charitable Foundation? History Gives Us the Answer

You’ve probably heard that Henry Ford II resigned from the board of the Ford Foundation because it had veered far away from its donor’s intent.  In his 1976 resignation letter, Ford (grandson of Ford Sr.) wrote:

“In effect, the foundation is a creature of capitalism—a statement that, I’m sure, would be shocking to many professional staff people in the field of philanthropy. It is hard to discern recognition of this fact in anything the. foundation does.

“It is even more difficult to find an understanding of this in many of the institutions, particularly the universities, that are the beneficiaries of the foundation’s grant programs.”[1]

What had the foundation been doing? Essentially it had gone rogue. Continue reading “Why Not Start a Charitable Foundation? History Gives Us the Answer”

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Why Did the Europeans Win?

My last post, “Land Grants or Land Grabs,” revealed that most federal land that started land-grant universities had been taken from Indians. I  received some constructive pushback. (See the comments.) But that feedback reminded me of a question, Why did the Europeans invade the New World in the first place and conquer Native Americans, rather than Native Americans invading Europe and conquering Europeans?

The phrasing of this question will alert some readers to the subject of this post, the powerful 1997 book by Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel.[1]

Diamond’s book travels through time (back to the origins of humans) and space (all continents except Antarctica) to answer that question—to determine why some societies became so powerful, with such technology, that they could cross an ocean and conquer millions of people. The European/Native American conflict is the most obvious example, but history has many examples of more powerful groups overcoming less powerful groups.

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Land Grants or Land Grabs?

You may have seen a statement similar to this one on a university website:

NC State University . . . respectfully acknowledges that the lands within and surrounding present-day Raleigh are the traditional homelands and gathering places of many Indigenous peoples, including eight federally and state-recognized tribes. . . .

Such statements are not purely the result of gracious sentiments. NC State’s acknowledgment and many others were added after a troubling study appeared. It was “Land-Grab Universities,” published in 2020 by High Country News, an environmentally oriented nonprofit  newspaper in the West. [1]

I learned about this report from Stephen M. Gavazzi, a professor of human development and family science at Ohio State University and a strong proponent of land-grant universities. In 2020,  Dr. Gavazzi had just finished co-editing a book about the land-grants’ “virtuous mission of meeting community challenges and solving society’s problems.”[2]

But then he read the High Country News exposé. Continue reading “Land Grants or Land Grabs?”