Alexander

The Invisible Army ← Series Home Key Takeaways Logistics as strategy: Alexander's campaigns succeeded because he planned supply before battle—timing sieges to coincide with harvests, selecting routes based on water sources, not just enemy positions. Light and fast beats heavy and slow: By minimizing baggage trains and maximizing soldier self-sufficiency, Alexander achieved speeds of advance that wouldn't be matched until motorized warfare. The tyranny of the horse: Cavalry horses consume 10x more fodder than a soldier eats grain—Alexander's army ate its way across Asia, and understanding this constraint explains his route choices. Logistics determines limits: Even Alexander couldn't sustain a campaign beyond the limits of supply. His army mutinied at the Hyphasis River not from cowardice but from exhaustion—they had reached the edge of what logistics could support. The Conquest That Shouldn’t Have Worked In 334 BCE, Alexander III of Macedon crossed the Hellespont into Asia with approximately 48,000 infantry, 6,000 cavalry, and enough supplies for… about thirty days. ...

The Kinetic Chain 1 Part 1: Alexander's Invisible Army 2 Part 2: Napoleon's Fatal Calculation 3 Part 3: The Railroad Revolution 4 Part 4: The Crimean Catastrophe 5 Part 5: Barbarossa and the Battle of the Gauges 6 Part 6: The Battle of the Bulge and the Tyranny of Fuel 7 Part 7: Wholesale Distribution and the American Way of 8 Part 8: The Pacific Logistics Challenge 9 Part 9: Victory Through Logistics 10 Part 10: Vietnam and the Tyranny of Terrain 11 Part 11: Giap's Bicycle Brigades 12 Part 12: The Ho Chi Minh Trail 13 Part 13: American Largesse in Vietnam 14 Part 14: The M16 Debacle and Logistics Failure 15 Part 15: The Falklands Logistics Miracle 16 Part 16: Desert Storm and the Logistics Miracle 17 Part 17: The Future of Contested Logistics ← Series Home Key Takeaways Logistics as strategy: Alexander's campaigns succeeded because he planned supply before battle—timing sieges to coincide with harvests, selecting routes based on water sources, not just enemy positions. Light and fast beats heavy and slow: By minimizing baggage trains and maximizing soldier self-sufficiency, Alexander achieved speeds of advance that wouldn't be matched until motorized warfare. The tyranny of the horse: Cavalry horses consume 10x more fodder than a soldier eats grain—Alexander's army ate its way across Asia, and understanding this constraint explains his route choices. Logistics determines limits: Even Alexander couldn't sustain a campaign beyond the limits of supply. His army mutinied at the Hyphasis River not from cowardice but from exhaustion—they had reached the edge of what logistics could support. The Conquest That Shouldn’t Have Worked In 334 BCE, Alexander III of Macedon crossed the Hellespont into Asia with approximately 48,000 infantry, 6,000 cavalry, and enough supplies for… about thirty days. ...

System's Perfect Victim 1 Part 1: The By-the-Book Admiral 2 Part 2: The Railroad Manager Who Followed Policy 3 Part 3: The Architect Who Obeyed the Emperor 4 Part 4: The Minister Who Balanced the Books ← Series Home The Mountain That Was to Be a Man In 334 BC, the architect Dinocrates presented Alexander the Great with the most audacious building proposal in history. He would take Mount Athos—a 6,670-foot mountain peninsula in Greece—and carve it into a colossus. In the statue’s left hand would be an entire city of 10,000 inhabitants. In its right hand, a vast bowl would catch the waters of a diverted river, which would then cascade dramatically into the sea. The statue’s face would be that of Alexander. The conqueror, legend says, was delighted. He asked only one practical question: what would the inhabitants eat? Dinocrates, the visionary, had not considered this. He suggested they would import grain. Alexander, the pragmatist, rejected the plan. The city of Alexandria in Egypt, a practical grid on flat land, was built instead. Dinocrates faded from history, his perfect, impossible vision recorded only as a footnote in the chronicles of architectural hubris. ...