Logistics matters … a lot.
Having an efficient, effective and flexible logistics operation is often the difference between success or failure; sometimes between life or death.
Look at what these famous writers and historical figures had to say about the importance of logistics.
Tom Peters – Rule #3: Leadership Is Confusing As Hell, Fast Company, March 2001
Leaders win through logistics. Vision, sure. Strategy, yes. But when you go to war, you need to have both toilet paper and bullets at the right place at the right time. In other words, you must win through superior logistics.
James A. Huston, The Sinews of War: Army Logistics 1775-1953, 1966
Logistics … in the broadest sense, the three big M’s of warfare – material, movement, and maintenance. If international politics is ‘the art of the possible,’ and war is its instrument, logistics is the art of defining and extending the possible. It provides the substance that physically permits an army to live and move and have its being.
A.C. P. Wavell, Speaking Generally, (1946)
The more I see of war, the more I realize how it all depends on administration and transportation… It takes little skill or imagination to see where you would like your army to be and when; it takes much knowledge and hard work to know where you can place our forces and whether you can maintain them there. A real knowledge of supply and movement factors must be the basis of every leader’s plan; only then can he know how and when to take risks with those factors, and battles are won only by taking risks.