Logistics Comes of Age
A quick and dirty history of logistics and supply chain management.
Welcome to the future. Anybody order a drone delivery?
Logistics is having a moment of mass recognition, rising on the crest of the internet, GPS technology, and globalized production. It’s been a long time coming.
As a practical science logistics has long been with us, of course. It’s the way companies, militaries, and states organize and manage complicated systems. It’s the way we get resources where they need to be in manufacturing and in society.
Even in ancient societies, there were people who specialized in making sure supply lines functioned in an uninterrupted flow while armies traveled into battle. And on the flipside of that work was the effort to interrupt the supply lines of enemies.
By the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, logistics was being established and popularized as a formal area of military study by French officer Baron Antoine-Henri Jomini. It makes sense that war, like everything, would be rendered on an industrial, scientific plane just like so much else in the capitalist era. Jomini took the term “logistics” after military lodgings, defining it in 1830 as:
“… the art of well ordering the functionings of an army, of well combining the…
