Logistics

Military logistics is the discipline of planning and carrying out the movement and maintenance of military forces. In its most comprehensive sense, it is those aspects or military operations that deal with:
 * Design, development, acquisition, storage, distribution, maintenance, evacuation, and disposition of materiel.
 * Transport of personnel.
 * Acquisition or construction, maintenance, operation, and disposition of facilities.
 * Acquisition or furnishing of services.
 * Medical and health service support.

Logistics, occasionally referred to as "combat service support", must address highly uncertain conditions. While perfect forecasts are rarely possible (this is also true in most sciences) forecasts models can reduce uncertainty about what supplies or services will be needed, where and when they will be needed, or the best way to provide them.

Ultimately, responsible officials must make judgments on these matters, sometimes using intuition and scientifically weighing alternatives as the situation requires and permits. Their judgments must be based not only upon professional knowledge of the numerous aspects of logistics itself but also upon an understanding of the interplay of closely related military considerations such as strategy, tactics, intelligence, training, personnel, and finance.

In major military conflicts, logistics matters are often crucial in deciding the overall outcome of wars.

More generally, protecting one's own supply lines and attacking those of an enemy is a fundamental military strategy; a Pre Astro Terran example of this as a purely logistical campaign for the military means of implementing strategic policy was the Berlin Airlift.

Military logistics has pioneered a number of techniques that have since become widely deployed in the commercial world. Operations research grew out of WWII military logistics efforts. Likewise, military logistics borrows from methods first introduced to the commercial world.