SUPPLYING WAR FOR PROFIT

The previous chapter focused upon the military effectiveness of armies raised under private contract. Unit commanders, whether on land or in command of naval forces, were generally motivated by more than a short-sighted desire to raise troops as cheaply as possible and then to exploit them for immediate financial self-interest. Regimental proprietors and ships’ captains sought to recruit experienced soldiers and sailors, and acknowledged the need to offer these men incentives to stay in service and to reward their military skills. Concern with operational viability shifted military activity away from large-scale, attritional warfare where the risk of supply failure and disruption was high. Enterprise encouraged military thinking and practice more appropriate to the limitations and possibilities available to armies and navies in this period: a strong emphasis on the mobility of field armies and willingness to draw upon the military qualities and resilience of the experienced troops within them; a massive downsizing in the scale of operational forces during the 1630s and 1640s as quality was preferred over quantity. All of this was the response of experienced, ambitious and capable commanders, who were certainly not combat-averse but were realistic in setting the pitched battle into a wider context of operational warfare which put more emphasis on territorial control and denial, and on maintaining the initiative through speed, surprise and flexibility.

At the heart of this case for a more economical and flexible use of force lay the management of logistics and finance. Albrecht Wallenstein put his campaigning priorities with characteristic succinctness when he wrote that his army needed bread, then munitions, and after these, wages. Military commanders who deployed their armies in increasingly mobile, flexible approaches to campaigning were well aware that this put even greater weight on well-coordinated supply systems, capable of meeting at least a part of their armies’ needs across a campaign which might extend over ten months and many hundreds of miles of marches, encampments, engagements and sieges. If they were sea captains the centrality of provisioning their vessels for an entire voyage would in most cases be a self-evident requirement before setting out from port.