A physically-active human needs about 3 lbs of food per day. (Modern hikers can probably find lighter calorie-dense foodstuffs, but we’re talking ancient history here.)
2 lbs of beef give you 2500 calories which is enough to survive. Cheese is even higher density. It turns out that for both you need a lot of salt which in turn makes salt very important militarily.
Yeah, I was thinking it’s hard to beat dried salted meat, hard cheese, and oil or butter.
You also don’t have to assume that all the food travels the whole way. If (hypothetically) you want to send 1 soldier’s worth of food and water 7 days away, and each person can only carry 3 days worth at a time, then you can try to have 3 days worth deposited 6 days out, and then have a porter make a 2 day round trip carrying 1 day’s worth to leave for that soldier to pickup up on day 7. Then someone needs to have carried that 3 days worth to 6 days out, which you can do by having more porters make 1 day round trips from 5 days out, etc. Basically it you need exponentially more people and supplies the farther out your supply chains stretch. I think I first read about this in the context of the Incas, because potatoes are less calorie dense per pound than dried grains so it’s an even bigger problem? Being able to get water along the way, and ideally to pillage the enemy’s supplies, are also a very big deal.
2 lbs of beef give you 2500 calories which is enough to survive. Cheese is even higher density. It turns out that for both you need a lot of salt which in turn makes salt very important militarily.
Yeah, I was thinking it’s hard to beat dried salted meat, hard cheese, and oil or butter.
You also don’t have to assume that all the food travels the whole way. If (hypothetically) you want to send 1 soldier’s worth of food and water 7 days away, and each person can only carry 3 days worth at a time, then you can try to have 3 days worth deposited 6 days out, and then have a porter make a 2 day round trip carrying 1 day’s worth to leave for that soldier to pickup up on day 7. Then someone needs to have carried that 3 days worth to 6 days out, which you can do by having more porters make 1 day round trips from 5 days out, etc. Basically it you need exponentially more people and supplies the farther out your supply chains stretch. I think I first read about this in the context of the Incas, because potatoes are less calorie dense per pound than dried grains so it’s an even bigger problem? Being able to get water along the way, and ideally to pillage the enemy’s supplies, are also a very big deal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeep_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation
This works too, yeah.