The first issue is what in military parlance is called the “tooth to tail” ratio. This is the ratio of the number of actual combat troops (the “tooth”) to logistics and support personnel (the “tail”) in a fighting force. Note that these are individuals in the fighting force – the question of the supporting civilian economy is separate. The thing is, the tooth to tail ratio has tended to shift towards a longer tail over time, particular as warfare has become increasingly industrialized and technical.
The Roman legion, for instance, was essentially all tooth. While there was a designation for support troops, the immunes, so named because they were immune from having to do certain duties in camp, these fellows were still in the battle line when the legion fought. The immunes included engineers, catapult-operators, musicians, craftsmen, and other specialists. Of course legions were also followed around by civilian non-combatants – camp-followers, sutlers, etc. – but in the actual ranks, the “tail” was minimal.
You can see much the same in the organization of medieval “lances” – units formed around a single knight. The Burgundian “lance” of the late 1400s was composed of nine men, eight of which were combatants (the knight, a second horsemen, the coustillier, and then six support soldiers, three mounted and three on foot) and one, the page, was fully a non-combatant. A tooth-to-tail ratio of 8:1. That sort of “tooth-heavy” setup is common in pre-industrial armies.
The industrial revolution changes a lot, as warfare begins to revolve as much around mobilizing firepower, typically in the form of mass artillery firepower as in mobilizing men. We rarely in our fiction focus on artillery, but modern warfare – that is warfare since around 1900 – is dominated by artillery and other forms of [indirect] fires. Artillery, not tanks or machine guns, after all was the leading cause of combat death in both World Wars. Suddenly, instead of having each soldier carry perhaps 30-40kg of equipment and eat perhaps 1.5kg of food per day, the logistics concern is moving a 9-ton heavy field gun that might throw something like 14,000kg of shell per day during a barrage, for multiple days on end. Suddenly, you need a lot more personnel moving shells than you need firing artillery.
As armies motorized after WWI and especially after WWII, this got even worse, as a unit of motorized or mechanized infantry needed a small army of mechanics and logistics personnel handling spare parts in order to stay motorized. Consequently, tooth-to-tail ratios plummeted, inverted and then kept going. In the US Army in WWI, the ratio was 1:2.6 (note that we’ve flipped the pre-industrial ratio, that’s 2.6 non-combat troops for every front line combat solider), by WWII it was 1:4.3 and by 2005 it was 1:8.1. Now I should note there’s also a lot of variance here too, particularly during the Cold War, but the general trend has been for this figure to continue increasing as more complex, expensive and high-tech weaponry is added to warfare, because all of that new kit demands technicians and mechanics to maintain and supply it.
[NR: Early in WW2, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill frequently harassed his various North African generals for the disparity between the “ration strength” of their commands and the much-smaller number of combat troops deployed. If General Wavell had 250,000 drawing rations, Churchill (who last commanded troops in the field in mid-WW1) assumed that this meant close to 200,000 combat troops available to fight the Italians and (later) the Germans. This almost certainly contributed to the high wastage rate of British generals in the Western Desert.]
Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday, April 22, 2022”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-04-22.
December 14, 2022
QotD: The “tooth-to-tail ratio” in armies
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