History of military logistics
Some of these magazines were dedicated to providing frontier towns and fortresses several months' worth of supplies in the event of a siege, while the rest were supported French armies operating in the field.
When operating in enemy territory an army was forced to plunder the local countryside for supplies, a historical tradition meant to allow war to be conducted at the enemy's expense. However, with the increase in army sizes this reliance on plunder became a major problem, as decisions regarding where and when an army could move or fight were made based not on strategic objectives but whether a given area was capable of supporting the soldiers' needs. Sieges in particular were affected by this, both for an army attempting to lay siege to a location and for one coming to its relief.  Unless a commander was able to implement some sort of regular resupply, a fortress or town with a devastated countryside could be effectively immune to either operation. Mons could not be besieged in 1684 because of a lack of forage in the area. For the later French siege of Mons in the Spanish Netherlands in 1691, during the Nine Years' War, Louvois purchased 900,000 rations of fodder the year before.

Although living off the land theoretically granted armies freedom of movement, it required careful planning, and the need for plunder precluded any sort of sustained, purposeful advance. Bread was a particular problem, as providing it locally was limited by the availability of mills, ovens and bakers. An army of 60,000 might require 90,000 rations once camp followers were included, and at 0.68 kilograms (1.5 lb) of bread per ration that would require 61 tonnes (135,000 lb) of bread per day. Armies normally marched for three days and rested on the fourth. A supply of bread for 60,000 men for four days required at least sixty ovens operated by 240 bakers. To build an oven required 500 two-kilogram bricks, so sixty ovens required sixty cartloads of bricks. In addition, a month's supply of fuel for the sixty ovens needed 1,400 cartloads. Local mills were targets for enemy action, so handmills were often necessary.
Recourse therefore had to be made to bringing up supplies from the bases.  Fortresses not only guarded  lines of communication they served as supply bases. In 1675, a French army 80,000 strong was supported for two months by the grain stored at Maastricht and Liège. The indecisiveness of campaigns of the period was largely the result of the difficulty involved in supplying large armies. The larger armies of the seventeenth century also saw the advent of military uniforms, which were introduced in Britain with the New Model Army in the English Civil War. Clothing contracts became centralised but funds were disbursed through regiments, which developed distinctive dress. Government payments were often in arrears, sometimes by years, and stripping the dead for their clothing became a common practice.

Eighteenth century: In 1704, the Duke of Marlborough marched his army from the Netherlands to the Danube, following the Rhine and Neckar rivers. He was able to do so because he was moving through rich country and his Quartermaster General, Colonel William Cadogan, paid for supplies in gold at fair prices, so that the local population were willing to sell, and brought supplies to collection points. This was arranged through a contract let to Sir Solomon de Medina to purchase supplies through local agents. The 400-kilometre (250 mi) march wore out boots but these too were provided. The result was that the army arrived in good condition and ready to fight the Battle of Blenheim.
In contrast, Marlborough's opponent, Marshal Tallard, was placed at a logistical disadvantage, having to advance without prepositioned supplies. Usually a population regarded the presence of an army, whether friendly or not, as a disaster and hoped that it would go away as soon as possible. Europe lacked a network of good roads, and rains or snow melt could turn unmade roads into quagmires. Bridges were infrequent, and wooden bridges were easy to destroy. Most were crossed only by ferry. Rivers could become unnavigable if the water level rose or fell too much.

The Chinese likewise were able to tap into the rich agricultural resources of eastern China to support campaigns against far-flung adversaries. The Kangxi Emperor drove the Russians from the Amur river region, and besieged the Russian fortress at Albazin. The Treaty of Nerchinsk allocated the region to China. In the Dzungar–Qing Wars, the emperor was able to mount an expedition across the Gobi Desert to defeat the Dzungar in the Battle of Jao Modo, but subsequent expeditions to Tibet in 1717 and 1718 were frustrated by logistical difficulties and ran out of food before a more successful expedition in 1720.
In the American Revolutionary War, the Americans had a young population with large numbers of potential soldiers, and an agricultural economy with surplus foodstuffs and no vital centres. Clothing and footwear could be supplied by domestic production, there was widespread ownership of firearms, and a shipping industry experienced in smuggling that could supply other needs. What they lacked was land transportation infrastructure  —  roads, waterways, wagons, animals and skilled personnel — needed for the distribution of supplies. This hampered the creation and maintenance of forces sufficiently large to drive out the British.
After the war the British created the infrastructure and gained the experience needed to manage an empire. They reorganised the management of the supply of military food and transport, which was completed in 1793–1794 when the naval Victualling and Transport Boards undertook those responsibilities. It built upon experience learned from the supply of the very-long-distance Falkland Islands garrison from 1767 to 1772 to systematise needed shipments to distant places such as Australia, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone.
This new infrastructure allowed Britain to launch large expeditions to the continent during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and to develop a global network of garrisons in the colonies. They were not always successful; British setbacks in the Kandyan Wars in Sri Lanka were partly attributable to logistical difficulties, although disease and terrain were also factors, and the British were defeated by the Ashanti Empire in the Battle of Nsamankow in 1824 when they ran out of ammunition.

Nineteenth century: 

Napoleonic wars: Napoleon made logistical operations a major part of French strategy. He dispersed his corps along a broad front to maximise the area from which supplies could be drawn. Each day forage parties brought in supplies. This differed from earlier operations living off the land in the size of the forces involved, and because the primary motivation was the emperor's desire for mobility. Crucially, the army did not degenerate into an armed mob. Ammunition could not as a rule be obtained locally, so Napoleon allotted 2,500 of his 4,500 wagons to carrying artillery ammunition, with the rest hauling rations. Each man carried 60 to 80 rounds in his pack, and each division carried 97,000 rounds in reserve. Thus, like earlier armies, the Grande Armée took with it sufficient ammunition for the whole campaign. Support troops accompanied each unit. A British Royal Horse Artillery troop in 1813 was authorised to have a farrier, a carriage smith, two shoeing smiths, two collar makers and a wheelwright.

During the Ulm Campaign in 1805, the French army of 200,000 men had no need for time-consuming efforts to scour the countryside for supplies and live off the land, as it was well provided for by France's German allies. France's ally, the Electorate of Bavaria, turned the city of Augsburg into a gigantic supply centre, allowing the Grande Armée, generously replenished with food, shoes and ammunition, to quickly invade Austria after the decisive French victory at Ulm.
Napoleon left nothing to chance, requesting the Bavarians to prepare in advance a specified amount of food at certain cities such as Würzburg and Ulm, for which the French reimbursed them. When French demands proved excessive for the German principalities, the French army used a system of vouchers to requisition supplies and keep the rapid advance going. The agreements with allies permitted the French to obtain huge quantities of supplies within a few days' notice. Napoleon built up a major supply magazine at Passau, with barges transporting supplies down the Danube to Vienna to maintain the French army prior to the Battle of Austerlitz in combat readiness.
The French system fared poorly in the Peninsular War in the face of Spanish guerrilla warfare that targeted their supply lines and the British blockade of French-occupied ports on the Iberian Peninsula. The need to supply a besieged Barcelona made it impossible to control the province and ended French plans to incorporate Catalonia into Napoleon's Empire. Wellington blocked the French advance into Portugal with a series of fortifications, the Lines of Torres Vedras, and devastated the area north of the lines to make it difficult for the French to mass forces there to assault or besiege the fortifications.

A more spectacular logistical failure occurred in the Russian campaign in 1812. Carl von Clausewitz noted:The second crisis most commonly occurs at the end of a victorious campaign when the lines of communication have begun to be overstretched. This is especially true when the war is conducted in an impoverished, thinly populated and possibly hostile country.