History of military logistics
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. How vast a difference there is between a supply line stretching from Vilna to Moscow, where every wagon has to be procured by force, and a line from Cologne to Paris, via Liége, Louvain, Brussels, Mons, Valenciennes and Cambrai, where a commercial transaction, a bill of exchange, is enough to produce millions of rations!

Medical logistics: Disease had been the greatest enemy of the soldier. Invading armies sometimes introduced diseases.  Wars often created conditions for diseases to flourish through crowding, social disruption and damage to infrastructure. Crowded army camps were always susceptible to diseases. In the eighteenth century, physicians like George Cleghorn, Richard Brocklesby and René-Nicolas Dufriche Desgenettes called for improvements in military hygiene, as did John Pringle, who wrote a treatise on military medicine in 1752, Observations on the Diseases of the Army in Camp and Garrison, in which he argued that disease was caused by bad air and overcrowding.
James Lind published a Treatise of the Scurvy in 1753 in which he advocated the consumption of fresh fruit and lemon juice to treat scurvy, a common illness among sailors on long voyages. Of the 175,990 sailors recruited by the Royal Navy between 1774 and 1780, 18,545 died of disease, mainly scurvy, and 1,243 were killed. Between 1794 and 1813, with the adoption of a lemon juice ration, the navy's sick rate fell from 1 in 4 to 1 in 10.75 and the death rate from 1 in 86 to 1 in 143. Lind also advocated the consumption of the bark of cinchona trees to prevent malaria, something that had previously been recommended by Thomas Sydenham in 1676. The active ingredient was extracted and isolated in 1820 by Pierre-Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Bienaimé Caventou, who named it "quinine".
The British Walcheren Campaign of 1809 was particularly notable in that less than 800 men died in battle, but forty percent of the force of 40,000 contracted diseases, probably malaria, typhoid or typhus; 60 officers and 3,900 men died, and some 11,000 men were still ill six months later. It is estimated that of the 240,000 British soldiers and sailors who died in all theatres in the Napoleonic wars, less than 30,000 died from wounds.

Later nineteenth century: The nineteenth century saw technological developments that facilitated immense improvements to the storage, handling and transportation of supplies. Salting, drying and smoking had long been used to delay food spoilage, but in 1809 Nicolas Appert invented a process of heat sterilisation and airtight bottling for food preservation on an industrial scale. Why it worked would not be explained until Louis Pasteur's ground breaking research in 1864, but the process was swiftly and widely adopted. Appert used glass because the quality of French tinplate was poor, but good quality tinplate was widely available in the UK. Philippe de Girard in France suggested its use to Peter Durand in England, who took out a patent on the process in 1810, which he sold to industrialist Bryan Donkin in 1812 for £1,000 (equivalent to £84,000 in 2023). The British Admiralty placed substantial orders for meat preserved in tin cans in 1814. Canning remained a manual process for many years until Max Ams invented the double seam for cans in 1896, making it possible to use an automated process to fill and close them. The use of cans simplified storage and distribution of foods, and reduced waste and the incidence of food-related illness.

A practical mechanical refrigeration process was developed in Australia by James Harrison and patented in the UK by him in 1856, and by the 1880s reefer ships were plying the oceans. Richard Trevithick developed the first high-pressure steam engine in 1801 and the first working railway steam locomotive in 1804. Steam power had great advantages for vessels that plied rivers, where twists and turns meant changes of course but the narrow confines of the river made it difficult to tack. Wood and coal could be obtained along the river, whereas ocean-going vessels had no such opportunity, and therefore continued to carry sails even when they had engines.
By reducing the dependence on the wind, the steam engine made shipping faster and more reliable. To allow their warships to operate around the world, the British built a global network of coaling stations. To reduce its dependence on British colliers, the United States Navy began to move to oil in 1913. For the British, this was a more painful process, as it produced coal but not oil domestically.
The first to realise the potential of rail were the Russians, who moved a force of 14,500 men from Uherské Hradiště to Kraków by rail in 1846. During the American Civil War, railways were used extensively for the transport of personnel, supplies, horses and mules, and artillery pieces. While railways were a more economic form of transport than animal-drawn carts and wagons, they were limited to tracks, and therefore could not support an advancing army unless its advance was along existing railway lines. The large armies of the American Civil also made great use of riverboats and coastal shipping, which were not so easy to damage or interdict.
During the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, railways enabled the swift mobilisation of the Prussian Army, but the problem of moving supplies from the end of rail lines to units at the front resulted in nearly 18,000 tons trapped on trains unable to be unloaded to ground transport. During the Crimean War, the British built the first military railway, one specifically for supporting armies in the field, to support the siege of Sevastopol. The Prussian use of railways during the Franco-Prussian War is often cited as an example of logistic modernisations, but the advantages of manoeuvre were often gained by abandoning supply lines that became hopelessly congested with rear-area traffic. The Canadian government moved 4,000 troops and their supplies over the Canadian Pacific Railway to suppress the North-West Rebellion in 1885, and the Russians moved 370,000 troops along the incomplete Trans-Siberian Railway for the Russo-Japanese War in 1904.

Twentieth and twenty-first centuries: 

First World War: Between 1870 and 1914, the population of Europe grew from 293 million to 490 million. The expansion of armies and navies was even more rapid. With the spread of military conscription and reserve systems in the decades leading up to the 20th century, the potential size of armies increased substantially. France mobilised 570,000 troops for the Franco-Prussian War and over three million on the outbreak of the First World War. The advent of industrial warfare in the form of bolt-action rifles, machine guns and quick-firing artillery sent ammunition consumption soaring. In the Franco-Prussian War, each German gun fired 199 shells on average but in 1914 the German stock of 1,000 rounds per gun were exhausted in the first month and a half of fighting.

In earlier wars, most artillery pieces lasted for the duration of the campaign, but now counter-battery fire was capable of  destroying them. Strenuous efforts were made to step up production but constant firing led to wear and tear on the guns. The factories prioritised production of new guns over spare parts, which became scarce. Quality suffered in the haste to produce more and there were serious problems with guns and ammunition. In 1915, as many as 25 per cent of the rounds in a batch might be defective. The shortage of ammunition created a political crisis in the UK, the Shell Crisis of 1915, which led to the formation of a new coalition government.
As munitions production increased, transport became the major bottleneck. Military logistical systems continued to rely on nineteenth-century technology. The British shipped 5,337,841 tonnes (5,253,538 long tons) of ammunition to France and 5,525,875 tonnes (5,438,602 long tons) of hay and oats to feed the animals. When the war began, the rail and horse-drawn supply were stretched to their limits. Where the stalemate of trench warfare took hold, narrow gauge trench railways were built to extend the rail network to the front lines. The great size of the German Army proved too much for its railways to support except while immobile.