Martin van Creveld’s Supplying War is a foundational work for understanding why operations and campaigns are limited by sustainment. The book’s core contribution is to treat logistics as a structuring constraint rather than a support function: what can be moved, fed, repaired, and coordinated determines what can be attempted.
For the command school, the value is analytic: it explains why large plans often fail for reasons that look “non-tactical” but are decisive.