Bureaucracy

Commissariat

commissariat_bureaucracy

A logistical branch of the military establishment responsible for provisioning armies in the field with food, forage, clothing, and equipment. The system developed under Louvois for the armies of Louis XIV — later refined into the Intendance — showed that an army that fed itself from organized depots could sustain campaigns of a scale and duration impossible for forces that lived off the land. A properly funded Commissariat swells the effective manpower available for campaigning; an underfunded one forces armies to compensate through ruinous private contracts, driving up maintenance costs far beyond what the manpower gain is worth.