Logistics started as the job of finding soldiers somewhere to sleep
The word logistics comes from the French for lodgings. Napoleonic-era staff officers included a marshal of lodgings, responsible for billeting troops on the march. A Swiss military writer turned that title into a general term for moving armies, and today it describes getting anything from anywhere to wherever it is needed.
Antoine-Henri Jomini, a Swiss officer and military theorist, either invented or popularised the French term logistique in his writings on the art of war, where it appears in an 1830 edition. He explained that general staff officers had once carried titles like marshal of lodgings and major-general of lodgings, and the new word grew from those. He described it as the art of ordering an army's movements: arranging columns, setting departure times and routes, and securing the communications needed to arrive on schedule. English adopted the word by 1846.
Not everyone bought the story. In 1832 Georges de Chambray called the word brand new, unseen in military literature, and found the lodgings derivation peculiar. He pointed out that the French Academy's dictionary already listed logistique as another name for algebra, from an ancient Greek branch of mathematics, the likely root of logistic growth in statistics. Some sources still credit that Greek term instead, whether unaware of Jomini's account or doubting it.
Definitions have since broadened. The Oxford English Dictionary still frames logistics as the military science of procuring, maintaining and transporting personnel, materiel and facilities; American dictionaries speak of coordinating any complex operation involving many people or supplies. Some describe it as engineering that builds systems of people rather than machines.
In business, logistics is the part of supply chain management that moves goods, services and information efficiently from origin to consumer, and back again for returns. It manages tangible things like materials and food as well as intangibles such as time and information. It covers transport between facilities, not the flow of parts inside a factory. Armies still need food, weapons, ammunition and spare parts delivered; civilian operations from rubbish collection and mail to utilities face the same puzzles. Because logistics eats a large share of operating costs for firms and even nations, simulation software is widely used to model and trim it.
Source: Logistics
