ABSTRACT
During the modern era, rapid technological change brought by the Industrial Revolution altered the form of warfare. The basic facts of logistics changed dramatically, both in terms of the faster speed of transportation and the greater need for war matériel. First the steam engine and later the internal combustion engine promised a mobility to armed forces that they had never known before, although it would take a century for the potential to be achieved. The carrying capacity of new methods of transportation eventually made supply of all essentials from rear staging areas both possible and necessary. Steam power provided the first mechanical means of transportation. The steam engine, pioneered in the eighteenth century and perfected as a means of transport in the nineteenth, gained its ascendence for long distance cargo-hauling by 1860. Land transportation required a technology which could replace the horse and wagon as the link between railhead and army unit.
