The author made some good points but also had some inaccuracies. Logistics has been the key to warfare for a long time, well before the Industrial Revolution. Back in the days of the Mongel hordes, men were able to make their disposable weapons (arrows) and live off of the land. They could also use weapons captured from the people they defeated (a common guerrilla technique for resupply even today). Still, their ability to survive and win was based on their ability to acquire enough food, water, and resources. This gave birth to the "scorched Earth" tactic where a retreating army burns everything to keep it from falling into the hands of the invader (a tactic used against the Germans as they invaded the Soviet Union in 1941).

It's been said that "military amateurs talk about tactics, professionals talk about logistics." Consider what it took for the US alone to fight WWII. We recruited or conscripted roughly 16 million men (and a few hundred thousand women). These people had to be transported to training sites, fed, equipped (clothing, weapons, etc.), receive medical care, and a host of other tasks. They then had to be transported to their duty area, be it a combat assignment or otherwise. There, they still had to be fed and supplied. It was a massive undertaking that consumed virtually everything in the economy. I've read that approximately 1 man out of every 7 in Canada served in their military during WWII. The ratio was approximately the same for the US. Most of the rest were involved in producing the food and war material needed to supply the troops. When there weren't enough men to do the job, millions of women were recruited to work in the factories and shipyards. They did a fablous job.

I've read that in the Pacific Theater, as many as 19 men were needed in the total logistics chain to support each soldier, airman, or Marine in combat. To support the infantrymen, there were aircraft (needing crew, fuel, ammo, and bombs), combat ships (to escort the supply convoys to protect them from attack and to provide artillery support), supply ships, landing craft, and a host of others necessary to do the job.

By contrast, the average Japanese soldier deployed with minimal support. He had his individual weapon, some ammunition, and some food and that was about it. Starting during the Battle for Guadacanal, our forces expended a great deal of effort to stop the Japanese resupply efforts (dubbed the "Tokyo Express"), ultimately rendering them unable to mount much resistance. Later, we adopted an island hopping strategy where we didn't attack every island that housed enemy forces, only the ones we really needed (typically, ones that had a good harbor or place to build an airfield). Our submarine forces were so good at taking out Japanese shipping that Japan resorted to using huge submarines as supply vessels. This reallocation of submarine resources both reduced their ability to attack our supply lines and was unable to carry enough supplies to keep many of the island forces from starving.

As for the European and African theaters, the Battle of the Atlantic was indeed critical. In 1942, the German U-boats were sinking supply ships faster than we could produce them. Without supply, there would've been no way to mount the invasion of North Africa (Operation TORCH), and the Normandy Invasion would've been impossible. Consider for a moment what it took to mount the Normandy Invasion (commonly referred to as "D-Day", but every invasion had its own D-Day). To send roughly 300,000 troops to France on the first day, it took thousands of aircraft and about 6,000 ships and landing craft. This was a massive undertaking. Think about the amount of men and material it took to pull that off, then consider that they had to keep the supply lines open to land additional men and equipment. Furthermore, as the forces advanced deeper into Europe, the supply lines kept getting longer. At one point, Patton's forces came to a halt for lack of supplies. Tanks aren't very effective without fuel and ammo.

One inaccuracy in the article was about the bombing of cities. He was right that during the first year of the war, neither side deliberately attacked the other's cities in any major way. Both sides started out with the idea of daylight precision bombardment of the other side's industrial base. However, both sides suffered unsustainable losses of planes and crew during the daylight attacks, so they ended up with night bombardment.

Early in the war when the British were bombing at night, studies showed that only a tiny percentage of the bombs landed within 5 MILES of the intended target. They lacked any form of long range navigation other than dead reconing and pilotage, so flying at night over a blacked out continent, often in marginal weather, meant that they had to target cities because that's all they had a chance of hitting. Later, navigation systems like Oboe and H2S, combined with Pathfinder forces, enabled them to be much more accurate. Still, they weren't able to target individual factories, railroad yards, etc. simply because they lacked the necessary accuracy. The head of RAF Bomber Command, Hugh "Bomber" Harris, didn't really seem to care about killing civilians as opposed to hitting factories. He once said, "It takes 2 years to built a factory. It takes 20 years to raise a factory worker."

The Germans developed navigation systems before the war started. The British, under the leadership of Dr. R. V. Jones, developed countermeasures to jam these navigation systems. This was the birth of electronic warfare. It explains how that lone German bomber accidentally jettisoned it's load over London and changed the course of history - it was lost due to British jamming. That freak accident literally changed the course of the Battle of Britian. At the time, the RAF was within a week or two of collapse. When the British retailiated and the Germans shifted their attacks to cities, the RAF managed to survive, preventing the Germans from invading England. Without Britian, invading the continent would've been nearly impossible due to the logistics problems of mounting an invasion from US territory.

When America entered the war, we stuck with daylight precision bombing as our policy despite stiff British opposition. Daylight bombing allowed for much better accuracy than night attacks, but it made it much easier for the German defenses, too. Through 1943, our bomber forces suffered massive losses on several missions where as many as 60 bombers out of an attacking force of a little over 300 planes were lost. That loss rate was unsustainable, for each plane carried 10 men, so over 600 men were also lost (some planes that made it back carried dead men and severely wounded crewmembers). The advent of long range escort fighters like the P-51 greatly reduced the loss rate to enemy fighters, but losses to flak were still high. Even under the best of conditions, the bombing accuracy wasn't all that great despite claims that the Norden bombsight could "put a bomb in a pickle barrel". Attacks from flak or fighters during the bomb run reduced bombing accuracy, and weather was also a big issue. By 1944, some bombers were equipped with radar bombsights to bomb through clouds, but the accuracy wasn't any better than night bombing.

Perhaps the biggest revolution in military operations over the past 30 years has been the dramatic increase in accuracy. This started with the first laser guided bombs dropped towards the end of the Vietnam war and continues to this day with better systems like JDAMS and cruise missiles. I saw a briefing earlier this year that stated a force of almost 1000 WWII bombers, each dropping 9 bombs, was needed back then to assure putting 2 bombs on a specific target (CEP was at best 3200 feet). Today, a single F-15E, F-117, B-2, etc., can attack multiple targets with near certainty of each bomb finding its mark. Recently, I read that a single B-2 on a test flight dropped 82 500-pound JDAMS bombs, each on a separate target. This radical increase in accuracy even allowed our forces to drop laser guided concrete bombs in urban areas to take out the enemy with much lower civilian casualties.

Had we wanted to kill civilians like we did in WWII, we could've sent over bombers like the B-52 and carpet bombed Iraqi cities. Or, we could've sent over a single plane carrying a nuke. We did neither. Killing the civilians was not only unnecessary, it was undesireable towards our long-term goal of establishing a peaceful democratically governed nation in Iraq.