5 ms·

Bring war material with you from home, but forage on the enemy. Thus the army will have food enough for its needs. --Sun Tzu, The Art of War

• mcguire 4y ago
  It works well enough to be a consistent strategy, but you have to be careful taking too much from a given piece of territory. Eventually, the locals start getting unhappy with you. And then there's things like the Thirty Years' War, where armies foraged their way through territories often enough that eventually there was nothing left.
  • zardo 4y ago
    > Eventually, the locals start getting unhappy with you. Pretty sure the locals are unhappy from the start of the foraging process, with all the stealing, murdering, and raping.
    • pessimizer 4y ago
      Unhappy is being used here to mean "unhappy enough that it affects you." It's not about concern for the mental health of the locals.
    • mcguire 4y ago
      There is more than one way to forage. At best, the army can pay the local inhabitants, maybe even a fair value, particularly if the area is nominally friendly. Even if the army "commandeers" supplies, it would want to keep the criminal activity to a minimum, if only because it is bad for discipline. The Thirty Years' War is an extreme case, in large part because the armies were made up of mercenaries that were not getting paid regularly.
  • watwut 4y ago
    I think that with Thirty Years' War, it was not just "foraging"bur also religious cleansing. It was kind of genocide. They did not had word genocide yet, but generally it fits.