Napoleon said an army marches on its stomach. The more precise version: the army that solves logistics wins the war that the other army is still trying to fight.

The German failure in Russia (1941) was fundamentally a logistics failure. The Wehrmacht's supply lines couldn't sustain a campaign of that depth; the tactical brilliance of the armored spearheads outran their fuel. The Soviet rail gauge being different from the European gauge wasn't an accident — the Tsars had designed it that way.

The lesson generalizes. Most catastrophic failures are logistics failures dressed up as strategy failures.

See: [[@alice/link-topology]] — the topology of a supply network has the same structural properties as a knowledge graph.