“An army, like a serpent, travels on its belly.” - Frederick II

 “An army, like a serpent, travels on its belly.” - Frederick II (1712-1786). Attributed See Statesmen: B.H. Liddell Hart (2)

An army travels in its belly. It runs on food, on supplies, on oil and blood. It runs itself into the ground, it runs itself ragged, it runs itself into a state of dire need for repair, simply by the regular maintenance of its machines, the standard training it needs, and the slow drip of experience caused by the old and wise constantly leaving, while the young and foolish are always entering. Battles, battles are won by the courage of the people who fight them, the advantages in technology and Intel one side has over the other, and by clever and quick commanders. However, one of the most important lessons of War comes to us out of antiquity, by way of our phrase 'A Pyrrhic Victory' - This event is named after king Pyrrus, an ancient king of Epirus in Greece, who won a great victory - and lost a war, because he paid too terrible a price for his win, and had no more troops left to fight the next battle, and the next, and the next battle after that. He had to retreat back home, abandoning any hope of staving off a Roman victory. This teaches us that it is a good maintenance of supply, and a steady husbandry of strength which wins wars. An army is not a troop, an expeditionary force, or a peacekeeping power - it is designed to last through many fights, against a large foe, across a large geographic area. We are no longer in the era of the swordsman and the pike bearer, where one battle decided everything - today, the back of the line is more important than ever. It is said that it takes ten troops back home to field a single fighting soldier. 

An army travels like a serpent, low to the ground. Out of sight, out of mind - in two ways. One very literal, as it is very well understood by anyone shooting a gun, is that if you can see the enemy, then he can probably see you too. If you are lucky then you have a technological advantage, with distance sights or thermal imaging, but in most cases, it is only a lucky guess that the enemy cannot see you. It may be an educated guess, but you only need to be wrong once. In a figurative sense,  Unger is also out of sight, out of mind, for hunger is a sensation of want, of emptiness, of need, and of not being full. That is, we tend to only notice hunger or deprivation when we need what we are missing, either food or ammunition. The 'ammunition' could be anything, such as training time, gasoline, or good food. If everything arrives at the front lines correctly, then hardly anything will be noticed, but when something is not delivered on time, the prepare to hear the moaning from the other side of the planet. Thus, supply is often a thankless job, like that of the cook in the back of the kitchen. This quote reminds us to send a message and pay our respects. 

Lastly, an army is most often full of young soldiers facing their first real trial, their first real job, their first real danger. As young folk in armies have done for millenia, they need two things to fight, and fight well - courage and discipline. Fill them up with both of these, and they will strike true. If discipline is missing, then like they serpent they shall with and twist before their foe, pretending to strike and bite, but missing the teeth to do any real harm. If courage is missing, then they shall do what the serpent in the wild does, and crawl away. An army in the field is, more often than not, only as strong as its weakest link. An army has to work in concert, work together, and work well, because a smart enemy will aim precisely at the point where that army is weakest, and in this manner roll up the flanks to sweep the field clear. If the enemy cannot find you, then strike in secret. If the enemy cannot face you, move swiftly and directly. If the enemy cannot outlast you, then run to gorilla warfare. That is to say, this quote gives us the greatest clue to which army is really the strongest in a given situation - the one that can survive even when something goes wrong. The one that has a fall-back position filled with support, the one who can avoid battle until a favorable moment, and the one which is willing to crawl in the dust if it means getting in one good bite.