Dr. Bret Devereaux

And so, you know, you can, yeah, river barges, you can load them right up.

And so the, the logistics throughput of the, of, of the sort of riverine supplies is really large.

There is a point late in the reign of, of the first Roman emperor Augustus, where he has a major revolt against,

happening in Illyrian Pannonia, what today would be the Northern Balkans.

The solution that his general on the scene comes up with, and his general on the scene is Tiberius, who will be the second emperor of Rome, comes up to is that he moves, he's on the Danube.

He moves both the armies, some of the armies that were up in Germany, south, and some of the armies that were over by the Black Sea, he moves them west.

And he concentrates just over 100,000 men in the Saba River Valley off of the Danube.

And during the campaigning season, he just rolls around foraging from all of the communities and eating up all the food until there's basically nothing.

And then when winter comes on, he just moves to his fortified bases on the river and supplies himself by the river.

And so the rebels up in the hills just run out of food.

He just spends two years eating the province into nothing with his giant army.

And then he's functionally immune to supply concerns because he has these supply bases on the Danube and the Sava that so long as he can keep the rivers open and with his huge army, it's easy for him to keep the rivers open.

And he can just run them out of supplies.

So riverine supply is amazing if you can get it.

The problem traditionally for most armies is that the rivers don't usually go where you want them to go.

But Isildur here has a great advantage.

But that's just a day spent portage.

Yeah, you just lift that stuff up and reload it on the other side.

And that's happening generally in friendly territories.

You probably can get the locals to help you out with that.