Military logistics is the discipline of planning and carrying out the movement and maintenance of military forces. In its most comprehensive sense, it is those aspects or military operations that deal with:

The word "logistics" is derived from the Greek adjective logistikos meaning "skilled in calculating". The first administrative use of the word was in Roman and Byzantine times when there was a military administrative official with the title Logista. At that time, the word apparently implied a skill involved in numerical computations.

By the seventeenth century, the French were using a magazine system to keep a network of frontier towns supplied for sieges and to provide for campaigns beyond their borders.

The British were seriously handicapped in the American revolutionary War by the need to ship all supplies across the Atlantic, since the Patriots prevented most local purchases. The British found a solution after the war by creating the infrastructure and the experience needed to manage an empire. London reorganized the management of the supply of military food and transport that was completed in 1793-94 when the naval Victualling and Transport Boards undertook those responsibilities. It built upon experience the supply of the very-long-distance Falklands garrison (1767-72) to systematize needed shipments to distant places such as Australia, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone. This new infrastructure permitted Britain to launch great expeditions of the French Revolutionary War and the develop its global network of colonial garrisons.