It’s not quite that simple. Horses can eat much faster than they can digest so a few short breaks can represent a lot of food over a day. Further, horses eat significantly more than people. A 30% slower pace that requires 40% less food per day is a net win on distance but not time.
The main issue, is that the horses of agricultural societies are bred to a large size, and cannot survive by grazing alone, they need to have grains in their diet.
That’s false. Horses doing heavy work can’t survive on grazing alone, but they are perfectly fine when left alone in good pasture. Thus the phrase “put out to pasture,” old animals where often given something of a retirement where they where left to take care of themselves rather than simply be killed.
I don’t know that much about horses but it’s something like:
A normal horse left to graze in good pasture can get a calorie surplus per hour. That same horse doing work has a calorie deficit per hour based on how strenuous the labor. A horse can get into a maximum calorie debt before issues happen. Thus a few day of hard labor plowing a field isn’t an issue by its self and having redundant horses is useful.
In terms of the Wagon equation, taking a nearly empty wagon back is vastly less strenuous than taking a full one out. It may be that taking several times as long to get back significantly extends the total distance you can move the army from your base. It may also be that running a calorie deficit on the outbound trip and then grazing for days before the return trip is useful. But I doubt any army is would actually try and approach any kind of theoretical maximum as in practice flexibility is needed.
Granted that’s for the average horse, where extreme athletic performance means significant extra muscle mass and thus higher caloric needs independent of actual work being done. But the extreme athletic horses are expensive to maintain so likely used by messengers etc not wagons or farmers.
ha, most (historical) armies hope to gain lots of plunder as a result of their campaigns. According to Byzantine military doctrine, attacking a successful invader as they are leaving, burdened by all their booty, is one of the most advantageous times to strike.
The wagon equation isn’t only about armies, it’s about the logistics of moving things by wagon. Militaries need supplies to move with the army which adds a whole new set of constraints.
I agree it’s not that big a deal when moving a full wagon.
However moving a nearly empty wagon is vastly less effort for the horses. Using a historic example, the Huns they could move their army without needing to provide any food for their horses because each horse was doing so little work.
Foraging require enough of density of settlements en route. Cause that is what foraging is, taking food from locals by force. The bigger the army, the more and bigger settlements you need to burn and steal from.
>... animals where often ... retirement where they where left ...
The word you are looking for is "were"[1], specifically the first and third instances of "where".
I usually don't bother to be a grammar nazi, but I'm sorry: When you use the word "where"[2] and then also misspell "were" as "where" immediately before and after, things get really confusing really quickly.
