I think you could always say "it depends." I think it was instrumental in the civil war, WWI & II but, hasn't seemed to matter much in Vietnam and the present Afgan war. I guess it runs up the enemy body count.

During WWII a German officer was captured by the Americans and was being driven back to a POW camp and passed a very large supply dump about a mile long. The officer thought "how stupid that they put all their supplies in one place. When our planes find it the war will be over here."

They reached the end of the supply depot and drove a few miles and came across another supply dump and then another and another. The German said he knew then the war was over and lost.

Sorry, we don't allow throughout history questions. These tend to produce threads which are collections of trivia, not the in-depth discussions about a particular topic we're looking for. If you have a specific question about a historical event or period or person, please feel free to re-compose your question and submit it again.