Timeless insights into military logistics sprang out of the hardships and sacrifices of Canadians who fought in Afghanistan.

Good battlefield logistics have always been more about people than things. Yet military logisticians in the Canadian Armed Forces have suffered in the cellar — the underappreciated bottom of the institution — for decades. These soldiers were called upon mightily in the summer of 2006 to sustain an infantry battlegroup in one of the world’s harshest theatres. Afghanistan burned as a pyre of quiet desperation for the soldiers of the Canadian logistics battalion — the National Support Element — sustaining Task Force Orion in combat through endless days and overextended lines of communication. This crucible yielded lessons of war that have never been shared before now.

In Our Dry Cellar, John Conrad makes a case for strengthening the logistics underpinnings of the Canadian Armed Forces while unlocking sustainment secrets of the small but gritty Canadian Army and giving human faces to the service and sacrifice of the revered art of battlefield logistics.