Re your comments about the Argentinian army, Lizzie Collingham in The Taste of War, World War Two and the Battle for Food showed that looking after soldiers, even their basic needs like that for food, wasn't deemed necessary by many armies. I was interested in the fact that the Japanese army, at that time, had no messes for soldiers. Instead they were either issued with rice and expected to cook it themselves, or with nothing and expected to live off the land, cultivating it themselves if necessary. In the infamous Japanese concentration camps, the guards were often only marginally better fed than the inmates.