[Balero]

So people can fill in 5 mins, whilst the others work to do this.

Elephants can't digest enough calorie rich food to be able to do this. They individually have to spend longer eating.

[ant6n]

Yet war elephants are a thing.

[gibspaulding]

Apparently specifically because of the food issue they weren't generally worth the trouble. ACOUP has a good post about it [1]. TL/DR: For the amount of fodder and manpower you need for one elephant, you can have a lot of traditional horse calvary.

[1] https://acoup.blog/2019/08/02/collections-war-elephants-part...