Here's a very specific example of such a case. In World War 2, the US Navy maintained a fleet of submarines which numbered over a hundred. They performed many duties, but probably the most important of them was commerce interdiction. To put it bluntly, they sank freighters carrying bulk cargo to Japan, including especially petroleum. This has to be put into the context of the war.
Japan is an island nation which is extremely poor in natural resources.
Then and now, almost everything its industry uses has to be imported. Indeed, it was this very fact which indirectly lead to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Japanese predations in China were viewed as unacceptable to the US, and the US resorted to a trade embargo on oil and scrap metal and other strategically important materials. But the American submarines massively interfered with the ability of the Japanese to bring raw materials to the home islands, and this had pervasive effects on nearly every aspect of the war in the Pacific. Japanese losses were about ten times the American losses, and the primary reason for that was inexperience on the part of the Japanese fliers, mostly due to inadequate supplies of fuel to permit training.