While I do not know how readily mold and bacteria will attack white flour made hardtack I suspect you will have no problem with insects. I think you will find that the way to best store hard tack is to make sure that it is moisture free maybe well dried in the oven and sealing it in a good zip lock bags. If you do have gluten problems and have a grain hand mill, I’ll bet you can make your hardtack out of millet. I would think if it were really dry and packed in nitrogen or a vacuum, you could store it a long time. I will not venture to guess what whole wheat or a whole grain hardtack would last on the shelf. I really doubt Columbus crossed the ocean with white flour hardtack. Take some rats and feed one group white flour and the other a diet of whole wheat, after a couple of weeks I think you will have reservations of living on white flour.
Point is- this exotic white flour bread was eaten by the rich (they could afford it) and the peasants ate the whole wheat bread. In Russia white flour bread was a bit more cost consuming to make, they put the flour in a cloth and beat the white flour out leaving behind the bran and wheat germ which you can now feed to the pigs. White flour worked great in a flour barrel for pioneer crossing the country. When you mill a grain and break the germ out of the grain- the oil in the germ starts to oxidize, so you want to use a whole grain flour shortly after milling. It was a modification that took the wheat germ and bran out of the flour and give the flour a long shelf life. It is my understanding, from my past reading, that white flour was a 19th century invention.
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