March of the Barbarians, The Mongol Art of War, & Genghis Khan's Greatest General: Subotai the Valiant

Why Mongolian history? Because the Mongolian military machine achieved the highest standards that we have today in modern warfare - during the 1200s. Innovation, survival, warfare, all of it revolves around a cycle of destruction and creation. Destruction and creation imply each other. So we study both - and, aside from modern militaries, there is perhaps only one army in history that personifies destruction ability better than the Nazi wermacht: the Mongolian hordes (“hordes” = relates to the word “order”). These three books are a great study of an organization that achieved wildly disproportionate success, overcoming all of the odds.

March of the Barbarians is a classic. If you’re looking to be awed and inspired by the wild might of the high speed maneuver warfare that blitzed across the dark ages on horseback, then this is it. Published in 1940 by a fantastic writer with a deep background in fiction-writing, this scholarly work reads like a wild adventure novel, mixing facts and legends into a captivating journey across the steppes. This would be my recommended starting place for anyone interested in diving into Mongolian history - it just has the music in it.?

It’s also a very serious work, written at a very serious time. In late 1940, the world had just witnessed the shocking power of the German blitzkrieg across Europe. March of the Barbarians begins with an introduction written by that year’s editor of The Infantry Journal, Joseph Greene, who was also a major in the United States Army infantry. Greene directly connects the Nazi style of warfare to the Mongol style practiced by Genghis Khan and the Mongol armies of the dark ages. With the first sentence of the introduction Greene summarizes this march of the barbarians perfectly:?

“the advance of ruthless might and power across the face of continents unprepared; the inevitable progress of trained and hardened armies of conquest overcoming, by the strength of their superior arms and tactics and by the singleness of their world-dominating purpose, every purely defensive army and fortress in their paths.”?

The Mongol Art of War is a deeper dive into Mongol tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), training and recruitment, strategy and operational art. Mongol innovations in warfare were devastating to their opponents and allowed a rather small army to conquer vastly superior forces; many of them are detailed in this work. The military reader will recognize the expert use of combined arms, high-tempo maneuver, and deception tactics, as well as familiar principles of command and control, not to mention the origin of now familiar concepts such as mobile artillery and preparatory fires.?

Perhaps my favorite chapter of this book is the last one. The author, Timothy May Ph.D., traces the principles of these steppe tactics from the Mongols to the Russians, and specifically to the Soviet general Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhackevsky who had, by 1937, built a Russian Army designed to execute Deep Battle tactics, which was a theory of warfare that was “Mongol in doctrine and tactical sense”. German wehrmacht officers, drilling with their Russian counterparts as a consequence of the Rapallo Pact of 1923, took notes and began to look in their own army for ways they might leverage steppe tactics to build a deep battle capability. Meanwhile in Russia, Stalin, true to form, executed Tukhackevsky and reorganized the army into a more traditional model, squandering any potential for a Soviet deep battle capability during that critical time. This obviously came back to haunt him when the wehrmacht blitzed Russia by surprise in 1941.?

So far we have the story of a high-performance culture and a deep dive into its operational art, so now we need an archetype: Genghis Khan is the obvious choice for this, but I gravitate more to Subotai. In Subotai the Valiant, the reader gets a close look at the Mongol general who I personally view as the ultimate wargod.?

Understand the enormity of this: Over the course of 20+ campaigns across Eurasia, Subotai conquered 32 nations and was victorious in 65 major engagements. He defeated every enemy in his path through superior strategy, tactics, and generalship. He never lost; he was called by his men “Subotai the Unfailing”. Ordered into the unknown of Europe, Subotai turned a reconnaissance-in-force into a full blown movement-to-contact across eastern and central Europe, treating European army after European army as targets of opportunity. He only stopped because he was called away for political reasons; had he continued, he had designs on the grasslands of France.

For this focused study of Subotai we have Richard A. Gabriel to thank, a scholar, an author, and a former professor at the U.S. Army War College who does an excellent job bringing the legend of Subutai to life.?

For further studies of Subotai’s campaigns, I recently got myself a copy of Subutai: Sorting Fact from Fiction Surrounding the Mongol Empire’s Greatest General (With Translations of Subutai’s Two Biographies in the Yuan Shi) published last year in the Journal of Chinese Military History. On the list for January!

Next books for 2020 along this line of study:?

The Secret History of the Mongol Queens

&

Subutai: Sorting Fact from Fiction Surrounding the Mongol Empire’s Greatest General.

* A message to Marines reading this review: the Mongol armies were maneuver warfare incarnate. John Boyd (godfather of USMC maneuver warfare) studied Mongol military history in depth, as have several other Marine leaders.

Other Reviews:

Learning War: The Evolution of Fighting Doctrine in the US Navy, 1898–1945

A New Conception of War: John Boyd, The US Marines, and Maneuver Warfare