Via ALD, some excerpts from James Chambers on the Old Boy himself:
The characteristic which made Genghis Khan the most successful conqueror in history was his genius for organisation. He mustered his army in multiples of ten, subjected it to regular and rigorous training, issued it with standardised equipment, including long-range, short-range and armour-piercing arrows, and selected and promoted his officers entirely on merit, not breeding.
There was little about his army that would not have been familiar to any modern professional soldier. His capacity to manoeuvre was so bafflingly brilliant that most of his enemies assumed that his armies were much larger than they were. Using an exaggerated version of a traditional steppe tactic, the feigned retreat, he could lure an entire army into a prepared position, suddenly surround it with huge formations of mounted archers and then destroy it with his withering firepower — just as Patton’s tanks were to do with part of the Afrika Korps.
A modern army advances on a broad front. So did the Mongols. But the Mongols were the first to do it. When Genghis Khan moved west towards Samarkand his right flank was in the desert north of the Aral Sea and his left was more than 800 miles southeast of it in the Pamir Mountains. When his sons invaded Europe, their front was even broader, with its right on the Baltic and its left in Transylvania.
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