The Mongols, or How They Learned To Stop Worrying About Logistics And Love The Ponies
The Mongols have made a deep impression on history, and arguably are the reason why places like Iran and Mesopotamia were no longer centres of world culture in the year 1400 as they were in the year 1200.
They conquered the largest contiguous empire in history, startlingly quickly, and they did things which would not become common again (in terms of organizational army structure and strategic movement) until centuries later.
And they did it with a secret weapon. Ponies.
No, there won't be any MLP references here. Probably.
No promises.
Anyway. The Mongols were fairly standard issue steppe nomads at first. They were excellent cavalry, of the cliche "born in the saddle" type, and they were herders by trade and livelihood.
Then along came someone called Temujin. Or, as we know him, Genghis Khan (lord of the sea).
Sea meaning sea of grass. That or meaning he wanted the entire world rather than just most of it.
The Mongols were unified into one nation fairly quickly under Genghis, and then they started invading places. All quite typical steppe nomad stuff, the Huns and the Cumans and the Turks and the Sarmatians and the Goths and the Alans and the Epthialites and all that were pretty much on the same mold.
But two things set the Mongols apart. One is that theydisplayed an unusual ability to adapt to civilized means of warfare - including siege warfare. Unlike before, these were nomads who could not be stopped by city walls.
The other is that, when they adapted, they retained their old military structure. This is also unusual - most of the time, a nomadic group will settle down pretty much en masse, picking up civilized tricks and trading them in for their "barbarian" advantages.
The Mongols didn't, at least not for most of their expansion westwards. Which meant their strategic mobility was breathtaking.
Steppe ponies aren't the kind of powerful cavalry horses everyone else used.
They're smaller, less able to carry really heavy weights, and a bit slower. But they've got phenomenal endurance, and most Mongolian cavalrymen had several - able to trade off between them on the march, and also able to use their milk (and, in a pinch, meat) for survival.
They also have lower energy requirements than most horses, so can sustain themselves well on grazing, and they're cold-tolerant. (Less likely to die of hypothermia - always useful for winter campaigning.)
The practical upshot of this, and of the way the Mongolian herders who were their warriors were self sufficient in civilian life, was that a Mongolian army had a tiny logistic footprint.
Or hoofprint.
They basically all did most of the work for themselves, on the march, so the army's logistical core could focus on a few things like the siege train and mobile forges - all of which could be left behind by all but a token force, so the Mongolian tumen (a standardized force of 10,000 - basically a division) could fan out and hit their enemies from unexpected directions.
The number of ways the Mongols achieved amazing things is staggering. For example, they successfully invaded Russia. (From the East.)
They invaded Russia in the winter - and won.
They launched a single summer campaign (1241) which essentially conquered eastern Europe.
And then they went home again, never to return so far west.
Their way of carrying messages was basically a duplicate of the pony express, and could carry an important message at about thirty to forty miles per hour - so it took them barely days to cross the vastness of Siberia.
They were the last of the great nomadic invasions - after them, gunpowder made such increasingly difficult - and by far the most successful.
