The 33 Strategies of War

by Robert Greene

The Mongol hordes led by Genghis Khan in the first half of the thirteenth century were perhaps the closest precursors to Napoleon’s corps. Genghis, who preached a philosophy of Mongol superiority, was a master of mobility in warfare. His segmented forces could disperse and concentrate in complicated patterns; the armies that faced them were shocked at how chaotic they seemed, so impossible to figure out, yet they maneuvered with amazing coordination. Mongol soldiers knew what to do, and when, without being told. For their victims the only explanation was that they were possessed by the devil. The sinister coordination of the Mongols, however, was actually the result of rigorous training. Every winter in peacetime, Genghis would run the Great Hunt, a three-month-long operation in which he would scatter the entire Mongol army along an eighty-mile line in the steppes of Central Asia and what is now Mongolia.