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The Achilles Heel Of Today’s Modern Chinese Empire
And how even now China is trying to protect it
The Asian Art Of War
In the 1200’s the Mongols began building the greatest contiguous land empire in human history. Their main advantage was the horse archer. Instead of meeting their enemies with tens of thousands of foot soldiers in the kind of static land battle preferred by the Macedonians and Romans, the Mongols figured it made a lot more sense for their thousands of horse archers to ride up just close enough to the enemy to fire their arrows, then gallop away before the enemy could respond. This essentially meant that the Mongols could attack with impunity by never giving their enemies’ infantry the opportunity to engage them in pitched battle.
The tactic has perhaps been best described by a metaphor used in Dan Carlin’s “Wrath of the Khans” podcast series as “trying to fight a swarm of bees” in that even if the defenders were able to swat down a few horse archers, their efforts did almost nothing to stop the Mongols’ near-continual deadly rain of arrows. Others used this tactic as well, most notably the Parthians when they annihilated several Roman legions at the Battle of Carrhae.
The lesson was simple and enduring: if you can destroy your enemy without ever giving him the opportunity to do the…
