gwern comments on How would you take over Rome? - Less Wrong

25 Post author: Yvain 14 March 2012 04:24PM

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Comment author: gwern 14 March 2012 06:25:41PM 7 points [-]

Arrive somewhere with good horses and poor leadership on the edge of the Roman Empire, implement Mongolian horsemanship/mobility/unit-tactics, most of which should be possible with the current day's technology in a horsemanship culture -

Is that true? Edward Luttwak in his book on Byzantine strategy remarks that the Mongol's reflex bows were very complex to make and hard to master - the Byzantine cataphracts had to constantly train just to keep their horse archery up to snuff.