Looking forward to it except for the Napoleon downgrade.

Since Dan Carlin came out with episode 3 of his Khan series, I predict a few more votes for Khan in this thread.

I certainly agree - he has been my no.1 for a lot of years but i always had to prove my point and most people were completely unaware of khan's achievement. They just looked at a map and said ''yea thats a lot of territory but look where it is!''. Clearly a ''league above'', as dan would say.

God damn Dan Carlin ruined fiction for me

I think the "league above" reference may be a bit misleading. Europe was in the "Dark Ages" and definitely in a period that it stepped back in it's impressive evolution compared to other regions. China has a most impressive linage and Khan was the best of the bunch but I can honestly say that there is no indication that Khan defeated the best and brightest of history for example someone like Han Shizhong. Khan's opponents were not doormats but no-one he or the Mongols faced seem worthy of the Top 100.

Speaking of Han Shizhong his military career enabled China to survive the Jurchen invasion and, along with Yue Fei, helped to crumple the very powerful Jin military. If it were not for Han Shizhong causing the decline of the militaristic Jin, we may not have seen the rise of Genghis Khan and the Mongols.

Or maybe they're not in the Top 100 because they were made to look fools by the Mongols.

Your mind has now been blown.

I have given that serious thought but looking deeper in the historical record there is little evidence of anyone beyond mere competent that the Mongols faced and to some were very incompetent. It should have been pretty obvious that hiding behind city walls or running after a feinted retreat was not working. I think the Mongols would not have ran over Asia and Europe in other periods with many of the GOAT military leaders at the helm adapting to the Mongols.

I put Khan/Subutai as a clear Top 3 but feel their should be some clear heads up matches before we crown the GOAT.

By the way the Mongols did not have an unblemished record. I love Dan Carlin as much as anyone, but his recent podcast series makes the Mongols look like they were a knife cutting through butter. There were a few bumps along the way.

Mongol camp gets devasted by Merkits by a surprise attack when Temuchin was invited to his ally Tooril Khan's camp.

Mongol under Temuchin tries to avenge the Merrkits in the next few weeks, but gets outnumbered routed and flees.

Mongol army without Temuchin gets defeated by Jamuhka

Kaifeng shoots shells out of the city during the siege by the Mongols. Mongol army flees.

Jin's imperial guard under Wan-nan with around 5000 men crushes the besieging Mongols in Beizing.

The first attack of Beijing failed, Genghis retreated north and attacked two years later, The initial attack on Kaifeng was also defeated, and the mongols changed strategy and allied with Song.

Genghis Khan gets ambushed by the elephant-ridden Gohrs in the northern India when tracking the fleeing Khwarazmian Monarch. Genghis Khan turns back after sacking the capital Delhi.

Mameluks under Baitur defeats the Mongol army in defence comprised of defeated Turks and Saracens near Damascus.

Timurlane overthrows Il Khanate.

Gui De where 450 Jin elite troops defeated a mongol army more than 10 times its size drowning more than 3,500 Mongols and killing genearl Sajisibuhua.

Numerous small defeats by the Sungs until finally losing to the Mongols.

Koreans make initial defence successful against the Mongols. The In 1236, In fort Jook Ju, by 1000 recruits under militia general Song Moon Ju against the 24000 mongolic forces. The mongols brought cannons all the way from China, and were bombarding the walls. However, during the 15 day combat, the militias were able to defeat the mongols. It was because general Song knew the mongolic strategy from Kweeju battle, a previous korean victory over Jurchens, who also employed similar tactics in comparison with the Mongols. Also, Song had rooted many Poles on the walls, creating a psycological blow to the mongols (they thought more men were defending the place than their numbers). Finally, the fort was also triple walled, and so cannons were less effective in bringing the wall down.

Kim Yoon Hu again, versus the mongols under Yagul. The mongols had raveged through 2 other forts, and layed siege for 70 days in Choong Ju, a fort. The Mongols, after exhaustion, retreated. This fort was never conquered by the mongols throughout the history of Korea.

Naval attack on Japanese shores makes initial success with land troops on move attacking Dajaiu. The supporting force composed of Sung Chinses and Mongol army from southern China, Im-nan gets shipwrecked with what Japanese calls "Kamikaze," the wind of God.

The fleets from Korea also gets shipwrecked few days later. Most of the survivors were killed on sight.

The Mongols had some significant trouble in trying but never succeeding at defeating Japan.

Second Japanese invasion meets much worse resistence from Japanese as they were preparing to meet the oncoming Mongols on the shores and another kamikaze devastes the fleets.

Vietnam invasion fails as the Annamese and Khmer force made well use of elephants and fire in the jungle against the horse-ridden Mongols.

Pagan force in Burma successfully resists against the Mongols after their capital gets burnt down. At Java, the mongol warship were ambushed and annilated, in Burma, the Shan Brothers defeated them in 1294 and drove them out of northern Burma.

Ming overthrows Mongol dominance in China.

Polish and German victory in Poland.

Timur the Lame defeats the Golden horde near Caucasus.

Moskivans defeats the Golden horde in a battle.

Tatars sack Golden horde's capital, Sarai.

The battle of lake Baikal in 1388 when General Lan Yu led an army of 150,000 across the Gobi Desert to attack the Mongols; the mongol army was trapped near baikal and 77,000 people were captured including 3,000 princes and one hundred from the ruling family and its entourage along with 150,000 animals. Karakorum was burned to the ground. This desicively weakened the Khalkas and led to the rise of the Wala.

Moscow overthrows Mongol dominance in Russia.

Timurlane demolishes the Kichak Khanate and Mongol world influence is pretty "much is all she wrote."

You have to take in account that we are talking of genghis khan, not the whole mongol history. While they were eventually defeated, especially under Kubilai khan, Genghis himself as a track record that is near perfect and established system that went on to dominate Eurasia for the next 250 years.

Tamerlane smashed the Turkic army who was rolling over Europe(bayezid's army), battle of ankara if i recall well.

The greatness of Genghis khan is the sheer size of his empire and the logisitics involved. Many others have been undefeated, but the size is absolutely staggering, and to have that empire last a good 200 years is what makes him the GOAT. And don't forget - he started from scratch, as opposed to many who had things laid for them(alexander - phillip II reform, Sulla - marian reforms, Napoleon - Large part of the army was a setup from Carnot). Khan didn't have the whole thing setup. He started from scratch and built it up.

I think we need to be careful about using "the sheer size of his empire and the logisitics involved" as evidence he was the GOAT. The problem is other Military greats did not seize power with the military and/or make themselves supreme ruler. Some did not run out overrunning other countries.

If we named the greatest military conquerer. Khan wins hands down. Not even close. Greatest Empire? I think British, Persian, Mongols and Roman Empire would end up fighting it out. The Mongols may win that one.

But was Khan the GOAT Military Leader?

If you could go back in time to try to rule the world who would you want to take back as a loyal General to lead your armies you would try to build to conquer with? That is the question I ask. If we take out the element that many of these prospects did not subordinate well. Humor me that they would all be able loyal lieutenants?

Is Khan your clear first choice? If so why? The pure sheer size of his empire and the logisitics involved in running his empire? Khan was impressive but I am not sure from this angle he would be on my top 5 list.

You are disregarding completely the objective of your own thread here, imo. It's GOAT Military Leader , after all, and even then the qualities i'd look for in this 'loyal General to lead my armies' are very much present in Genghis Khan. I'll take the best 'logistician' over the best tactician (which is what you seem to be looking for in this hypothetical) any day, to be honest. The former seems to be based much less on reputation, bias or chance (say, strength of opponents or the supposed 'strokes of genius').

I cant help but agree with Adaptation here that actual results are >> theoretical accomplishments. Yeah, Hannibal, Sulla, Scipio or one of the eastern Generals (about which i know woefully little) might have been 'greater' than Genghis Khan but i cant help but acknowledge that (according to Wiki) he once ruled 25% of mankind, which, even today, seems impossible. Not to mention that he might be an ancestor of 0.5% of the world's population, according to an article published in 2003.

While I agree with Genghis as clear #1, I think he started with his share of advantages too.

A lot of Genghis's success can be contributed to the style of warfare that the people of the steppes fought and were fighting way before him. They had developed the very mobile horseback archer style of fighting that was devastatingly effective. I think anyone who could unite the people of the steppes was going to be very dangerous to the outside world.

There were many other leaders that showed to be a very a skilled logistician in their military careers.

Many that excelled in administration as well. Managing a large area of land is great. The Romans as well as many other civilizations mastered logistics as well. I would put Octavian/Augustus as an equal, if not greater, then Khan in this department any day. Augustus was not the GOAT (he is very unrated by many) but he is a prefect example of why this metric is valuable, but is not the quality alone the makes the Military GOAT . Pompeius Magnus, Sulla, Julius Caesar all very skilled administrators/logisticians. Cyrus the Great and Napoleon are other examples, so I am not accused of a "Roman Fetish"

Sure Khan had a very systematic way of distribution of wealth, but at what cost???? Khan "Nazi Germany Style" was eliminating large populations of people, and making slaves out of others. This also alone does not make a "military GOAT."

For all of you that poo-pooed the US victory in Desert Storm many of Khan's campaigns resembled the first gulf war with what the nazi's were doing in WWII mixed in as well. Does that mean Norman Schwarzkopf, Dick Cheney, George Herbert Walker Bush as TOP 100 GOAT candidates?

Again, i ask each of the regulars in this thread....If you could go back in time to try to rule the world, who would you want to take back with you as a loyal General to lead your armies you would try to build to conquer with? Again take out the element that many of these prospects did not subordinate well. Humor me that they would all be able loyal lieutenants.

Is Khan your clear first choice?

If so why? The pure sheer size of his empire and the logisitics involved in running his empire is impressive? Your choice would be a skilled logistician?

I understand what your saying honey badger but here we face a apples/oranges comparison.

You cannot use a modern seperation of state/military for genghis - he was both. While history has its fair share of Leader - General relations(Justinien-Belisarius and Carthage council-Hannibal come to mindd), Genghis is both. This is one of the biggest problem in the GOAT Military - What about the generals who had no say in logisitics and operated strictly with what they have(see previously mentioned names).

I guess what im saying is that it is very hard to determine when criteria's are so loosely defined... Personally to answer your question if i was a Secular ruler who had to choose a Military Leader i would probably choose Suvorov, Malborough or Belisarius because they are the best guys who would not turn on me! But if i had to replace myself and put absolute power in someone, Genghis would be my first choice(assuming the morality aspect of it is put aside obviously)

I want to indicate that I am a huge fan of Khan as a potential GOAT! I've spent a great deal of time studying both Roman and Mongolian/ Chinese military history and I am very impressed with both.

Khan was a master of applying various tactics very well and he did overrun a very large area. We have to be careful though. Much of my study led me to conclude that there was a significant amount of tailwind behind the Mongols military machine. What I mean by that is the environment that they were in was highly favorable to their tactics. I mention Cortez and Desert Storm earlier in the thread because again this a great deal of correlation between what they were able to accomplish as the Mongols.

I think it's time for me to put Scipio Africanus heads up against Khan. I'll try to post that over the next several days.

Napoleon inherited a decent army that was adequately but inconsistently lead and turned it into the greatest professional fighting force on earth. He may not have built it from scratch and was not responsible for every administrative or organizational facet of the army, but he did promote and institute a variety of extremely significant principles, some from the previous revolutionary military regime but most from his own ingenuity. He continued and strengthened the revolutionary practice of military promotions based on merit and not class, and he benefited from and continued the revolutionary practice of mass conscription. While the concept of a corps system (highly mobile units of infantry, cavalry, artillery of ~20k men) had been floated by Moreau, it took Napoleon's initiative to actually see it adopted by the entire army. As a result, the French army became the most mobile, fastest, most flexible army on the continent. People who think that Napoleon was just a 'tactical genius' sometimes forget the logistical feats he and his subordinates accomplished. Quoting from here:

Also, Napoleon is far closer to Khan in terms of rising from inauspicious beginnings than Alexander or even Sulla; Sulla was a patrician after all, although I remember that his father didn't have/lost his fortune.

Mongols beating out the Romans or the British??

If I could serve as a check on Napoleon's megalomania, I wouldn't even think twice; he had the perfect mind and disposition for warfare. If not Napoleon, I too like the choice of someone like Suvorov or Belisarius or Subutai or Khalid ibn al-Walid, I'd also definitely consider Hannibal. If in addition to conquering I needed a political actor or an administrator, I'd take Caesar. Despite the recent Dan Carlin episodes and this thread's best efforts, I'm failing to see Genghis Khan's GOATness atm. I was more impressed by Subutai's expedition than by anything Khan did in part III of Dan's the Wrath of the Khans.

Khan defeated much stiffer opposition Subutai. This was not Europe or Asia's brightest period for Military talent. Think Cortez and Desert Storm not Khalid ibn Walid or Fall of France in 1940.

Khan was much more like Wilt Chamberland without the Boston Celtics and Bill Russell.

Subutai was more like letting Lawrence Taylor play for an local area High school football team. He stands out but because he is so far ahead then his competition. Let him go up against some of the other talent in this thread and we may have had a far different outcome. Think the US war in Grenada or Pizarro's conquest of Peru. Not Hannibal at Cannea or Khalid Ibn Walid at Firaz.

Do you think your beloved Napoleon would have hung around in a city in France while Subutai used civilians as human shields, built siege engines, and hurled diseased bodies into the city hoping they would get bored and leave?

Compared this to Michael Jordan standing out a very talented group of NBA talent like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing, Akeem Olajuwon Julius Erving, Moses Malone, Isiah Thomas, Dominique Wilkins, Scottie Pippen, Shaquille O'Neal, and others.

This is what it was like for many Military leaders from other periods.

Ok lol, way too much going on with the analogies here, but I'll do my best.

I said before that I begrudgingly give Khan GOAT status; I'm just mentioning now that having been recently listening to Dan Carlin and reading more posts itt has not done much to change my tentative and begrudging acknowledgement of Khan as GOAT into a more solid, enthusiastic endorsement of Khan as GOAT (as you expect, I still have the urge to press the argument in favor of Napoleon). Dan's account of Subutai's expedition in part III left me pretty impressed with Subutai (from the use of spies and diplomacy to coordinating attacks hundreds of kilometers apart), while my view of Khan remained more or less unchanged. This concept of 'stiff opposition' occurs in almost all of our posts and is a moving target, but even granting that Subutai may not have faced strong opponents during his expedition, consider how few men he had and how far away he was from reinforcements. Stiff or not stiff, one mistake and his adventures would have ended in failure (and were it not for the fact that he coordinated his battles from afar with flag signals, they could have ended in his death). It is also of course the case that Subutai's methods were influenced and informed by Khan's and vice-versa, so I'm not alleging that Khan is somehow the Octavian to Subutai's Agrippa.

Now to your analogies.

Subutai against Europe or Asia = Cortez against Aztecs or Americans against Iraq. This seems like a big stretch. Talent aside, we are talking about huge, civilizational gaps in technology between combatants. Are you suggesting that Subutai had as much a technological advantage against the Rus at the Battle of Kalka River as the US in Iraq or Grenada?

Khan = Wilt without the Boston Celtics/Bill Russell. This is a tad confusing; I assume you mean that Khan played in the pro league and dominated the pro league like Wilt played in a pro league and would have dominated the pro league had it not been for the Boston Celtics and Bill Russell. But since Khan had no Boston Celtic/Bill Russell type enemies who beat him all the time, why not go with Khan = Michael Jordan right away? I assume it's because any sane person knows that Jordan = GOAT and you are not conceding that Khan = GOAT. Maybe you should have gone with Khan = Kobe?

Also, I'm not sure how strong you actually think Khan's opponents were. You say about Subutai "not to think Hannibal at Cannae". But does that imply you think Khan faced an opponent as strong as Hannibal faced at Cannae? If so, which opponent? The main reason I'm skeptical about Khan as GOAT is because he never faced any existential threat (except for maybe internal threats early on) to his empire. Whether he conquered this or such Chinese dynasty or not, whether he avenged the killing of his diplomats by some Khwarazmian nincompoop or not, nobody was ever coming for him, nobody had that capability.

While we're still making sports analogies... My GOAT case for Napoleon in sports terms is: he is like a #1 ranked college team from the best conference which plays the best ranked teams in the country the first 10 games of the year and beats them all by 30 points, then it losses 1 game to a top 25 opponent where it was close in the first half but they get blown out in the second half and then fall to 10-1. They are still ranked #1 at the end of the season even if BYU is undefeated in some **** conference.

The topic was military. Logistics of managing a great empire is different than what we're discussing. Also, Cheney and Bush weren't military.

Once again, two different topics. Who had the best shot of actually taking over the world? Without a doubt the Germans, but that's because of the mechanical aspect of their armies and the times they lived in. If we're talking about switching places, then the Mongols or the Germans would be a good choice. If we're talking about their respective leaders being your general? Neither, obviously (Khan/Hitler). Maybe Rommel?

During their respective times, Khan/Hitler had the best chances to actually "take over the world", even though I personally view that as impossible.

If Cheney and Bush were not military nor was Khan later in his life.

I want to share something that I have first hand knowledge which will clearly show why I am biased about the First Gulf War. Dick Cheney had more influence on Operation Desert Storm then you would probably think. He vetoed Norman Schwarzkopf's first plan and approved a plan created by a Retired Air Force Col and Pentagon consultant who had a huge influence on me Col. John Boyd.

Boyd was brilliant military strategist. If I could take anyone back in time with me in my hypothetical situation above he would be the guy I would want leading my army. The bottom 80% of Adaptation's list would be in serious trouble too. Boyd was extremely demanding and challenging person, but no-one and I mean no-one since Carl Von Clausewitz understood militray conflict better. If we had a military strategist GOAT list he would be in the top 10 all time.

Boyd's plan was brilliant and very well executed and on the level operationally with anything done by the Mongols. The same way the Mongols cut through Asia and Europe is the same efficiency the US did in Iraq in Desert Storm with Boyd's "Left hook."

The Logistics involved in the build up to Desert Storm is as impressive as anything done by the Mongols. The Mongols logistics were not that impressive. They were nomads who were mobile and lived of the land with entourages accompanied them. It was their tactics that was most impressive about the Mongols. They executed Asian Military tactics par excellence.

Many military leaders were on par with the Mongols in this area of taking what you need from the land or others and if they don't give you what you want terminate them with extreme prejudice.