The Mongols, Drones, and the Future of War

The $500 Weapon That Changes Everything

In under 70 years, an unknown confederation of nomadic tribes built the largest land empire in human history.

At its peak, it covered everything from the Pacific coast of China to the borders of Poland, and from Siberia down to the Persian Gulf.

That was East Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe.

It was five times larger than the Roman Empire at its peak. And it all happened in the span of one lifetime.

“God alone knows who they are and from where they came.”

• Russian chronicler describing the Mongols’ arrival.

The Mongol armies arrived so swiftly and conquered so decisively that the civilized world had no framework for what was happening to it.

They swept out of the steppe like a weather system — by the time you understood that something was coming, it had already arrived.

What is so notable is that the Mongols did not conquer a collection of disorganized, defenceless people. They overthrew the wealthiest empires the world had ever known. And they did it quickly.

The scale of what they conquered is difficult to overstate.

The Khwarezmian Empire, stretching across modern-day Iran, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, had taken over 150 years to build. There were over two million people, wealthy trading cities, and standing armies. The Mongols dismantled it all in two years.

The Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad — seat of Islamic civilization for five hundred years, home to over a million people and the largest library in the world — fell in thirteen days.

The Song dynasty in China - three hundred and nineteen years old. A hundred and twenty million people and an economy that produced a third of the world’s GDP — three times the output of all of medieval Europe combined. A civilization that had invented gunpowder, movable type, and paper money.

In 1279, all of China fell to the Mongols.

A Minor Adjustment

How? How does a collection of nomadic tribes from the barren steppe dismantle the wealthiest civilizations on earth?

Most historians point to a minor adjustment in military technology.

The stirrup.

Stirrups existed before Genghis Khan. But the Mongols weaponized them in a way no army had done before.

With both feet planted firmly in iron stirrups and mounted on hardy steppe horses, Mongol warriors could fire arrows at full gallop with devastating accuracy. They could stand, pivot, and even ride backwards while loosing volleys into a pursuing enemy. They could cover distances that no infantry-based army could match, arriving at the walls of cities before scouts had time to deliver a warning.

The stirrup didn’t just improve cavalry. It created an entirely new kind of warfare — one that made the existing military paradigm obsolete overnight.

Erik Prince — the founder of Blackwater, the most elite private military force ever assembled — made an observation recently that stopped me in my tracks. He said, reflecting on the current conflict in Iran, that the introduction of drone warfare onto the modern battlefield represents “the greatest swing in the pendulum, since Genghis Khan put stirrups on horses.”

Now, when most people hear “drone warfare,” they think of a Predator or a Reaper — a $28 million aircraft operated by the U.S. military from a facility in Nevada. That is not what Prince is talking about.

He is talking about a $500 commercial quadcopter fitted with a 3D-printed munition that can be assembled in a garage and destroy a $3 million tank. He is talking about Iran’s Shahed drones — which cost somewhere between $20,000 and $40,000 to produce — being shot down by $5 million Patriot interceptor missiles.

He is talking about the U.S. Navy spending over a billion dollars in munitions to defend against Houthi drones that cost less than a used car.

This is what Prince means by stirrups.

The empires the Mongols conquered had operated for centuries under a simple assumption: more wealth meant larger armies, stronger weapons, and military dominance. Genghis Khan wiped that assumption out with a piece of bent iron that cost almost nothing and fit in the palm of your hand.

The stirrup didn’t give the Mongols a bigger army. It gave a smaller, poorer force the ability to defeat a richer, more established one.

Prince argues that is exactly what drones are doing today. The battlefield no longer belongs to the nation that spends the most. It belongs to the nation that adapts the fastest.

If he is right, we need to think very carefully about what comes next.

Winning by Not Losing

Here is a question most people never consider. What is the difference between winning a battle and winning a war?

The Americans have the most powerful military the world has ever seen. This is not a matter of opinion. In terms of technology, firepower, logistics, training, and the ability to project force anywhere on the planet, the United States military is without peer.

And yet.

The American military won every significant battle in Vietnam, Iraq and Afganistan… but lost all three wars.

The lesson is as old as warfare itself. When a smaller, weaker force is attacked by a superpower, it does not need to win. It needs to not lose.

Survival is victory.

If you are still standing when the great power loses its appetite for the fight — when the cost in blood and treasure exceeds the political will to continue — you have won. Not by defeating your enemy, but by refusing to be defeated.

Iran cannot defeat the American military. No honest assessment of the balance of forces suggests otherwise. But Iran does not need to defeat the American military. Iran needs to endure it. Every day the conflict continues without a decisive American victory, Iran’s strategic position improves. Every day the Strait of Hormuz remains contested, the cost to America — economic, political, and reputational — compounds.

And that brings us to a curious parallel in modern geopolitics…

America’s Suez Moment?

Most people assume that the transition from the British pound to the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency happened at the end of World War II. It seems logical. Britain was shattered. America was ascendant. The Bretton Woods agreement in 1944 appeared to settle the question.

But if you look at the actual balance sheets of central banks in 1945, you will not find a sudden pivot. Despite being battered — infrastructure destroyed, resources depleted, debts staggering — Britain had won the war. And after a century and a half of trusting the pound sterling, the world’s central banks did not have sufficient incentive to go looking for an alternative.

Until 1956.

In 1956, Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser made a calculation. He assessed that the United Kingdom — once the most powerful empire in human history — was too weak to defend and maintain its occupation of the Suez Canal.

The Suez Canal was not an ordinary waterway. It was the artery through which two-thirds of Europe’s oil supply travelled. It connected Britain to what remained of its trade interests in the Middle East, the Indian Ocean, and Asia.

Whoever controlled the Suez Canal controlled the flow of energy to the Western world.

President Nasser nationalized it.

The United Kingdom, unwilling to accept this humiliation, mobilized what had once been the most powerful navy on the planet and moved toward the canal alongside France and Israel.

But this was 1956, not 1856. The Royal Navy was short of resources. Without American manufacturing support — the same support that had sustained Britain through two world wars — they lacked the firepower for a sustained campaign.

So Britain did what it had done throughout World War II. It appealed to the Americans for help.

President Eisenhower, however, saw the situation differently. He worried that Britain attacking Egypt would push the entire Arab world toward the Soviet Union in the middle of the Cold War. This was against the US interests.

Frustrated with the careless nature of Britain's military pursuits, he responded strategically and sent a message to the rest of the world.

He blocked $561 million in IMF standby credit that Britain desperately needed. He froze $600 million in Export-Import Bank loans. And he ordered the US Treasury to prepare to dump America’s holdings of British sterling bonds — a move that would have collapsed the pound overnight.

Britain’s Chancellor warned the Prime Minister that without American financial support, the country would be unable to import sufficient food and fuel within weeks.

The message was simple. Withdraw from the Suez Canal, or we will destroy your currency.

The British Navy retreated home. Tail between their legs. With the rest of the world watching.

This — not Bretton Woods, not the end of the war — was the moment that central banks around the world truly pivoted from the pound sterling to the American dollar. They watched the previous world superpower, which had dominated the globe for all of recent memory, become neutered. Unable to act without the permission and support of the new greater power.

The Strait

That is why analysts are calling the Strait of Hormuz America’s potential Suez moment.

The Americans have indicated a willingness to withdraw from Iran before the Strait of Hormuz is reopened to international shipping. If that happens — if an unsuccessful military adventure in Iran results in the Americans going home having lost control of the situation, having forfeited control of the Strait to their adversary — it does not matter under what pretense the narrative is spun domestically.

The rest of the world will see what actually happened.

And central banks will do what central banks have always done when they witness that kind of moment. They will adjust.

The Promoter

But here is something else I am thinking about.

The American military is dependent on manufacturing inputs from China. This is well documented. From rare earth minerals to electronic components, the supply chain that sustains American military capability runs through Chinese factories.

Iran is also dependent on China.

Although the Strait of Hormuz is theoretically closed to Western-bound oil tankers, ships have been travelling through it — with Iranian permission. Not just Iranian crude heading out to China, but Chinese cargo ships heading into Iran. Since the war began on February 28th, Iran has shipped at least 12 million barrels of crude oil through the Strait, all of it to China. Meanwhile, China-linked cargo vessels have been transiting in the opposite direction.

There has been much speculation in the United States about whether Iran will run out of missiles.

My question is different. What is on those Chinese cargo ships arriving in Iran?

Reports have surfaced of Chinese-supplied air defence systems, kamikaze drones, anti-ship cruise missiles, and even precursor chemicals for solid rocket fuel being shipped to Iranian ports. Is any of this finding its way onto the battlefield? And if so — what exactly are we looking at here?

I’ll tell you what it looks like to me.

In the 1970s, a boxing promoter out of Cleveland perfected something that would make him the most famous man in the sport — and the most controversial.

He put on some of the biggest fights in boxing history - Muhammad Ali versus George Foreman and Ali versus Joe Frazier. He managed Mike Tyson’s rise to undisputed heavyweight champion, against foes like Buster Douglas and Larry Holmes. He dominated the sport through the 1970’s, 80’s and 90’s.

The promoter’s name was Don King. And he is the most famous boxing promoter who ever lived. King understood something very simple: if you hold the promotion contract on both fighters, you don’t need to pick a winner. You just need the fight to happen.

Why is that controversial?

A boxing promoter’s job is to protect his fighter — to negotiate the best purse, to select the right opponent at the right time, to make sure the terms of the fight favour his man.

It’s a negotiation, and by definition, that means negotiating against the interests of the opponent.

But when one promoter holds both contracts, the negotiation shifts from promoter-on-promoter to promoter-on-fighter. And that’s a fight the promoter wins every time. (This is probably why Don King has been sued over 12 times by fighters.)

If you are not a boxing fan, think of it this way - the parallel would be hiring the same lawyer to represent both sides of a lawsuit. The only person guaranteed to walk away richer is the one collecting fees from both.

But here was King’s real leverage - his contracts required any fighter to agree that if they won, King would promote their future fights too - so he always retained the winning fighter under contract.

It didn’t matter who won. He had already locked up whoever walked out of the ring with the belt.

Is China the Don King of the Persian Gulf?

If the Strait reopens on American terms and Western commerce resumes, China will remain America’s indispensable manufacturing partner. The supply chains don’t change. The rare earth dependencies don’t change. America still can’t build the next generation of weapons systems without Chinese inputs. China keeps the contract.

If Iran wins — if the Americans withdraw and Iran maintains sovereign control of the Strait — China stays Iran’s primary weapons supplier, its largest oil customer, and its most important trading partner. Iranian crude flows to Chinese refineries at a discount. Chinese cargo flows into Iranian ports unopposed. China keeps the contract.

Show me a conflict where one country supplies both sides, and I’ll show you the country that’s actually “winning”.

The question the world should be asking is not whether America can defeat Iran. The question is whether America can afford to fight a war in which its primary economic competitor is bankrolling both corners of the ring.

Honest question — let me know in the comments: what am I missing?

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Thats it for today,

Jay Martin

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