Mongol Military Organization and Tactics

The Mongol army was structured into decimal units, the arban (10 men), zuun (100), mingghan (1,000), and tümen (10,000), a system that facilitated command, discipline, and logistics; each arban formed a unit of absolute solidarity, its members collectively answerable for the desertion or cowardice of any one of them, on pain of collective death. Military mobilization was, in principle, universal for nomadic men roughly between fifteen and sixty years old, turning the entire steppe society into a permanent military reserve, and each warrior typically kept several spare horses, between three and five, allowing constant changes of mount and long-distance marches at high speed without exhausting the animals.