Free The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur by Mark Perry

within just a few months was astonishing. But now, in his Fort Myer library, he analyzed not simply how to bring airpower onto the battlefield, but also how to most effectively coordinate air, land, and sea assets as a unified battle of all arms. It was something that had never been done in the history of warfare.
    MacArthur was struck by what he read in a compelling biography of Genghis Khan, the Asian conqueror who used speed and surprise to overwhelm his foes. While MacArthur never cited which biography of Khan he read, it was undoubtedly Harold Lamb’s
Genghis Khan: Emperor of All Men
—still there, in Norfolk, its pages frayed with use. While not scholarly, Lamb’s account of Khan’s tactics was insightful, and the descriptions of how the Mongol conqueror deployed his soldiers made for fascinating, if romanticized, reading. Khan’s deployment of his foot soldiers, with his cavalry on their tough little ponies as outliers, had a marked impact on MacArthur’s thinking and was reflected in his own rapidly evolving strategic views. Here in Lamb’s narrative, MacArthur believed, lay the key to using tanks, light mobile units, and aircraft as weapons that could leap ahead of static armies, cut off and starve large military formations, and strike deep into enemy territory. Most important of all, Khan had deployed his horde as an army of maneuver. Swift and self-sustaining, it conquered vast stretches of territory and brought two empires to their knees. The key was speed and mobility, with large weapons an encumbrance, frontal assaults suicidal, and sieges a thing of the past. For Khan, massed attacks expended the one resource he couldn’t afford to lose: his own men.
    MacArthur began to write down his own thoughts on the future of warfare and planned to include these ideas in a report to Dern and Roosevelt when he retired. The report was begun that summer at Fort Myer, but was only perfected after much thinking and rewriting and many more weeks of reading. Although the report would not be released until the next year, it reflected the research that MacArthur had conducted from August until November 1934:
         He [Khan] devised an organization appropriate to conditions then existing; he raised the discipline and morale of his troops to a level never known in any other army, unless possibly that of Cromwell; he spent every available period of peace to develop subordinate leaders and to produce perfection of training throughout the army, and, finally, he insisted upon speed in action, a speed which by comparison with other forces of his day was almost unbelievable. Though he armed his men with the best equipment of offense and defense that the skill of Asia could produce, he refused to encumber them with loads that would immobilize his army. Over great distances his legions moved so rapidly and secretly as to astound his enemies and practically to paralyze their powers of resistance. He crossed great rivers and mountain ranges, he reduced walled cities in his path and swept onward to destroy nations and pulverize whole civilizations. On the battlefield his troops maneuvered so swiftly and skillfully and struck with such devastating speed that times without number they defeated armies overwhelmingly superior to themselves in number.
    When it was released, in the late summer of 1935, the report garnered more attention than MacArthur might have hoped. While his peers included senior officers who were themselves studying how to use tanks, fighters, and bombers, military theorists had different views. The theorists remained stuck in the Great War, where lieutenants and captains ordered their soldiers over the lips of their trenches—and to their deaths. The conflicting views of warfare were not a surprise. The armies of the Great War had been commanded by senior officers who were stuck in the past and who believed that cavalry charges would tip the balance against the enemy. Those who fought disagreed: They thought that