This is the second part (I, II) of our somewhat silly look about the plausibility of warfare in Frank Herbert’s Dune. Last week, we looked at the system of warfare that is dominant in the setting when the first book opens: warfare among the Great Houses. While I noted some worldbuilding issues I see – some of the physics doesn’t quite work out, I don’t think lasers are satisfactorily dealt with and the implied social system doesn’t seem even remotely stable– we’re going to accept for this part that the system works more or less as Herbert describes it.
The various Houses (Major and Minor) maintain relatively small militaries of trained close-combat fighters who fight using shields. Because shields reduce the effectiveness of ranged combat nearly to zero, this system of warfare dominates among the Great Houses and because untrained, unshielded fighters are so profoundly vulnerable to trained, shielded ones, outside military challenges to this system are generally unsuccessful, enabling the small, closed and mostly hereditary elite with their retinue-armies of shielded fighters to maintain a stranglehold on political and military power. They use that power to run relatively inefficient patrimonial ‘household’ governments over entire planets, siphoning off what little economic production they can – because their administration is so limited – to fund their small armies.
What keeps the armies small is both that the resources of the Great Houses are limited – again, small administrations – but also that the core components of industrial military power in this setting (trained fighters, shields, ornithopters, frigates) are clearly very expensive, both to build and to maintain. And as an aside, because it will be relevant below, it is clear even in the books that wear and tear on shields is a major cost: “The Harkonnens certainly used plenty of shields here, “Hawat said. “They had repair depots in every garrison village, and their accounts show heavy expenditures for shield replacement parts.” (Dune, 88, emphasis mine). In short, these elements of military power represent ongoing expenditures, requiring maintenance and logistics which is going to matter a bit below.
This week we’re going to look at how the Fremen disrupt this system and ask if the Fremen success in doing so seems plausible. We’ll do so generally accepting Herbert’s clear description of the Fremen as superlative warriors, even though long-time readers will know that I find the idea of the Fremen being such superior warriors broadly unlikely. But as we’ll see, even if the Fremen are remarkably skilled warriors, they are unlikely to succeed in their jihad against the society of the Known Universe.
In particular, the reduction of Stilgar from the clever, charismatic, thoughtful figure of the first film to the blind fanatic of the ending scenes of the second film is astoundingly powerful and well-delivered.
But first, as we’re going to cover below, equipping a fighting force with Dune’s version of modern military power – shields, ornithopters and frigates – is expensive. If you want to help me equip a Great House of trained fighters to challenge the Imperium, you can support this project over at Patreon. If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).
Wars of the Fremen
We should start just by outlining exactly what the Fremen do, both what we see in Dune and what we are told about in Dune Messiah.
The Fremen are, at the time Dune begins, the native population of Arrakis and we are told there are about 15 million of them. They maintain some small levels of industry – mostly things which can be rapidly moved – back lack large industrial systems and notably lack the ability to produce any of the elements of industrial military power (shields, aircraft, frigates) essential to the warfare of the Great Houses, though they do at time capture and use this equipment.1 The Fremen are already highly capable warriors, but because they lack these elements of industrial military power – especially shields – it is easy for the militaries of the Great House to oppress them. In particular, the Fremen have no defense against laser weaponry, which is devastating against unshielded opponents.
When Paul arrives, he organizes the Fremen for what is initially a classic protracted war campaign against the Harkonnen occupation, which eventually sufficiently disrupts spice production to bring the emperor himself to Arrakis. The result is something of a science-fiction rerun of Dien Bien Phu: the foreign occupier, convinced that his industrial military renders him unbeatable in a conventional engagement intentionally and arrogantly extends his force into enemy territory only to be cut off and defeated.
A few things make this Fremen success work. First, the Fremen operate from a terrestrial base that their enemies cannot attack effectively (the deep desert). The Fremen also operate with tremendous local knowledge: because they are the indigenous population, it is easy for their agents to infiltrate into the settled zone the Harkonnen control, meaning that the Fremen have good visibility into Harkonnen operations even before their leader becomes a prescient demigod. Perhaps most importantly conditions on Arrakis negate most of the advantages of industrial military power. As Hawat notes, ornithopters suffer substantial wear-and-tear on Arrakis, making it expensive (but not impossible) to maintain large fleets of them; shields too apparently are hard to maintain. The large sandstorms that rage basically anywhere except in the small area protected by the ‘Shield Wall’ mountain range (which is where all of the cities are) can disable shields at almost any scale. But most of all, shields attract and drive mad the large local sandworms, making their use on the ground in the open desert essentially suicide.
Consequently the Fremen able to win in part because they occupy the one place in the whole universe where the military ‘package’ of the Great Houses does not work.
And to be honest, I do not find the way the Fremen win on Arrakis to be wholly implausible. Given their mastery of the local terrain and infiltration of the local population, it makes sense that the Fremen would be very hard to uproot and might steadily bleed an occupying force quite badly over time. At the same time, the idea that Shaddam IV and House Corrino might – somewhat arrogantly – assume they that could safely extend themselves down to the surface is the sort of military error regular armies make all the time. Finally, it also makes sense that the Harkonnen and Corrino armies coming to Arrakis might fail to adapt to Fremen warfare – fail to adapt to warfare without shields, for instance – because they do not perceive their primary security threat to be the Fremen (the Harkonnen, we’re told, consistently underestimate how many Fremen there are). So while they should respond to the Fremen with guns and artillery, it makes sense that initially they respond with the sort of armies that work for all of their other problems: trained melee fighters with shields.
And if – again, we’re accepting this for the sake of argument – if the Fremen are the superior close-combat fighters, the result of that effort might well go this way. Especially with a prescient leader pushing them forward to victory. Crucially, the victory at Arrakeen fundamentally depends on these local factors: Fremen knowledge of terrain enables Paul to mass his forces undetected and observe the Corrino disposition safely and to thus to stage a coordinated surprise attack against his opponents. Sandworms enable him to deliver an attack force rapidly through a sandstorm and the storm itself disables the defender’s shields, enabling him to disable their frigates and also neutralizing much of their airpower. Fremen victory is almost entirely reliant on factors unique to Arrakis.
So that is more or less fine. The problem I have is really with everything that happens next.
What Happens Next…
I think we should be clear what Dune and especially Dune Messiah lead us to understand comes next to avoid unnecessary wrangling in the comments. While we do not see it, the Fremen wage an absolutely massive, known-universe spanning war in which they conquer thousands of worlds and kill sixty-one billion people (the statistic given in Dune Messiah).
Equally, we are supposed to understand that this result was inevitable. Indeed, this is one of the central themes of Dune, that by the time Paul’s prescience has developed sufficiently for him to understand the road to his Jihad, it is already too late to stop it. As we are told of Paul’s thoughts, “He had thought to ppose the jihad within himself, but the jihad would be. His legions would rage out from Arrakis even without him. They needed only the legend he already had become.” Just after, right before his duel with Feyd, he thinks, “from here, the future will open, the clouds part onto a kind of glory. And if I die here, they’ll say I sacrificed myself that my spirit might lead them. And if I live, they’ll say nothing can oppose Muad’Dib” (Dune 482, emphasis original). The point is the Jihad happens either way.
I want to stress that: even without Paul Atreides’ prescience, the Jihad happens and at the very least burns across the known universe doing massive destruction; in fact, even without Paul the Fremen win.
That position – that the destruction of the Fremen Jihad is not merely possible but inevitable to the point that Paul cannot stop it – puts a very, very high bar on its military plausibility. In particular it rules out any defense that Fremen victory is simply because Paul, as a prescient military leader, can simply pull an endless series of ‘inside straights.’ Remember: the Fremen explicitly still win even in Paul Muad’Dib Atredies is dead at the hands of Feyd Rautha Harkonnen. It is not enough for it to be possible for the Fremen to win, it must be impossible for them to lose.
Now in the thematic world of Dune, that is because military victory is fundamentally a product of the Fremen Mirage: societies have an inherent vitality to them and the Fremen are vital, hardened by the harshness of Arrakis, in a way that the Great Houses are not. In Herbert’s mind, that is enough: the ‘hard men’ created by the ‘hard times’ of Arrakis will inevitably triumph once an event – the emergence of Paul as a heroic figure – spurs them into action. Paul is thus die Weltseele zu Pferde, “the world-spirit on horseback,” the archetypal ‘great man of history’ who embodies supposed historical forces which are larger than him, which act through him and which would act without him.
Except of course the problem is that both the Fremen Mirage and the Great Man Theory of history are, to put it bluntly, rubbish– grand historical narratives which simply do not fit the contours of how history actually works. ‘Hard men’ from ‘hard places’ and ‘hard times’ lose all the time. Societies only seem ‘vital’ or ‘decadent’ when viewed in retrospective through the prism of success or failure that was contingent, not inevitable. History is full of movements and moments which cannot be explained through the agency of ‘great men.’ There is, in fact, no ‘world spirit’ guiding history like an invisible hand, but rather a tremendous number of contingent decisions made by billions of people with agency acting with free will.
So rather than simply assume that because the Fremen are moving with the ‘universe spirit’ of history as it were, that because they are a vital people, because they are ‘hardened’ by Arrakis, that they win by default, we’re going to ask are the Fremen actually likely to win in their Jihad? Remember: the books present this not merely as likely but inevitable. Is it likely?
Oh my, no.
The War With the Great Houses
I think we actually want to think through this conflict in two rough phrases. Initially, the Fremen leaving Arrakis are going to be confronted by the traditional militaries of the Great Houses. We’re never told how many Great Houses there are, but it is clearly quite a lot – the institution still very much exists in God Emperor of Dune despite the fact that we’re told 31 Houses Major (the upper-rank of the Great Houses) had collapsed. The implication is that 31 Houses Major do not represent even a majority. Likewise, the entire political system of the Corrino Imperium only works if the Houses of the Landsraad collectively had more military power than the Corrino Sardaukar, such that the emperor had to keep them divided at all times (and such that, acting collectively, groups of them might force concessions from the emperor). Given that Baron Harkonnen thinks just two legions of Sardaukar could easily overwhelm his entire offensive force of ten legions, the implication has to be that there are quite a few Houses Major with military forces on the scale of House Harkonnen.
In short the Fremen are likely to be faced by many dozens of ‘House armies’ ranging from the high tens of thousands to the low hundreds of thousands, probably collectively representing several million trained fighters with shields (I’d guess a few tens of millions, once Houses Minor are accounted for), ‘thopters,’ frigates and all of the other components of ‘modern’ (for the setting) warfare.
The main advantage the Fremen have – and it is a very significant advantage – is that their control over the Spacing Guild (via control over the spice on Arrakis) means that they can face these forces one-by-one, rather than having to face a large coalition of the Landsraad all collected in a single location. The secondary advantage the Fremen have is that the Great Houses are likely to try to meet them with the same rigid, formulaic armies they have long prepared for use against each other: trained fighters using shields engaging in melee combat. They will probably not be, in the first instance, rapid military innovators – they aren’t set up for that.
But the disadvantages the Fremen face are enormous. First and foremost – and this is going to be central – Fremen manpower is fundamentally brittle. On the one hand, the Fremen do not have a civilian class – all of their people are trained fighters, so basically their entire adult population is available for combat. The problem is that means that there is no underlying ‘peasantry’ as it were to refill the ranks of their losses and the harsh conditions of Arrakis – essential to the entire Fremen thing – are not conducive to a ‘baby boom’ either. Fremen losses will thus be functionally permanent: every Fremen Fedaykin lost is lost forever – a long-term reduction in the total Fremen population and thus available Atreides military force. Meanwhile, Hawat estimates the total Fremen population at roughly 10 million. That represents a fundamentally finite resource which cannot really be replenished: it must provide for offensive forces, for casualties, for garrison forces to hold conquered worlds and with enough left over to maintain both the logistics of the Jihad and the basic rhythms of life in the sietches of Arrakis.
The other major problem the Fremen face is that most of their key advantages evaporate once they are off of Arrakis. Indeed, some invert. The Fremen knowledge of local terrain was crucial to their victory on Arrakis but if anything the Fremen are remarkably badly equipped to understand and fight in other terrains. These are men who cannot conceive of a thing called a ‘sea,’ for instance and one supposes they would not fair well in snow or forest either. Urban terrain is also, crucially, mostly foreign to them. Their mastery of stillsuits, of walking with irregular strides in the desert, of concealment in sand, of the use of sandworms all matter exactly not at all off of Arrakis and in most cases will be active hindrances. At best they will have to face the armies of the Imperium in ‘stand up’ fights, at worst they will be repeatedly ambushed.
What is even worse, the Fremen are stepping into a kind of warfare they are unfamiliar with, for which their society was not designed. Remember: Fremen victory on Arrakis depended on most of the technology of industrial warfare not working there. Sandstorms grounded ornithopters and shields were broadly unusable outside of the towns and villages (and disabled by a sandstorm for the final battle). None of that is true the moment the Fremen step off world.
Worse yet the Fremen supply of industrial ‘firepower’ is fundamentally limited. The Fremen themselves are incapable of manufacturing any of this. One of the sleights of hand here is that while the Fremen disable all of the Harkonnen and Corrino frigates at the opening of their battle at Arrakeen – blasting the noses off – these very ships are handwaved back into functionality for the off-screen Jihad. One wonders how the Fremen – who have never seen this technology before, technology which is built nowhere on Arrakis (we’re told the Harkonnen’s equipment is all off-world import, nothing is manufactured locally) – were able to swiftly repair dozens of high-tech spaceships. Equally, the Fremen lack both the ability to manufacture shields or ornithopters, but also lack the knowledge to maintain shields or ornithopters.
I suspect any Fremen campaign would suffer from limited frigates – both for transport and presumably for fighting – through the entirety of it.
They have exactly what they captured from the Harkonnen and Corrino troops and nothing else, with almost no means to repair anything that breaks – this is where my earlier point that shields evidently require a lot of maintenance and replacement matters. While the idea of running an army entirely off of captured weapons is a thing often thought of, functionally no one ever actually makes it work: open the hood on armies claiming to run primarily off of captured equipment and you almost invariably find foreign sponsors providing the bulk of their weapons. The Fremen have no such foreign sponsors – or at least, won’t have them the moment it becomes clear they intend to burn down most of the known universe – so their access to military material is going to be limited.
As a result, the Fremen are going to be a remarkably two-tier force: a small body of troops equipped with looted shields and supported by what aircraft can be maintained, with a larger body of Fremen fighting ‘light’ as they did on Arrakis, but without storms or worms or mastery of local terrain.
On the one hand, the Fremen would presumably be able to outnumber the first individual Great Houses they targeted. Great House armies are small, as we’ve noted, so while the Fremen would have an overall numerical disadvantage (the Imperium has more trained fighters than there are Fremen) locally they would have the advantage, created by their control of the Spacing Guild. It would be less overwhelming than you might first think though, for a fairly simple reason: though the spacing guild is compliant, the Fremen only have the space transports they can capture. Note that the Spacing Guild supplies heighliners, not frigates and the Fremen do not know how to build frigates. So their ground-to-orbit and orbit-to-ground capacity is going to be limited. High – the Harkonnen and Corrino fleets captured on the ground at Arrakeen were large – but limited. Still probably enough to give the Fremen local numerical superiority everywhere they went.
The problem would be attrition: Fremen manpower is brittle. This is made worse by the fact that achieving numerical superiority on multiple fronts – and we’re told this fight encompasses a great many worlds (and planets are big things – most of them do not have all of their major settlements packed in one small area like Arrakis does), so they fight on multiple fronts – would require deploying large numbers of those ‘second tier’ Fremen forces. Those Fremen are going to be lethal in close combat, but extremely vulnerable to the industrialized firepower of the setting: one thing we’re told very clearly is that lasguns are evidently extremely powerful against unshielded enemies.
Meanwhile, as capable as the Fremen are, we also know they are not trained how to fight in shields (it is an entire plot-point in Paul’s duel with Jamis that they do not understand Paul’s slower movements), so once forced by military conditions outside of Arrakis to fight shield-against-shield, some part of the Fremen qualitative edge will be lost even for the ‘first tier’ troops.
And simply put, a few million Fremen is probably not enough to actually sustain that campaign, though I will admit it could end up being borderline, depending on the size of Great House armies and the loss-ratios the Fremen are able to put up. Once you have siphoned off the tens if not hundreds of thousands of soldiers required to garrison worlds that have been taken and accounted for losses fighting technologically superior opponents in unfamiliar terrain, I would guess that Fremen manpower would end up badly overstretched.
Very roughly, we can start with 15 million total Fremen. While Fremen women are trained to fight and Chani is on the front lines, we do not see any other women do so: the Fremen do not employ their womenfolk offensively as fighters, as a rule.2 So accounting for women and children – in a society that we may assume has almost no elderly – that 15 million total Fremen might give us 5 million military aged males available for offensive deployment. Some portion of those will still be needed on Arrakis for spice production, administration and so on, but perhaps it is a small portion.
So perhaps 3 million Fremen available for offensive action off world, of which perhaps only a few hundred thousand can be moved at a time given the limited supply of frigates, charging out into a universe with perhaps something on the order of 15 to 30 million trained fighters. That offensive force will be depleted not only by casualties, but also by the demands of holding and administering captured territory and also that army needs to still exist when the fighting is done, both to deter what Great Houses remain and also to enable the continued existence of the Fremen as a people. If Paul conquers the universe but gets a majority of all military-aged Fremen men (over a decade, so more than one full generational cohort) killed, Atreides rule isn’t going to last very long.
Worse yet (it gets worse) the manpower pool the Great Houses operate from is absolutely vast – there are evidently tens if not hundreds of billions of people in the Faufreluches – so any Great House not entirely wiped out is going to be able to reconstitute fairly rapidly. If you do wipe out a Great House but leave the planet, there are no shortage of richece willing to take their place and then reconstitute a Great House army fairly rapidly. The Fremen are going to be playing whack-a-mole quite a bit, because their opponents have enormous demographic reserves to draw on, while by contrast the Fremen’s own are very limited. Of course the Fremen could start recruiting people out of the faufreluches, but that seems both unlikely (the Fremen do not bother to conceal their contempt for the people of the villages of Arrakis, whose conditions are already much harsher than the average worker in the faufeluches) and would also dull the all-important qualitative edge the Fremen need. So while the perhaps 5 million or so total Fremen military-aged-males is a exhaustible, set resource the 15-30 million Great House fighters is a resource which can be almost endlessly replenished.
It is easy to see the ways this could go wrong. First, the Fremen lack of industrial military power could cause the casualty ratio to turn the wrong way once they are off world. Sure, they have the superior close-combat fighters – we’ve stipulated that – but if you lose half of every attack group to lasguns, hunter-drones or other ranged weapons on the way in (because you haven’t enough shields), the Fremen are simply going to run out of Fremen before they subdue the Great Houses. The other path is one where the campaign sputters: the Fremen win initial (costly) victories due to numbers and mobility advantage but are then forced to dissipate much of their force in garrisons and administration. That in turn enforces something that happens to many great conquering peoples: they become like the regimes they replaced. Fremen leaders with their small military retinues settle down to control and exploit the worlds they garrison while being vassals of the Atreides – in short, they become Great Houses, likely losing whatever distinctiveness kept them militarily superior in the process. In either cause, because the numbers are so lopsided, the loss of momentum for the Fremen probably spells collapse as the balance tips back the other way and the Great Houses, with superior manpower and economic resources, begin whittling down what is left.
In short, Fremen victory against the Great Houses strikes me as possible but implausible, it is an unlikely outcome – one that probably would require a prescient warlord directing everything to perfection in order to win. Which as we’ve noted already, is a failure point for the narrative of the books, which require this war to be a thing that succeeds regardless of if Paul lives or dies.
Of course this assumes broadly that the ‘military resources’ – trained fighters, shields, supplies, frigates and so on – in the ‘system’ remains fairly static: that the Great Houses mostly fight as they have always done, with the weapons they’ve always had. One result of that is that the Fremen never get access to the quantity of weapons to fully modernize their own forces – the Great House armies are, ironically, too small to furnish them enough systems to capture.
Of course those limits might not hold. War is, after all, the land of in extremis. The Fremen assault might be enough to really break the static nature of the faufreluches and unlock a lot more economic potential, which might increase the military resources the Fremen could unlock from captured worlds.
That scenario, it turns out, is both likely and much worse.
Fremen: Total War
First, let us start with the part that this seems likely.
So far we’ve been discussing this as a war between the Fremen and the Great Houses, with the much larger mass of the population left out of it. We’ve done that because I think it is the only version of this war the Fremen could win. But it is also clearly, explicitly not the version of the war that happens.
Again, we’re told in Dune Messiah that the Jihad ends up killing 61 billion people, wipes out forty religions, and sterilized ninety planets.
In short, under Muad’Dib’s leadership the Fremen are not merely waging a war against the noble families of the Great Houses, but rather a war against the people of the Imperium. There is something of an irony that Frank Herbert seems to be clearly thinking in terms of something like the rapid expansion of the Rashidun Caliphate (632-661) here, but the Rashidun caliphs quite deliberately avoided this sort of thing, often offering religious protections to the underlying peoples beneath the empires (Roman and Sassanid) they were attacking to avoid a situation where they faced broad popular resistance. That said, this aspect of Islamic conquest was often not emphasized in the 1960s popular understanding, so Frank Herbert may not have been aware of the degree to which local religions and communities were largely and intentionally left in place during early Islamic expansion.
Either way, it seems almost certain that Paul’s Fremen attempting to extirpate entire religious traditions and sterilize entire worlds, are going to start facing broad popular resistance.
Now obviously the first problem here is that it makes their manpower problem much worse. When the Fremen were just facing the Great Houses, they were outnumbered perhaps 5-to-1, which is quite bad but in the fiction of the setting superior skills can overcome those disadvantages at least some of the time.3 But against a, say, Earth-like planet – of which there must be very many, given that killing 61 billion people did not even cause much of a social collapse in the Imperium – the Fremen might face mass-mobilized armies on just that planet in the high tens of millions. The USSR mobilized an astounding 34.5 million troops during WWII out of a population (pre-war) of about 200 million. Naturally it would be hard to mobilize a whole planet on that basis, but doing so on a modern-Earth-like world would net you around one billion soldiers.
So the idea that the Fremen might find themselves landing forces of, say, 300,000 Fremen warriors (representing basically the maximum carrying capacity of the Corrino and partial-Harkonnen fleets they captured) on a planet only to find themselves facing an opposing force five million or fifty million or five hundred million foes is not out of the question. One of the few ways to force that kind of mobilization from modern societies is to attempt to genocide a population or extirpate their long and sincerely held religion and the Fremen are trying to do both.
Now the Great Houses can control these populations because they maintain local legitimacy, because shield-based fighting gives them a huge advantage against populations that cannot afford shields and because they have demilitarized the lower classes. But the Fremen will have removed all of these factors. The Fremen do not have long-standing local legitimacy – they are a barbarian foreign force trying to take away your religion. They also do not have a shield-based fighting system and lack enough shields to fully equip their force in any case and so take to the field without a technological edge over a mass-mobilizated populace. And worse yet, the very threat they pose is going to push the lower classes to militarize.
Now in pre-industrial societies, this effect was somewhat limited because pre-industrial societies were not capable of fully militarizing their lower classes. But the societies of Dune are post-industrial societies. It may be impossible to provide the high tech instruments of warfare to an entire mass army – not enough shields, ‘thopters and frigates – but it would be trivially easy for these societies to equip the great masses of their population with spears, swords and simple guns.
Ironically, the Fremen would now find themselves immediately caught in the same trap as the Great Houses: trained in a fighting style that emphasizes close combat, they would try to have close-combat mass-battles with huge, unshielded armies of melee combatants, rather than being set up to use their shields to maximum advantage by conducting the fighting at long range.
Facing even relatively modest mass armies would require the Fremen to deploy a lot of their available manpower simply to be able to hold ground on the kind of scale these wars would be fought on, which would make the two-tier structure of their army even more of a liability because it would force them to field those second-tier troops in quantity. And while a Great House might be dumb enough to fight those second-tier unshielded troops in close combat – that being their habit – one imagines a mass army of resistance might approach it differently. After all a mass army is going to look for cheap ways to arm hundreds of thousands or millions of fighters and guns and artillery are relatively cheap compared to shields and ‘thopters. And we know that the basic technology of artillery is not lost, because Vladimir Harkonnen uses it as a surprise tactic against the Atreides.
Heaven help the Fremen if some planet somewhere stumbles on the same idea and expands it out to a fifty-million-soldier army against a largely unshielded, close-combat-based infantry Fremen force. Ask the survivors of the Battle of Omdurman (1898) what happens when the most skilled, motivated, desert-hardened and determined ‘hard men’ attempt to charge machine guns with contact weapons. While the ‘first tier’ Fremen troops with captured shields might still be effective, after their ‘second tier’ supporting units were obliterated they would be horribly outnumbered, easy enough to simply mob down with bayonets.
Even if the Fremen qualitative edge remained intact – perhaps because their opponents continued to operate in the contact-warfare frame rather than rediscovering projectile weapons – the attritional structure of the conflict would become unsustainable pretty quickly. Paul could easily lose half of his entire offensive force fighting a single partially mobilized world of this sort with a 15:1 casualty ratio in his favor.
But there’s an even worse outcome here for the Fremen, especially given the length of the conflict: total economic mobilization. So far we’ve considered worlds with perhaps days or weeks of warning doing panic mobilization while under attack, churning out as many rifles and swords as they can to put together mass armies, relying on the fact that planets are very big and so any conquest would take months if not years.
Paul’s Jihad lasts twelve years, canonically. For a sense of what twelve years is in ‘mobilization time,’ the United States went from producing almost no tanks in 1939, to just 400 in 1940, to 4,052 in 1941 to 24,997 in 1942, to 29,497 in 1943. In 1939, the United States built 5,856 aircraft; by 1944, it was building more than 8,000 aircraft a month.[efn_notes]Statistics via Overy, Why the Allies Won (1995), 331-2.[/efn_note] Again, as we’ve already noted, the only way the small armies of the Imperium make sense with its attested population (which must be more than the 61 billion Paul kills) is if this society is mostly demilitarized. We see plenty of industrial capability – aircraft, space-ships and so on – it is just that these noble houses with their limited administration cannot mobilize that capacity for war.4 The technology and population exists, what is lacking is the administrative capacity and political will to employ it. And while we might imagine that Dune‘s frigates and ornithopters are more complex machines than WWII-era aircraft, tanks and warships, it is equally the case that we’re thinking about the economies of entire planets rather than individual countries.
But for a planet that found itself not immediately under attack but very obviously in the path of Paul’s Jihad – perhaps with a well-entrenched local religion – that calculus is different. Information might spread slowly in the Imperium, but not infinitely slow – at least the elite do seem to have some sense of affairs in distant places. Those richece, perhaps with their nobles or without them, might well opt to do what those noble houses with their tiny, underdeveloped administrations could not: mass mobilize not just people but industry, unlocking the productive capacity of several billion people and turning much of the civilian economy over to a war-footing in a way that the Great Houses, with their small administrations and very limited legitimacy never could. Show the people film-strips of Paul Muad’Dib’s army murdering billions and sterilizing worlds and say, “that is coming here unless you line up to work in the factory churning out ninety thousand ornithopters a year.” Big posters that say, “to keep the Fremen Fedaykin murderers away from Our Holy Sites, we need YOU to hit our target of launching two thousand heavy weapons frigates this year!” Industrial societies engaged in something approach total economic mobilization can produce enormous amounts of destruction very rapidly.
The Fremen Jihad lasts more than long enough for the more populous worlds of the Imperium to adopt this kind of war economy in preparation and the tremendous violence that the Fremen inflict – again, sixty-one billion casualties – are more than enough to motivate a lot of these worlds to do exactly that.
Paul will, in that event, at least be lucky that the Spacing Guild might let him isolate such worlds, although if you are the Spacing Guild (or an anti-Fremen group of smugglers) you might just be willing to roll the dice to see how Paul’s base of power on Arrakis handles the arrival of thousands of frigates with tens of thousands of ‘thopters carrying millions of heavily equipped troops showing up in the skies above Arrakeen.
The Failed Jihad
Now of course the natural response to all of this is that Paul Muad’Dib Atreides can avoid all of these outcomes because he is the Kwisatz Haderach, able to see the present and the future and thus able to anticipate and avoid all of these outcomes, threading the needle of probability perfectly to guide the Jihad to its victorious conclusion.5 And of course we’ve already noted the flaw in this: Dune is explicit that by the time Paul fully grasps his prescience, it is too late to stop the Jihad, which would happen and succeed even if he was dead. Paul is merely the catalyst for what Herbert imagines as historical – nearly ecological – merely the manifestation of the ‘world-spirit’ of the age moving through history. The Jihad would happen without him. Only the catalyst is required; the rest is inevitable.
And it just clearly isn’t. There are, in fact, quite a lot of ways the Jihad could swiftly fail.
And fundamentally that goes to how Frank Herbert’s vision of military power – one shared by quite a lot of people – differs from how military power is actually generated. In Frank Herbert’s vision, military power is a product of the individual capabilities of fighters, which in turn is produced ecologically based on the harshness of the environment they come from. He imagines huge gulfs in capability, where two legions of Sardaukar can easily overpower ten legions of Harkonnen and Fremen in the desert can inflict even more lopsided casualties on Sardaukar.6 There is a direct correlation then between the harshness of a place and the military power it can produce.
And equally, there is a strongly gendered component of this view in Frank Herbert’s writing: militarily effective societies in Dune are masculine in key ways.7 Harsh conditions, for Herbert, produce intensely masculine societies (whereas the decadence of the Imperium is signaled in equally gendered terms: the gay sexual deviant Baron, the genetic eunuch Fenring, the emperor with his household of daughters and his failure of “father-head”-ship), which in turn produce militarily effective ones.
It is not hard to see how intense and pervasive a view of military power that is, how frequently in popular culture ‘manliness’ is presented as the primary source from which military effective flows. This isn’t the place to get into the modern manifestations of this sort of ideological framework, but it is not particularly hard to find recruiting and propaganda videos that attempt to communicate military effectiveness almost purely through gendered visual language of masculine fitness prowess, as if victory belongs to the army that can do the most push-ups. Herbert’s vision is somewhat more sophisticated than this, but only somewhat. It is water drawn from the same well.
And that simply isn’t how military power is actually generated in the real world. Training certainly matters and there are some kinds of fighting – like horseback archery – that almost have to be deeply socially rooted to be effectively trained. Cohesion also certainly matters, but it can be generated quite a few ways and strong cohesion is certainly possible to produce ‘synthetically’ through training and drill. But the strongest armies do not generally come from the harshest places – indeed, the opposite: for most of human history the military advantage has gone to resource-rich places with dense populations. This is obscured somewhat in popular culture because the exceptions to this rule are so striking but they’re striking because they are exceptions.
But especially after the industrial revolution – and Dune is a post-industrial (very post-industrial) universe – military power is largely generated by economies, a brute-force product of the ability of societies to deploy the most men (supported by their agriculture), the most metal, the most explosives and these days the most electronics. Weaker powers can still win by protracting conflicts and focusing on degrading the will of an enemy, but they do this because they are weaker powers who understand that they do not have much of any chance of winning in a direct confrontation. Indeed, the armies that have put the most emphasis on the ‘fighting spirit’ or individual physical superiority of their soldiers have tended to lose modern wars to armies of conscripted farm-boys and shop-keepers backed up by tremendous amounts of modern industrial firepower.
Of course, as Clausewitz reminds us (drink!) war is the realm of the “play of probability and chance” – a contest in which the stronger does not always win. Military strength may be, in modern times, almost entirely the product of industries, economies and demographics (and the first two more than the last one in most cases), but such raw strength is not the only thing that determines the outcome of wars, which equally depend on the strategic importance of the objective, the political will of the two parties and the vagaries of chance that are omnipresent in war (drink again if you got the reference).
None of this makes Dune a bad book or Frank Herbert a bad author – it is a fascinating book that raises these kinds of ideas and questions. But equally precisely because the book’s understanding of where military power comes from derives not from historical facts but from fictional events, it is worth thinking hard about how it imagines this works and if that actually corresponds to historical trends.
In this case, Frank Herbert imagines that ‘historical forces’ have created an effective inevitability that once roused the Fremen, on account of their harsher society, would storm the universe basically regardless of the balance of logistics, military equipment or numbers because the vague ‘hardness’ of their society makes them unbeatable. It makes for a fascinating narrative, but this is not how history works and indeed the wastelands of history are littered with the half-remembered names of a great many peoples who were ‘hard’ and ‘tough’ and ‘aggressive’ and utterly slaughtered or overrun because the ‘wealthy’ ‘decadent’ and ‘unmanly’ societies they fought also had greater numbers and superior weapons.
So to answer the original question: no, one way or another, the Fremen would fail, though they might fail in the most interesting way – failing not by replacing the faufreluches, but by galvanizing them into producing (or reproducing) a different kind of self-governing society that was far better able to mobilize itself and its resources – and capable of far more destructive, horrifying forms of war.
One wonders what the Dune universe’s version – after the collapse of both the faufreluches and the Fremen – of the First World War, a horror-show of industrial warfare on unprecedented scale – would look like.
- It is striking how little a role captured ornithopters seem to play in Fremen warfare, suggesting that while they can capture these things, they probably cannot maintain them, leading them to quickly degrade rapidly in harsh desert conditions.
- Neither do the Great Houses, from what we can tell. Herbert’s fantasy universe is very explicitly a patriarchy, even amongst the Fremen.
- Attempting to win in close-combat against five to one odds in the real world, however, has a far lower success rate in the absence of non-training advantages like better armor or weapons.
- To go a step further, in a society like this I would imagine that part of the reason none of these Great Houses have mobilized their whole societies for war is that it would imperil their own rule – the same reason that the monarchies of Europe tried (unsuccessfully) to put the ‘cat’ of the levée en masse back in the bag after the end of the Napoleonic Wars – mass warfare creates social pressures that tend to push either towards totalitarianism or democracy, both of which are incompatible with the sort of small, personalist, traditionalist regimes the Great Houses are running.
- One interpretation, as an aside, I’ve toyed with of the books is that Paul is in fact not really the Kwisatz Haderach, but that his son Leto II is. I think it is striking that the Bene Gesserit breeding program expected a Kwisatz Haderach not in Paul’s generation, but in the next – in a sense Paul was the ‘early misfire’ of their effort, whereas Leto II arrived right on schedule. It also fits with Frank Herbert’s ‘genetic philsophy’ as it were, that the Bene Gesserit breeding within the noble houses only produces failed almost-Kwisatz-Haderachs like Count Fenring, but it is the blending of an outside people, the novel combination of Paul and Chani with a Fremen element (the very thing the Bene Gesserit regard as a catastrophe) with produces the true completion of the program with Leto II and Ghanima. It’s striking that while Frank Herbert shares some of the Fremen Mirage which is often a staple of racist ideologies, Herbert instead views the mixing of peoples and cultures as good, the novel creations of such as necessary for the vague ‘vitality’ of a people.
- “It was a good fight,” the Fremen said. “We lost only two men and spilled the water from more than a hundred of theirs.” There were Sardaukar at every gun, Hawat thought. This desert madman speaks casually of losing only two men against Sardaukar.” It is unclear in the passage how many Sardaukar and how many Harkonnen are in those ‘more than a hundred’ described, but it is at least a few (they captured three).
- The retort here is going to be to bring up God Emperor of Dune‘s Fish Speakers, but as noted in the link there, the trope of a ‘Fremen’ society so masculine that even its women behave in unexpectedly masculine ways from the perspective of a patriarchal society is an ancient one too. The Fish Speakers thus fit neatly into a long tradition of ‘barbarian warrior women’ serving as the gender-flipped other, drawn into high relief by how their army was entirely composed of women without exception, with men entirely eschewed from their society save as husbands. In short, the Fish Speakers are not a more gender-egalitarian or gender-neutral society, but a ‘palette swapped‘ version of Dune‘s other patriarchies.
It’s been a while since I read the books (and honestly, I’ve re-read the truly bizarre ones, Emperor/Heretics/Chapterhouse more often), but it feels to me that there’s a lot more variability (or at least possibility) in terms of what the text describes? I don’t think it’s ever stated that it’s ONLY the Fremen and whatever motley assortment they’ve captured that then perpetuate a galactic jihad. Or is it?
I always pictured the Fremen as the tip-of-the-spear units. 61 billion dead sounds like a lot, but assuming, what, thousands (or tens of thousands?) of inhabited worlds? Most of the planets are probably much less populated than our Earth (or else the hundred-odd sterilized would be hundreds of billions dead). So I always imagined something more like the Mongol conquests, in which, after the first couple years, actual “Mongol” soldiers were not really that high a percentage of the armies, all in all.
As soon as Paul is declared emperor, would it not be plausible that allegiances within the Corrino Imperial demesne immediately fracture? Likewise when he’s made known as the new (old) House Atreides head; I always imagined perhaps some houses (or planets, or minor nobles, etc) who had previously sympathized with the Atreides (Leto was a notably influential figure in the Landsraad, no?) and had a grudge against the old order might well have thrown in with the so-called jihad.
And of course the threat of cutting off the spice would be a damn good way to cow or suborn an awful lot of elites, and really limit top-down resistance. I seem to recall that it is fatal to be cut off, once one is a habitual user! So that’s quite a threat to have hanging over opposing leaders.
Emperor Paul does have more resources than the Fremen, but only if he’s alive. As Bret noted, the book is clear that the jihad is inevitable *even if Paul dies.* So the Fremen are going to win even without Paul’s imperial legitimacy, Atreides lordship, newfound CHOAM wealth, etc.
True, but whoever leads the Fremen is going to have some more resources too: not just the direct spacing guild but also the indirect pressure that can bring, etc.
Without Paul they still have a monopoly on Spice and honestly it seems like that would be enough.
Well, I’m not sure it’s as simple as “without” those advantages:
-the… let’s call it the “Paul Memorial Jihad…” does have control of Arrakis, which is the foundation of CHOAM wealth. They don’t have the CHOAM bank account, but they do have an awful lot of the economic leverage that CHOAM had, and you have to figure CHOAM’s credit rating/stock price/whatever is in free fall so whoever does have the bank account doesn’t really have “CHOAM wealth” anymore either.
-the PMJ can call on Atreides legitimacy to some extent. They have Paul as a martyr, they have Lady Jessica, they have Alia. I don’t think this wins them very much in and of itself. Probably it’s good for popular sentiment on Caladan, but will it activate any of the old Atreides allies in the Landsraad? Probably not! Or at least, not on its own, but then again…
-The PMJ does not have any imperial legitimacy, but after the events of our alter-Dune, there isn’t much imperial legitimacy left for anyone else to use either. I think we can assume Shaddam and Irulan are dead, so we have an unexpected heir trying to pick up the pieces after an enormous betrayal has publicly blown up in the Imperial face. Will the Landsraad rally to her? After what her father is revealed to have done to the best among them?
On the point about spice withdrawal, I think you’re correct that this gives Paul a lot of leverage, but to me this just shifts the problem to another issue which has always bothered me: why on Earth does House Corrino regularly grant a monopoly on spice production to its most dangerously ambitious vassals? Given that threatening the supply allows the ruler of Arrakis to blackmail the entire galaxy, surely any advantages of ‘trapping’ a rival dynasty in an unfamiliar environment are massively outweighed by the risks. I know that House Corrino’s state capacity is limited, but if there’s one planet in the galaxy that it would be worth governing directly, and garrisoning to the gills with the most fanatically loyal Sardaukar, it would absolutely be this one.
I believe that the extended universe / prequel books invent some story as to why it’s done this way as a political expedient. It smells to me as a fudge to rationalise a poor plot point in the original. But I haven’t read those, Brian Herbert lost me with those god awful final 2 books in his father’s main series and I have no interest in reading anything else penned by him.
This came up in the comments for part 1.
Everyone else knows that this would make House Corrino all-powerful, and the Great Houses combined could overthrow the Emperor. (Fast enough so they don’t all die from spice withdrawal: in Dune most houses have their own spice stockpile). So the Landsraad won’t let the Emperor run Arrakis.
Meanwhile House Corrino knows that anyone ruling Arrakis for long enough could build up enough wealth to challenge them. So the Emperor rotates the rulership of Arrakis through a series of Great Houses.
Balance of power, like so much of the Imperium.
I understand the basic idea, but remain sceptical that normal balance of power considerations could durably hold here, let alone for 10,000 years. The ability to threaten spice destruction (equivalent to permanently detonating all of Earth’s fossil fuel supplies and simultaneously the heroin to which the entire global elite is addicted) just seems too strong. All the great houses have atomics, and is it really credible that in all that time, none of them have dared to try Paul’s MAD strategy when it’s time for them to rotate out of Arrakis? Or that no emperor has been bold enough to just seize the planet and give the Landsraad a choice between death or absolutism?
In the books, atomics aren’t enough to destroy spice production. Glassing the entire deep desert is assumed to be outside the reach of a great House. What Paul threatens to do is create the “water of death” by mixing the water of life (used to turn Jessica into a Fremen Reverend Mother) with spice. This could then be used to create a chain reaction that would destroy all spice on Arrakis, and the worms that produce it. It’s all very handwavium, but it’s a plot contrivance for why only someone with Fremen knowledge but without Fremen reverence for the worms, would be able to make such a threat and have it be taken credibly.
Books are explicit that the Landsraad united is more powerful than the Emperor; the threat of Atreides uniting them for an overthrow is the cause of the whole buisness.
Thank you, holdthebreach, for clarifying this. I had forgotten the exact mechanism by which Paul threatens to destroy the spice, and you’re right that this is significantly less replicable by other Houses than just nuking the wells to contaminate them.
I continue to think that, over the course of 10,000 years, the temptation of Arrakis is such that eventually some canny emperor or revisionist challenger would have assembled a military coalition able to hold it for long enough to bring their opponents to their knees and enable closer control over the planet. But I acknowledge that the present system exists for a reason and seems fairly stable, and possibly some additional factors outside the scope of real-world history (e.g. quasi-supernatural Bene Gesserit manipulation behind the scenes) could enable it to endure for multiple millennia.
You could just as easily ask why the Spacing Guild, with its monopoly on interstellar transport and ability to see into the future, rules neither the Imperium nor the one planet in the universe it absolutely needs. Such things are forbidden by the strongest power in any Secondary World: Author Says So.
It can be argued that the Spacing Guild effectively do rule the Imperium. Every other institution is set up to counter-balance the others and provide checks, the check on the Spacing Guild is that they simply do not wish to rule directly.
They wish to be wealthy and have access to the spice, and operate a system where they handle all inter-planetary commerce and dictate the terms of warfare, which they do in such a way as to minimise the power of any single contender and enrich themselves. They’re frogs in tanks, they can’t govern, but they can use their foresight to find an outcome they prefer.
They have a puppet Emperor to serve as the ceremonial capstone providing legitimacy the off-putting Navigators cannot provide to the single-planet nobility, who themselves have limited capacity. It’s an unstable system which requires a lot of restraint, but if the Guild is maintaining it then that does give it a major reason to have survived so long.
I thought it was said somewhere in the first book that the Navigators deliberately don’t assume direct control of Arrakis because then their own prescience would be self-interfering. That to them Arrakis is actually more predictable and therefore secure if someone else in charge.
@ad9, finding it unrealistic that any organisation **doesn’t** ruthlessly exploit every advantage to maximise their domination over everyone else says rather more about you than about Frank Herbert.
1) The series on the blog entitled Work, Life, Death, and the Peasant describes how the peasants needed a constant supply of grain to avoid dying of starvation, and were therefore strongly motivated to acquire sufficient farmland to provide them with the required quantity of grain. Give any of them something of incredible value and he would certainly use it to help acquire control of at least the amount of land needed.
The Navigators of the Guild needed a constant supply of spice to avoid dying of spice withdrawal, and were therefore strongly motivated to acquire sufficient land to provide them with the required quantity of spice. Given them something of incredible value and they would certainly use it to help acquire the amount of land needed. Which would in the nature of thing all be on Arrakis. I am assuming no more than that the Navigators wished to avoid death as much as did the peasants.
2) It is my observation that giant worldwide monopolies tend to end up in the power of people who do seek power. While this might not be true of a given monopoly at some period in time, I am doubtful that this period would last ten thousand years, three or four hundred human generations. Over time, things tend to revert to normality.
3) Given any set of goals, achieving them requires the wealth or power to achieve them. Achieving any goal therefore requires achieving the subgoal of having the wealth and power needed to achieve it. For this reason all organisations with any goal tend to be power seeking to some extent, and the Spacing Guild has had ten thousand years to develop in this direction, from a starting point that gives it near unlimited power over human civilization whether it wants it or not.
@scifhughf
In fairness, the people who run large, powerful organizations tend to be much more ruthless about exploiting their advantages than the average person would be. There’s several entangled factors that cause this, but it’s a pretty clear recognizable pattern. As a rule, if an organization isn’t ruthlessly exploiting every advantage, it’s because something else in the society or the logistics of doing so would make it impractical.
@ad9
What it comes down to is that the Spacing Guild has a very reliable arrangement by which spice is delivered to them, and by which the only plausible threat to their continued survival and power (mechanical navigation devices) do not emerge.
The actual harvesting of the spice is, yes, handled by administrators and not by the Guild or the Navigators directly. The task of preventing anyone from building navigation machines is largely handled by others, likewise. But the job gets done and until a really far-out “black swan” event occurs in the form of Paul showing up, the system works fine.
One may argue that this is exactly what it looks like when they are already ruthlessly exploiting their real advantages. The game is over and they have already won, so far as they are able to foresee.
I think we *have* to assume that many or even most planetary populations either joined the Jihad or at least passively stood aside while the Fremen dismantled their Great House oppressors. The 61 Billion and the exterminated religions have to be exceptions. Although, even then, it’s difficult to imagine racking up that kind of toll without the use of atomics on civilian populations — I can’t recall if Messiah or God-Emperor ever mention this, which means it probably didn’t happen since it would have been a major plot point if it did.
I’ve mentioned elsewhere, but famine could do it depending on planetary food security. We know the Atreides used to export pundi rice from Caladan, which is presumably a staple. If that’s significant enough to be a planetary export, then it must be feeding a significant number of people off-world. If this sort of arrangement is replicated across the Imperium, and Paul and the Fremen use their leverage over the Spacing Guild to cease food export…that’s a lot of people dead.
Don’t need atomics to wipe cities off the map with kiloton or megaton blasts; thousands or millions of tons of conventional explosives can also do the job. Or even simple inert ingots of refractory alloy, ejected from an orbital cargo hauler.
I commented elsewhere, but Herbert makes a point to mention that at the time of the Jihad, milennia of stagnation had left the Imperium a powderkeg of pent up human energy, just looking for a reason to explode. This suggests to me that at least a significant chunk of the populace were raring to join Paul’s armies, whether they were true believers or just opportunists. Even before a planet was conquered, there were probably uprisings that disrupted the noble houses’ ability to fight back.
Another possibility is that as Paul destabilized the old power structures, a lot of internecine conflicts vaguely related or unrelated to his own conquests flared up, and/or that a lot of people “rose up to join him” and then immediately settled their own old scores against former enemies. This is by no means an uncommon outcome in rapid conquests by an outside force, or in civil wars.
I feel like a more plausible version of the Fremen Jihad would be one where the Fremen strike the first blow but then are quickly overtaken by events.
Perhaps word of Paul’s victory over the Emperor and the Harkonnens on Arrakis inspires revolts among the richece on other worlds. By the time Paul and the Fremen stage their first off-world offensive, several other worlds have already cast off the farfeluches and joined his cause. The Fremen remain Paul’s elite bodyguards and shock troops, but they become less and less relevant as the fighting continues.
After Paul’s first interstellar offensive succeeds, even he has become irrelevant. Enormous numbers of worlds have thrown out their Great Houses and mobilized their populations and economies to rid the universe of the parasite class. Where the Great Houses prevailed, they too have embraced full mobilization in the vein of e.g. the Prussians learning to fight Napoleon.
While Paul was the first mover, and his example unleashed popular fury at the great houses, he lost all control after Arrakeen and from then on was little more than a mascot at the head of a deadly but dwindling force of increasingly out of place desert nomads.
Now there’s a version I’d like to see.
That wasn’t quite what Napoleon (admittedly an imperfect analogue) produced: in the end the Great Houses (Romanov, Hohenzollern, and Habsburg) managed to re-establish themselves as reactionary leaders, with no more than minor concessions to the bourgeoisie and some of the subordinate ethnic groups.
Napoleon’s enemies wanted no part in democracy (or whatever France had after the Coup of 18 Brumaire) but they did have a vested interest in being able to match the size of Napoleon’s armies. Prussia in particular made a series of reforms that aimed to create the capacity for mass mobilization without substantial changes to the social order, many of which became globally influential.
I suspect the Great Houses in this hypothetical would have been trying to thread the same needle and hoping to get the most mobilization potential out of the fewest possible concessions to the poors. And like in our world, one imagines that this might not produce a stable equilibrium in the long term.
John Keegan, in The Face of Battle, takes rather the opposite tack: that the European autocracies (at least Germany and Austria) were able to produce mass armies of astonishingly high morale, willing to endure immense suffering and death, without allowing much in the way of popular government. It’s true that the autocracies crumbled in the aftermath of shattering defeat, but it’s not clear that the democracies of Britain and France would have weathered a similar defeat any better.
Thirty-five years on, I’ve become a follower of Azar Gat rather than Francis Fukuyama: history does not inevitably culminate in liberal democracy; any such culmination–by no means assured at this moment–is the result of entirely contingent factors.
The issue there is the stochastic question: If the entire empire is so unstable that the Fremen Jihad can cause this mass uprising, how did it last for 10.000 years before that? In that time, in a universe where killing 61 billion people is *not* a major population disruption, there must have been thousands of other possible sparks in the form of successful charismatic leaders rebelling against the Great Houses.
Without controlling the Guild, it’s hard to see any revolt spreading beyond a single planet and so having much impact at a galactic scale. And it’s hard to see a revolt without a monopoly on Spice, and who has the threat of destroying all supplies that the prescient Guild navigators believe is credible, being able to control said Guild.
The ruling class is mostly addicted to a drug that, among other things, provides precognition. That might allow them to deal preemptively with many smaller disruptions, especially from non-precogs, without most of the downsides of obvious indiscriminate oppression. Imagine a version of the movie “Minority Report,” but instead of murder, cops are focused on thwarting political activism.
I think that the spice doesn’t really let nobles become precognitive- either they’re not using enough, or there’s something else going on. Note that the Emperor, Baron Harkonnen, and so on are not presented as being even limited precognitives as far as I can recall.
The primary force stabilizing the system is the Guild. They don’t rule the Imperium but the Imperium is their most desired political and economic situation, where their form of life is supported by the manufacturing of the entire Empire without having the hassle of ruling directly and there’s no strong pressure for alternatives to their monopoly to emerge. The tripod structure of the Empire becomes radically unstable when the Guild is subdued by a new kind of Emperor. This also occurs at the same time that the inevitable unrest creeping into the system is cooking to a boil.
The Jihad is Chernobyl. Someone exchanged the suppressing system with an accelerant as the system was growing increasingly volatile.
From what Herbert has said something like that *was* the plan for the later novels. (I believe he talked about it being eventually about replacing the feudal system with a more democratic one) but he never finished those and they kinda end on a cliffhanger.
Indeed. I have, personally, never read all the sequels. (After reading Dune: Chapterhouse out of reading order, I was no longer interested in what was in between), but for me, the idea of Atreides jihad was about a vaguely-defined galaxy-wide rebellion/crusade/upheaval. I would imagine it would, locally, look a lot like some people’s crusades: loose people from the lower classes of society on the move for an indefinite religious goal, dealing out violence more or less indiscriminately. More like Cultural Revolution than the somewhat coordinated historical Jihad of the Caliphs.
So, it would not be just the Fremen but the masses of the several planets screaming Paul’s name.
Thanks for this series. As a person who’s seen the Lynch and Villaneuve films but never read the books, a lot of these things perplexed me when watching. Why exactly are the Fremen supposed to be some awesome fighting force for *taking over the galaxy* when there’s obviously a finite number of them and they are technologically primitive in a future sci-fi epic? What am I missing? It’s like taking the “Tribes of Ewoks successfully launch a surprise strike against a relatively small force of Stormtroopers guarding a shield generator” and then pushing it to “Ewoks defeat the Empire all across the galaxy”
Maybe someone can also help me also understand why Arrakis is supposed to be a “trap” for Duke Leto and House Atreides that even he sees as likely to occur? I understand the Emperor and the Sardukaur are secretly helping the Harkonnens and they have a sort of man on the inside with Dr. Yueh, but how is this different than if they did the same attack on Caladan? Is the latter much easier to defend or were weakened by having to split their forces?
Re: the “trap” point, I think the point was that House Atreides was *entrenched* on Caladan, in a way they tried to achieve on Arrakis but not in time. In the “desert power” speech from Duke Leto to Paul, he explains by way of contrast that on Caladan they mastered “sea power”, probably involving a navy, aircraft carriers, submarines, etc. There are major investments in training and expertise needed for these technologies, and if they fought on Caladan, House Atreides would be able to use forces and weapons they have familiarized themselves for generations with. Plus the Atreides propaganda corps has had time to indoctrinate the populace of Caladan, the House probably has significant popular support from local leaders and everyday people. Even if House Harkonnen won the initial war against House Atreides, they’d have to continually put down rebellions on Caladan.
In contrast, if you move House Atreides to Arrakis, all those advantages are on the other foot. House Harkonnen has dealt with the unique challenges imposed by the desert for a while now, while their solutions are perhaps not always optima they have found solutions for their main problems (e.g. hunting Fremen that disrupt spice mining). House Atreides has not yet had time to acclimate, adapt to desert conditions, and develop a local base of power – much is made of the idea that locals expect the Atreides to be “just like the Harkonnens” and Duke Leto’s plan to court the Fremen needs time to build trust.
Finally, there’s the actual sabotage that the Harkonnens can pull. Shortchanging on equipment, neglecting maintenance, the “rainforest room” in the Atreides residence designed both to waste water and send a message. The Harkonnens pulled a lot of wealth out of Arrakis by dint of cruelty and oppression, Duke Leto cannot operate in the same way due to his own morals and public image but must still produce similar output for the Emperor and the Spacing Guild.
Haven’t read the book either, but have read lots of descriptions of what happens in it.
The “trap” has been described as “getting moved from their power base”, from what I’ve seen. No details, but implies relationships/population support (including the “best propaganda corps in the imperium”), possibly also terrain knowledge, built up defenses, and all the usual advantages of being in a place for a long time with a war expected.
I haven’t seen details beyond this, but it does make sense that attacking into who knows how many thousands of years of defenses, plus mentat created exact details of a defense plan, plus an unfriendly population at least somewhat loyal to the Atreides, terrain advantages (“Sea and air power” mentioned in the movie and I assume the book), warning systems, etc. is a much harder pull then attacking a house with an army that’s just moved to a new planet and hasn’t built much of anything yet. A single high level traitor isn’t likely to cancel that out. Means Harks have a good shot as wasting all that money to move the army, and even if they win they are weakened and open to another house’s attacks. The general population is much more likely to spot and report on the Sardukar attacking (Which tells the other great houses what the emperor is doing and means they cause trouble for him).
The line about “Sea and Air power” is lifted directly from the book, yeah
Firstly, if you’re interested enough to read this article and watch the films, I’d recommend reading the books (the first 3 or 4 form a cohesive story, the others are very different). There’s far more to them than a war story, and the prevalent themes of ecology and the dangers of falling for a charismatic leader are very relevant today. They’re not short, but Herbert is an engaging author.
As for why Arrakis is a trap, there’s one big reason beyond what @Dillon Saxe said. Dune is a secretive planet. There are no satellites there (the Guild forbid it) and off-worlders are rare. Word of Sardaukar landing on Caladan, even in disguise, would inevitably leak, triggering a Landsraad revolt against the Emperor. While on Arrakis it stayed silent: Keynes seems one of the few credible witnesses who could have got word out.
An additional, though minor, reason is that the Atreides taking over a Harkonnen half-fief is a plausible reason for the latter to launch an all out invasion of the former that 3rd parties would happily believe. The Harkonnen’s emptying decades of profit to do the same on Caladan when the rivalry between the two houses has been stable for millennia would have raised considerable eyebrows and prompted speculation that other powers were involved.
In other words the “trap” is not only about military advantage, but about it being easier to hide Imperial involvement. And the Emperor could only commit to direct attack against a major house if he was certain he could conceal it.
The Guild doesn’t forbid satellites above Arrakis. The Fremen do. That’s clearly stated in Dune.
It’s sort of both. The Guild forbids them because the Guild receives immense spice bribes from the Fremen to do so.
If Sardakar had attacked Caladan, the empire would have immediately either suffered coup d’etat or been plunged into civil war. It’s explicit that the great houses fear the emperor picking them off one by one and that Leto has some notability among the opposition. There is talk about the Baron mobilizing the same fear later and he isn’t a popular figure like Leto. Paul talks about blackmailing the emperor and becoming his heir in between the attack and him going native.
Arrakis is a trap because it’s so important that it can be portrayed as a one off not to be repeated and the houses will tacitly accept that by not examining too closely. If the spice stops flowing, space travel stops and many nobles die of withdrawal so Arrakis is extremely important to the emperor’s interests. The other houses aren’t going to expect it to be a repeat act by the emperor.
The Ewok Mirage: hard times make soft, furry teddy bears…
This whole discussion is reminding me a bit of *The High Crusade* by Poul Anderson, which could be taken as a tongue-in-cheek parody of this aspect of Dune (an alien scoutship is hijacked by medieval Englishmen, who then conquer the entire alien empire with melee weapons, outside-the-box thinking, clever politicking and a lot of bluffing)… if not for the fact that the book predates Dune by half a decade.
It’s a trap in the context of the Landsraad, where the answer to “why not just attack Caladan” is “because that’s not how we do things.” There is understood to be some level of warfare among the Great Houses, yes, but it’s rarely open war and never total war. Economic warfare, proxy wars, vendetta and ‘war of assassins,’ yes… Just land all your dudes and fuck them up, no.
Further, the Emperor’s problem with the Atreides is that they look too good. They are too noble, too honorable, their propaganda corps is too powerful, and it makes him… I don’t know… feel bad? Look bad? (I’m not exactly clear on why this is such a problem for Shaddam. We don’t get a lot of his world, really: it seems like he is kind of a petty manchild, but it’s also reasonable to suppose that he faces real problems that are worsened by having this Duke who looks like the shining example of nobility AND he’s a petty manchild.) So he can’t just grab their arms while Feyd and Rabban kick the shit out of them, because that makes his problem worse instead of better.
If, instead, the Atreides are seen to overreach, if they accept a wealthy new fief from the Emperor’s hands and then prove themselves not equal to the task, well, then they’re vulnerable. The other Houses will accept the Harkonnens taking revenge on the Atreides for the way Leto stole Vlad’s favorite planet, where they wouldn’t accept the Harkonnens just attacking Caladan. The Emperor can’t attack Leto for being too good, but he can instead collect the goodwill he earns by *rewarding* Leto with a shiny new planet, and then act sad and disappointed when (for some mysterious reason) things just don’t go well for the oh-so-noble Atreides on their new fief.
Militarily, could the Harkonnens have just attacked Caladan and won? Maybe. They’re richer than the Atreides, they have more troops, but the Atreides have better training and that home field advantage. Without the Sardaukar,* I’d put the odds at something like 40% for Harkonnen victory, just considering the two Houses alone. But there are two problems: first, the Spacing Guild would never go for it, so the Harkonnens aren’t going to be able to land ten legions on Caladan.
Even more important, every other House would hate it and work against the Harkonnens. Now, they wouldn’t unite to defend Caladan or anything, but you’re still fucked. You’ve deployed ten legions to Caladan, who is guarding everything else you own? Every other conflict you’ve had for the last two generations just re-opened, because that guy that you had that fight with about mining rights on World We’ve Never Heard Of? Yeah, he’s pissed that you attacked Caladan and he’s noticed that suddenly you don’t have a battalion patrolling the mining district, you have a company of reservists, and he’s thinking “hey, I could grab those mines now and I’d be richer AND I’d be Striking A Blow For Freedom!” The fellow you put in charge of the Ancient and Honorable Guild of Shield Artificiers, Other World We Don’t Know Chapter? He just got knifed in an alley by a suspiciously professional killer, and his replacement doesn’t accept your dinner invites (but you saw him shopping with a tailor who sold a coat to a cousin of House Whatever).
*My reading is that the Emperor did not start out willing to just lend the Sardaukar to the Harkonnen for whatever, but only committed them to stabilize the spice supply once things had already spiraled pretty badly.
Thanks for the answer! Hopefully you can understand why I didn’t get much of this context from the films where a lot of these political undertones aren’t really discussed, and the Other Houses mostly seem to come into play only in the last 5 minutes of the second film.
Somewhere in the books its mentioned that the Emperor had been building up his wealth and hardpower by control of CHOAM profits for the period leading up to the events of the book, at the expense of alienating the high nobility which lead him to be paradoxically weaker than his forebearers despite being stronger on paper. In that environment, Leto was a political threat as a leader of the Landsraad houses due to how his charisma and reputation for nobility allowed him to be someone the dissident houses could agree on to serve as their spokesman.
There’s a point made that the structure of Imperial politics had lead the Emperor and Leto to be foes despite a good deal of personal warm feeling between the two. Leto needs to be popular as part of his feud with the Baron, the Emperor can’t afford a popular man in the Landsraad right now.
It’s been a while since I read the books (and I’ve re-read the weirder ones, Emperor/Heretics/Chapterhouse, more often), but it feels to me that there’s a lot more variability (or at least possibility) in terms of what the text describes? I don’t think it’s ever stated that it’s ONLY the Fremen and whatever motley assortment they’ve captured that perpetuate a galactic jihad. Or is it?
I always pictured the Fremen as the tip-of-the-spear units. 61 billion dead sounds like a lot, but assuming, what, thousands (or tens of thousands?) of inhabited worlds? Most of the planets are probably much less populated than our Earth (or else the hundred-odd sterilized would be orders of magnitudes more dead than stated). So I always imagined something more like the Mongol conquests, in which, after the first couple years, actual “Mongol” soldiers were not really that high a percentage of the armies, all in all.
As soon as Paul is declared emperor (and married to Irulan), perhaps allegiances within the Corrino Imperial demesne immediately fracture? Likewise when he’s announced as the new (old) Atreides head; perhaps some houses (or planets, or minor nobles, etc) who had previously sympathized with the Atreides (Leto ws a notably influential figure in the Landsraad, no?) and had a grudge against the old order might well have thrown in with the so-called jihad.
And of course the threat of cutting off the spice trade would be a damn good way to cow or suborn an awful lot of elites, and stifle top-down resistance. I seem to recall that it is fatal to be cut off, once one is a habitual user. So that’s quite a threat to have hanging over opposing leaders.
One thing that strikes me – what if it’s not just the Fremen? What if everyone else is thoroughly sick of the “Great Houses” and most of what they are doing is simply inspiring revolution? Those forty religions might be mere whizzy ideas of a few idle rich, and the poor might well delight in wrecking them. Also, now you get civil war, which allows thirty billion people to exterminate thirty billion other people…
Yes, Paul has a vision about the inevitability of the Jihad, & how it’s driven by the desires of much more than the Fremen, it’s a collective unconscious thing–but you could interpret it as the desire of the mass of the people in the Empire to throw off the restrictive class system, & the Jihad *and the religion Muad’dib brings* gives them a way to do it. So the Jihad’s success is only partly due to the Fremen, it’s also due to most of the non-rulers wanting them to succeed.
I agree. The Cultural Revolution would be, in fact, the most suitable path towards an Atreides Jihad:
1) Paul Muad’Dib is declared Emperor and assumes the leadership of CHOAM and the grudging cooperation of the Guild.
2) He uses the position to foment a religiously inspired social movement, starting local rebellions of the faufreluches (and minor houses who see the possibilities), with the Fremen and “red guards” used as enforcers to maintain imperial control of the revolution.
3) This results in chaotic conditions where billions are killed and whole planets sterilised in mostly-stochastic violence.
4) Finally, you have the emperor Leto II reigning supreme on a pyramid of skulls.
5) And countless houses that turned renegade and left the Known Space, as posited in later books.
So, this way, you don’t really need to fight battles with Fremen. Instead, they are used as enforcers and recruiters, while the masses of each planet do most of the killing and dying.
Hey, it looks like the “Why the Allies Won” citation is supposed to be a footnote, but currently that footnote is malformed and not rendering as a footnote.
Had Herbert had put more thought into “Paul is now the Emperor” it might have worked? Paul does control CHOAM, the interstellar trading company, which means he has that most vital of wars three necessities “Money, Money, and Money!” If he also technically has control of the Imperial Military & bureaucracy, and most of the Great Houses are at least sullenly compliant then the Fremen Jihad is more of a suppressing the rebels thing than outright conquest. With logistical and military support from the resources of the Empire and the Fremen being ruthless shock troops that make the Sardaukar look reasonable.
So, I think ‘Paul becomes Emperor’ is entirely doable without the Jihad at all? He’s in a very strong position at the end of Dune and becoming the heir is imminently doable…the problem is that doesn’t actually fit the themes the book is going for?
My understanding was always that Paul becomes the emperor, but there will be holdouts, and *that’s* what the Jihad is doing.
It’s not even conquering the galaxy, it’s mopping up the holdouts. The Harrying of the North on a galactic scale.
Right, the fact that a lot of great houses survived the process suggests many signed up on the new Emperor’s side – the Atreides were after all very popular. And Paul is insanely charismatic- maybe a lot of people voluntarily join his religion and his jihad, with the Fremen just the tip of the spear.
That would also account for a lot of casualties- such a process might ignite civil war on a lot of planets which could be a lot bloodier than the usual planetary invasions
The other thing with this, which I feel like isn’t addressed at all (and I don’t think Herbert thinks very hard about, either) is what, exactly, is going on with the “sterilized” planets, because that’s really hard to do! My immediate reaction to that, on reading it this time was, “That means someone used their atomics.” Of course, there are other possible answers… enough frigates falling uncontrolled or even on an intentional collision course onto a planet might well do it, too, but all of them imply very much more total industrial war.
Anyway, this is just to say that it feels like another support for the idea that it only really makes sense if the Fremen start it, and they head out on their jihad… and the rest of the known universe promptly convulses into civil war as a result.
I assume that “sterilized” just means they killed all the humans there, not that they necessarily killed off every single bacterium.
This also helps the math. Sixty-one billion casualties, even spread out over twelve years, is a lot for five million Fremen. But if the Jihad involved a civil war between Imperial factions, it looks much more plausible.
It may even fix the issue that Brett was stressing, that Paul foresaw the Jihad was inevitable even if he died. A civil war doesn’t need Paul himself, just a candidate Emperor to rally around. After all, look what happened to Rome when their generals started thinking “hey, even I could be Emperor”.
Yeah, Bret clearly lays out “the existing system is inherently unstable” and “the Fremen couldn’t do that much killing all by themselves, against an industrialized galaxy with remotely unified leadership” but then doesn’t take the next logical step those imply together.
Paul is able to see that if he stops the Jihad short, he’ll be killed and it will continue on in his name. Given the golden chance with the Emperor captive and the Guild subdued, the Fremen aren’t going to give up their chance at conquest. Paul’s war machine doesn’t need Paul as anything but a unifying story.
Since you mentioned the Rashidun Caliphate, and I’ve only read the first book and seen the Villaneuve films, but do the Freemen recruit locally on some of the worlds they conquer through voluntary conversion and incentives? And, if they did, would that drastically alter their chances of success?
I always supposed that the Freman Jihad was a religious war of conversion, & accumulated fighters & other supporters like a Katamari. So the numbers don’t really apply after the first planet.
It is nearly impossible to become Fremen after birth — Paul achieces it by being superhuman. Jessica becomes part of the society for a time but eventually goes back to the Sisterhood. There might be religious conversions, but not conquered peoples becoming Fremen.
The Fremen almost certainly aren’t going to take any significant number of people from other planets and recognize them as Fremen, but they very well might start recruiting and arming them as auxiliary troops to fight in the coming battles.
A little off-topic, but the links to “How the Weak Can Win” post reminded me that we are four years into the (the major action of*) the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I know you’re a military historian not a modern day military expert, but it would be really interesting to get your takes on if there have been any historical conflicts that resembled this one… and how they ended.
*Yes, I know there’s arguments for setting the beginning much earlier, but you know what I mean.
This is an interesting article, but I think it makes a fundamental misreading of that offscreen conflict between Paul’s Fremen and their opponents. For starters, I want to call your attention to this bit, when Paul has effectively won and is laying out his demands to Jessica, to relay for him:
“The Emperor’s entire CHOAM Company holdings as dowry,” he said.
“Entire?” She was shocked almost speechless.
“He is to be stripped. I’ll want an earldom and CHOAM directorship for
Gurney Halleck, and him in the fief of Caladan. There will be titles and
attendant power for every surviving Atreides man, not excepting the lowliest
trooper.”
“What of the Fremen?” Jessica asked.
“The Fremen are mine,” Paul said. “What they receive shall be dispensed by
Muad’Dib. It’ll begin with Stilgar as Governor on Arrakis, but that can wait.”
So once the Fremen are launching off-planet, they have, through Paul, essentially the revenue source of House Corrino, plus his intimidation hold on the Spacing Guild. We’re not entirely told how the great houses obtain their kit; how it goes from the industrial base of the Imperium to actually being frigates and ornithopters and shields and whatnot, but Thufir and other characters always fixate on the expense, not the logistical chains themselves; the implication seems to be something akin to war as described in Thucydides: If you have the money, the materiel finds its way where it needs to go. And Paul has a LOT of money, because again, he just nammed the Emperor’s entire CHOAM holdings and he controls spice production.
So I always figured that he has virtually unlimited kit to outfit his Fremen with. And also, while the brief bit in Messiah talking about how the war went; I was at least under the assumption that significant elements of the Landsraad at the very least stayed out of it, and may have even opportunistically switched sides. After all, we have this in the original Dune; as Paul is relaying his visions to his inner circle.:
“The Padishah Emperor himself is there,” Paul said. He looked at the rock
ceiling of his cell. “With his favorite Truthsayer and five legions of
Sardaukar. The old Baron Vladimir Harkonnen is there with Thufir Hawat beside
him and seven ships jammed with every conscript he could muster. Every Great
House has its raiders above us . . . waiting.”
Chani shook her head, unable to look away from Paul. His strangeness, the
flat tone of voice, the way he looked through her, filled her with awe.
Jessica tried to swallow in a dry throat, said: “For what are they waiting?”
Paul looked at her. “For the Guild’s permission to land. The Guild will
strand on Arrakis any force that lands without permission.”
“The Guild’s protecting us?” Jessica asked.
“Protecting us! The Guild itself caused this by spreading tales about what
we do here and by reducing troop transport fares to a point where even the
poorest Houses are up there now waiting to loot us.”
Which tells us two things: One, a significant amount of military power of the combined Landsraad was already on Arrakis when Paul had his victory; which probably left the ruling houses off balance when Paul started attacking. Two, there’s a significant pool of people who are willing to fight for loot if the Guild doesn’t make it prohibitively expensive by making the transport fees. And honestly, what kind of loot are you expecting to find on Arrakis, unless you’re willing to set up shop with a harvesting operation?
Again, while I can’t think of a textual citation to prove this, I was under the impression that Paul’s troops moved for free, and a corollary of that is that a LOT of soldiers signed up, for nothing more than the plunder. You weren’t seeing The Fremen vs everyone else. You were seeing The Fremen plus a bunch of the Landsraad vs what elements were still resisting and a bunch of people probably trying to see who came up on top and blowing like weathervanes.
Maybe I’m misremembering, it’s been a long time, but I thought the Jihad was pretty explicitly Paul’s Fremen forces running wild? That’s also why they’re running around exterminating other religions (which mercenaries and local recruits would presumably belong to?)
This is a way to square the circle, but as our host notes, the text stresses that the Jihad is inevitable even if Paul and his inner circle die. Whichever successor arose from the Fremen ranks wouldn’t have Paul’s ability to leverage galactic politics.
Admittedly I can still see a loophole; we’re told that the Jihad is inevitable, but not the timeline. Theoretically the Fremen could still kill the Emperor and seize control of Arrakis on schedule, then take a generation or two consolidating their power before the Jihad spread across the galaxy. Still, that’s pure interpolation on my part; there’s nothing directly contradicting it in the text, but there’s nothing implying it either.
Ehh, I think the core of it is still there even without Paul. You might not get the exact same leverage points, but as soon as someone intimidates the Guild into compliance by threatening to destroy the spice (which theoretically, any Fremen leader that arises can do), you get both the free transport and the opportunistic hangers-on that free transport implies. And even if you don’t get the CHOAM coffers, or as much support from friendly Lansraad houses they still have all the considerable wealth Arrakis itself produces; that would again get themselves to a first rate set of equipment pretty fast, I would think.
Put simply, our good host seems to assume that the Fremen cannot acquire ‘modern’ military technology nor acquire forces from outside of Arrakis itself, and I see no reason to suppose either of those things. The text certainly does not say so and implies otherwise.
If the Fremen spend a generation or two consolidating their power on Arrakis, the entire empire collapses as space travel halts forever and a lot of the nobles die of spice withdrawal.
Which in itself would be one solution to the stagnation of galactic civilization. The problem is that would inevitably lead to a would-be replacement empire dabbling in thinking machines capable of interstellar navigation, which would initially be successful enough that no one who didn’t use them could hope to win. But then we’re back to the tyranny of the AIs. The Spice-based Imperium was the solution to that conundrum but led to problems of its own, which Paul and Leto II attempted to address.
We are told that Jihad is inevitable, and Paul believes it is, but he is not infallible… He might just be an unreliable narrator in this instance.
Pretty much this. Also, the Fremen are not primitive barbarians, it’s stated that they are specialized, literate, and possess advanced technology and industry, despite living on the margins as insurgents. Granted, they originally lack the capacity to manufacture frigates, but as you said, they gained vast resources with Paul-Maud’Dib’s ascendancy, and they certainly don’t lack the knowledge. They’re also the tip of the spear, backed up by numerous conscripts and mercenaries due to reasons stated.
It seems that Dr. Devereaux is shoehorning the Dune novels into the argument that romanticized warrior cultures tend to be defeated by factions with greater industrial might (eg the Civil War, Shimabara Rebellion, etc); and that the narrative of barbarians toppling decadent societies (eg Roman collapse, Osmanli conquest of Byzantium, Mongol invasions, transition from Ming to Qing dynasties, etc) is a specific use-case that is more of an exception than the rule. I think that argument is valid historically, but does not fit a careful reading of Dune.
Something that I could see aiding the Fremen is that there are probably some worlds that would capitulate to the Fremen very quickly, and the Fremen could tap them for conscripts. Would they be as good as the Fremen? No. Could they bolster their numbers? Yes.
(And that’s also without getting into the Lesser Houses and few Great Houses that had pledged support to Duke Leto before his death, and who Paul – or Gurney, or Jessica – could point the Fremen at).
Something I thought would be quite fun, as fan fiction, would be a story set during the Fremen Jihad, where they encounter a planet of ‘reverse Fremen’. The planet is one endless ocean inhabited by sea-going nomads who use their knowledge of the seas (and how to avoid the giant sea serpents prowling them) to drive the Fremen crazy until they just give up and just write that world off as a lost cause.
Something similar happens in the latter books written after Frank Herbert’s death by his son. There’s a water world with giant whales instead of giant worms. Those giant whales produce super spice. Yes, it’s literally called super spice. And yes, those books are as bad as that sounds.
Heh! The Ocean-desert dwellers would even share the Fremens’ obsession with water conservation, since drinking water is hard to come by at sea!
Minor note on the physics. If one assumes that Shields block entrance by objects with a certain *momentum* (mass × velocity) or kinetic energy (0.5 × mass × velocity^2), then the issue of why they block bullets but not air (and likewise, why running people over with an IFV/APC would be ineffective, which came up in the comment section of the last post) is resolved.
Fun series of articles!
On the other hand, sandworms can beat shields. Presumably they don’t finesse their way through like a knife-fighter would; they must just overwhelm it through brute force.
I used to think sandworms beat shields by brute force but there is a simpler explanation: a sandworm is big enough to swallow a spice harvester, so swallowing a shielded human is no problem at all. The shield maybe stops you from being chewed, but your life expectancy in a sandworms stomach is going to be very short because of all the gases and digestive fluid.
So do shields just break Newton’s first law, then? I’ve read Dune, but it’s been decades. What happens to the momentum if you shoot a shielded human with a cannonball? Does it just get nullified? (Which implies a privileged rest frame and no relativity, which I guess could explain how FTL travels works.) That’s about the only way I can imagine ranged weapons being ineffective, since otherwise you’d still get people getting tossed about like ragdolls from momentum transfer.
Gedankenexperiment: If you drop an anvil on the head of a shielded human, does it hard stop at the shield, then immediately start falling through (slowly) due to starting from zero momentum/kinetic energy?
Does the kinetic energy get dissipated by the shield somehow?
I.e. if I drop a tank on a shielded person from 30 storeys up, does everyone in a 500m radius get heavily irradiated?
What about interstellar communications? It’s been a while since I read the book, but are there interstellar “radio” signals or is all communications done through couriers conveyed by heighliners? If the latter, the Guild could keep news of the Fremen Jihad from reaching any world before the Fremen did
All couriers using heighliners or similar. No ansibles. Any interstellar radio signals would take years to decades to arrive in the other system, even if the technology exists to build a usable transmitter over those distances.
Even so, there seems to be a lot of space traffic going on in the Dune Imperium (noted in part 1), so news is going to spread faster than the Jihad itself. For starters, there were ships of many of the Great Houses in orbit around Arrakis at the end of Dune, and at least some of them would have gone home with news about the new Emperor.
Well, only if he wants to. They can’t go anywhere without Guild approval, and the Guild answers to whoever controls Arrakis.
Interstellar communication in Dune is back to age of sail pre-industrial mechanisms. There’s no way for Paul, or anyone else, to control what heighliners are doing without sending another heighliner to try and catch up with them. As was the case in our own world, tight control over what ships are doing when communication takes weeks or months will be impossible.
It’s also an important plot point in Dune Messiah that Paul cannot ‘see’ what a Guild navigator is doing, or what the people in the vicinity of the navigator are doing. So even if the Emperor of the known universe has nothing better to do with his time than use his powers to try and track every spaceship, he still won’t know who is talking to who and what they’re saying.
“I’ve toyed with of the books is that Paul is in fact not really the Kwisatz Haderach, but that his son Leto II is.”
The problem with that is that the difference between Paul and Leto II is not ability, but willingness. Paul saw the Golden Path and what it required and balked, Leto II did not.*
So, while in Dune there was a lot of talk about THE Kwisatz Haderach, because that was the Bene Gesserit end goal, that doesn’t mean there could and would only be one.
* I think the differences between Paul and Leto II that one to try to avoid the Golden Path and the other to embrace would make for an interesting analysis.
This.
Who controls Arrakis controls spice. Who controls spice controls guild. Who controls guild controls where people and information can go.
Outside jihad bubble only thing known is that liners from certain planets that were supposed to come did not. Nothing else.
That also means nobody knows to start mobilisation or war economy because they have no idea jihad is coming. Or that it has fremen who would have largely unshielded troops. And when jihad arrives, no liners leave that planet anymore to destinations outside jihad bubble.
I also disagree with firemen numbers as they mainly disregard women. Women can bear brunt of administration and spice harvesting, leaving nearly all able bodied men as spearhead for assaults.
And religious fanatics would definitely have approved eager converts to their ranks to bolster numbers.
If the spacing guild is truly the only game in town for FTL, and is compliant with the Freman war plan, the outcome Herbert describes seems very plausible to me, though, past Arrakis, not due to the personal fighting strength of the Fremen.
Disclaimer: I haven’t read the Dune books, so I might be missing something key here.
The first step is to stop intersteller travel. The galaxy’s world are likely highly specialized, just like modern countries. Almost no one produces all their own food, energy, medicines, key industrial components, etc. Unless active effort is made to stop it, economic forces powerfully favor specialization and comparative advantages. As a result, industrial worlds like Giedi Prime would quickly start starving. Planets specialized for agriculture would find they lack industrial inputs. Planets that have both would find they can’t source the key components they need to keep their in-system Frigates flying.
After a few years, some worlds will adapt, but many will be badly weakened before they even see a Freman.
Many also won’t really know what’s going on. Without FTL, news travels at the speed of light, and most star systems are more than 12 light years apart, meaning they wouldn’t know what is happening until the Highliners show up at their doorstep.
If the military Frigates the Fremen capture + whatever Spacing Guild assets can be weaponized are stronger than the remaining fleet of any inhabited system, the Fremen win easily. This seems plausible, since the fleet they capture was the Emperor’s fleet, mobilized in response to a crisis.
The Fremen only need to win in space. Then, they can sit in the outer solar system of any inhabited system, far beyond the range of any ground-based planetary defenses, and lob asteroids at any resisting world until the planet has rings and its surface is magma.
I picture the absurd scene of a Freman admiral, quite obese thanks to all the off-world junk food he now has access to, obliterating a world of tough, hardened people like Salusa Secundus from hundreds of millions of miles away by moving space rocks around, then blasting out some propaganda about how he personally beat their 10 strongest warriors at once in melee combat.
This accounts for the huge number of sterilized worlds and utterly destroyed religions. This method only works if there’s no attempt made at actually holding planets that attempt any real resistance.
“Of course the Fremen could start recruiting people out of the faufreluches”
The thing is, do we actually know they don’t do that? The kind of massive casualties of the Jihad always made it seem like they added a lot of forces to their Fremen core as the Jihad gathered steam.
And if the Fremen DID recruit local forces, there’s no reason that the Jihad couldn’t win. Just smash a nearby great house or two, and at least some nearby smaller houses would certainly pledge themselves to Paul out of the fear of being next. Then use the forces of those smaller houses as cannon fodder to smash a few more houses, which would get a few more terrified houses willing to swear loyalty to Paul and rinse and repeat until there are enough houses sworn to Paul to easily outnumber any individual house by a ludicrous degree and then smash each recalcitrant house one by one.
If Paul just allows terrified houses to join him and uses their forces, the MASSIVE advantage having a monopoly on spice gives him would allow him to easily win the Jihad without any fancy tactics or strategy since his opponents could be picked apart one by one as they’re completely unable to help each other. If an enemy house DOES go into total war mobilization then just smash it to pieces anyway with the (however inefficiently marshalled) resources of a thousand worlds.
Or just glass it from orbit. (which I presume what the “sterilized” worlds are all about) the system has banned atomics but all those rules are out the window now since whoever controls the guild can strike but is essentially immune to retaliation.
Right, exactly, the monopoly on space travel is so powerful that the Jihad always made perfect sense to me.
Herbert almost certainly read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress between writing Dune and writing Dune Messiah.
That’s not technically correct. You don’t need the Guild and its Navigators to go FTL. You just need to do so to well, navigate safely. I forget exactly where it’s said, but somewhere in the series someone says it’s about a 1 in 5 chance to go off course and never be seen again if you try to just brute force it with a holtzmann field spaceship of your own.
MAD still works in Dune even without the Guild, as long as you send enough nukes to be sure that enough get through even when you figure a 20% failure rate from them not making it through space safely.
As follow ups to this, could you analyze the military effectiveness of the Noldor? The elves of the First Age absolutely crush orcs in three elves v. Orcs battles, then Morgoth adapts. Elrond says at the Council that a legion of Noldor would not matter against Sauron. I am not sure he was right.
Also, as a reversal, I would love to read an analysis of the Malazan Empire (Steven Ericsson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series, which is nowhere near the popularity of Dune or Lord of the Rings but sold decently). The Malazans seem like the Roman Republic fighting a world of foes who ascribe to the Fremen mirage, but in a world where the Fremen mirage does not fully apply but magic gives it some validity.
Elrond speaks broadly, but the relevant passage is:
“The number must be few, since your hope is in speed and secrecy. Had I a host of Elves in
armour of the Elder Days, it would avail little, save to arouse the power of Mordor.”
It’s hard to see how a host of elves leads to victory. For one, they can absolutely be seen from a long distance away – any number of elves sufficient to make a dent in tens of thousands of orcs is an army. Even if you handwave logistical concerns by way of lembas and other contrivances, such a big army can only move so quickly and cannot go certain ways. They cannot attempt to pass over the Misty Mountains and Caradhras, and they cannot surprise-blitz through Moria either. They might be able to (judging by the map) pass down the river Bruinen, then take the North-South Road through the gap of Rohan, traveling through Rohan and Gondor and assailing Mordor through the Black Gate.
But then what? Instead of generously throwing 50-100,000 orcs against Minas Tirith so our protagonists can score a morale victory, Sauron can instead keep his forces in Mordor and instead defend the siege with some 100-150,000+ orcs (perhaps even more, if he is not simultaneously assaulting Dale, Erebor, Lothlorien, etc). “A host” is a vague number, but given that Turgon’s force of 10,000 elves was cheered as a wondrous occasion for joy in the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, we can probably bound it above by about 50-60,000. And no matter the physical prowess of each individual elf, a one-to-three numerical disadvantage while assaulting a fortress is not desirable.
Finally, there’s the temporal argument to consider. Note that Elrond says “armour of the Elder Days”, not actual elves from the First Age, and this is because there are no such elves left in Middle-Earth. The whole arc of the Elves from their arrival in Middle-Earth is one of gradual decline and decay; not for nothing does the Doom of Mandos foretell: “And those that endure in Middle-earth and come not to Mandos shall grow weary of the world as with a great burden, and shall wane, and become as shadows of regret before the younger race that cometh after.” The greatest martial achievements of the Noldor are in the First Age, especially just after their arrival from Valinor, because they have not had time to fade. From the account of the Dagor-nuin-Giliath: “The Noldor, outnumbered and taken at unawares, were yet swiftly victorious; for the light of Aman was not yet dimmed in their eyes…”. Save for the defeat of Sauron by Gil-galad and Elendil, there are no elvish martial achievements of note in the Second Age. Men, too, are also weaker than before – the Last Alliance featured men from Arnor and Gondor about only a hundred years after they were founded by Numenorean exiles, and Elendil himself was born in Numenor. Both men and elves were quite literally stronger and more powerful during the Second Age, which is why the Last Alliance was able to succeed (and only just barely); neither the current elves nor the current men are a match for their previous achievements.
Note Sauron also remembers losing in that exact way last time, he will have devised additional countermeasures to large armies attempting to overthrow him by force.
I think the advantages of Elves in First Age major battles largely comes down to a combination of heavy equipment and strong drill and cohesion and the impression I’ve gotten that orc armies are very fragile unless they tremendously outnumber their opponents because they almost never have sufficient investment in the cause they’re fighting for, their overlord, or each other to hold them together the moment they start taking bad losses. In the absence of vast numbers (or perhaps just a still necessary supplement to it), they require officers with a deeper sense of loyalty to their master who can instil discipline through fear, and being shored up with novel weapons or fearsome and powerful auxiliary troops.
I’m not quite sure of the passage concerning Elrond’s statement to which you’re referring (it sounds kind of like something I remember Gandalf saying), but I suspect it was commentary on how, with how greatly Sauron has them outmatched, there’s not only no band of powerful warrior elves sufficient to break the ranks of Mordor in the heart of their domain, but that such a thing will run against the problem of being eye-catching enough for Sauron to focus all efforts on it and thus find his Ring.
Sauron himself makes for an interesting antagonist in this case and measured against his topic, because an analysis of exactly why he’s so unstoppably strong at the outset of the War of the Ring comes down to him being a logistics genius and actually keen strategist (with just a hint of having made contributions towards the process in preceding centuries of all of his former peer competitors decaying into lesser challenges). It stands out against usual considerations of being a menace primarily on the basis of black magic or especially deadly monsters.
I think physical size is a factor too. At Helm’s Deep, Gimli doesn’t engage human enemies, because they’re unsettlingly large from his perspective, but he kills loads of orcs in that same battle. And these are the “fighting Uruk-Hai”, big enough to push around the other orcs.
Did Frank Herbert really think the conquest plot arc through half as carefully as we’re trying to deconstruct it? I never quite believed that a few million Fremen beat up the galaxy. Given ~10K inhabited worlds – if they all surrendered, the Fremen couldn’t even garrison them.
Close-combat weapons couldn’t sterilize planets. That suggests serious collapse of old norms – important “forms” about limiting destruction were not obeyed. I can imagine something more along the lines of a civil war, with the Fremen mostly a trigger for long-simmering local conflicts. (So Fremen “conquest” means that the winner chooses not to argue with the religious crazies armed with MWDs currently parked in orbit above their planet. Our religion is now Zensunni? No problem! I, for one, welcome our new Prophet and Emperor…)
The author sometimes recognized when he was out of his depth and left well enough alone. A label plus a few lines of exposition define the Butlerian Jihad. The Fremen Jihad doesn’t get much more in the way of detail, letting the reader retcon something they find vaguely plausible, and that’s probably for the best.
>> Did Frank Herbert really think the conquest plot arc through half as carefully as we’re trying to deconstruct it?
No, I don’t think he did. That it happens entirely off page with just a few quotes from characters’ prescient vision of what it will be, and post-fact reminiscing of it, shows that galactic war was not the focus. I think it’s less a question of Herbert being “out of his depth” and more that that wasn’t what he wanted to write about; his focus is quite clearly on the sociological, ecological, and psychological consequences of the Jihad than on the waging of it. On a similar note there’s an interview of him that says he invented the Butlerian rule of “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind” because he thought there was enough scifi about AI and robots and wanted to do something else.
If we’re told that the Jihad “sterilized planets”, then apparently there were many instances when Muad’dib’s forces didn’t bother to actually fight the locals, just devastated them from orbit. That combined with the presumed utter submission of the Spacing Guild and Paul’s control of CHOAM, probably means that most of the planets were conquered by economic blackmail and/or nuclear blackmail. In that case I see the Fremen not as barbarian conquerors, latter-day Caliphates or Mongols, but rather more like the Spanish Inquisition, the NKVD or the Reign of Terror. Possibly this was abetted by a “peasant” population long cowed to obedience to the nobility and the richee’, who accepted the Fremen as simply the new bosses and sought mainly to keep their heads down, mouth whatever pledges were demanded of them, and avoid being made examples of.
I haven’t re-read the series in decades, but I always assumed that since the Freman War is called a Jihad it’s a religious war of conversion, and that the couple million Freman fighters are quickly joined by millions, then tens of millions, of other fighters, and by the infrastructure to support them.
We don’t really see what the appeal of the Cult of Muad’dib is outside of Arrakis, but Herbert says something about the collective unconscious surging forward to mix genes, which I interpret as the common people being pretty fucking sick of the faufreluches class system. It’s a lot easier to win a war when most of the people on the planet you’re attacking are actually on your side.
So basically I think looking at the prospects for the Fremen Jihad from the tactical/operation POV maybe misses the point. As Clausewitz says (drink🍷), “War is the continuation of politics”, and in this case, the continuation of *religion*–which means the tactics of religion can have powerful effects.
Jihads don’t really have anything to do with conversion, historically. A successful jihad war changes what religious figures get state funding and establishes a tax deduction for people who subsequently decide to convert, but it’s very different from the way things like the Northern Crusade and the Reconquista operated. If Herbert’s choice to make it a Jihad instead of a Crusade was meaningful (and it may not have been, he wasn’t really a religious scholar) then he was choosing to denote a variety of holy war that focuses on political goals at the expense of religious conversions.
I think you’ve hit it. The faufreluches system IS unstable, as Devereaux writes, or at least HAS BECOME unstable over millennia of stagnation, and the common people of the galaxy are desperate to escape its confines (which Herbert expresses as a quasi mystical genetic imperative because, well, that’s his thing). Any Great House that doesn’t submit promptly to Paul — and perhaps quite a few that do — is overthrown by its own people adopting a pop-culture understanding of the Cult of Maudib that boils down to “the Messiah has come to free us from our oppressors, His faithful defeated their vaunted armies on Arrakis and we can do that here if we believe hard enough, EAT THE RICH.” Followed by a galaxy-wide series of planetary civil wars with the Fremen intervening as missionaries, advisors, and special forces.
Also, the Fremen religion is based on the stuff the Bene Gesserit has been brainwashing the entire galaxy with all along– the people are primed to accept this messianic crap, even if it comes in a slightly unfamiliar package.
A lot of this is just repurposed arguments for why the Mongols couldn’t have successfully besieged cities or beaten armored opponents, two things they did a lot of that nevertheless you still find people claiming on the internet that ‘common sense’ says they mustn’t’ve.
Beyond that general complaint, I don’t think your view that the Fremen Jihad was supposed to be a war of forced conversion is correct, I think we readers are meant to understand that the killed religions died from the extermination of their followers rather than by conversion under threat of death. Not that that’s morally better necessarily, I’m just saying that all the examples of the horrors of the war were the same thing rephrased, all just different ways of saying that the surface of planets was rendered unsurvivable for human life. Herbert’s understanding of ‘Hard men” is not a D&D view where the Fremen get extra hit points and metaphysical combat skills because Hard life gave them levels before they started adventuring, he means something much more fascist; that Hard life gave them a worldview that acts as a permission structure for doing abhorrent things other men would not be able to make themselves do (like genocide by ecocide). Crucially, that sort of Hard-born worldview is something the disaffected among the conquered can adopt easily if lead to it, as the SS proved throughout Eastern Europe.
Dune won the Nebula Award for 1966, contentiously. It was up against Heinlein’s The Moon is A Harsh Mistress, a book where the slight population of the Moon forces the surrender of the entire Earth via strategic bombing with inert meteors. That was the work that would have intruded into Herbert’s thoughts more than any other as he was writing Dune Messiah, Heinlein’s assertion that anyone at the bottom of a gravity well was *trivially* at the mercy of anyone in space was just a universally accepted fact for science-fictioners into the 70s and beyond. That’s the kind of warfare the Fremen would have been engaging in: demand surrender, drop rocks when it didn’t happen, destroy places completely if they never surrendered. Potentially they might send a force down to kill some conventional forces by surprise before demanding surrender, but you’re right that the Fremen do not have much population, there’s too much Universe to occupy and authoritarian fanatics famously do have a solution to that dilemma.
I didn’t know that trope of 70s SciFi, but it doesn’t strike me as particularly likely to be true. Redirecting an asteroid to hit the Moon isn’t meaningfully harder that redirecting an asteroid to hit the Earth. Sure, the Earth’s gravity well is deeper, but you’ve already climbed 3/4 of the way out of it by the time you’re a measly 6000km from the surface. Go far out enough to find asteroids to redirect and you’re in a very gravitationally flat area. Asteroids will hit the Earth significantly harder than the Moon, but that’s the only major difference.
Seems to me that this is mostly a MAD scenario then one that gives an overwhelming advantage to the high ground. And, like a nuclear MAD, having a colossal population / industrial advantage means that the Earth could generate, and try to intercept, far more threats than the Moon.
In the case of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, there’s no significant space travel further than the moon. The inhabitants of the moon already have a mass driver built for delivering big canisters of grain (don’t ask me how the moon has become a significant agricultural resource) into earth orbit for collection. The rebels just repurpose this to drop rocks, at first into the ocean for demonstrations, then onto cities. And yes Earth does try to intercept the rocks, but they have the same shot exchange problem as current day militaries using million dollar SAMs to shoot down thousand dollar drones. Earth can’t retaliate in kind, because they don’t have a lot of space ships and it would take too long.
As someone who has read a lot of 1970s scifi, the trope is more that a spacegoing civilisation has the advantage from the “high ground”. They’re a dispersed target and can do things like push asteroids into new orbits, in opposition to planet-bound civilisations that can’t.
Ah, right, if one side has an orbital-grade mass driver and similar space-faring industry while the other doesn’t, then the situation is very lopsided indeed. That feels to me like a much bigger factor than the geographic (or rather solgraphic?) positioning of bodies relative to gravity wells I was thinking of above.
I have no idea if it’s realistic, nor am I interested in the question. American science fiction is a community, not just a publishing category (and indeed some people best known for Fantasy like Mercedes Lackey are “American Science Fiction Writers” while other people best known for science fiction like Margaret Atwood are not) and in *that community* in 1967 the idea was kind of an axiom.
It remains influential, from Skylab panic and Japanese anime and may other things through to being a fear apparently driving billionaires to want to colonize Mars today.
The other crucial thing about TMHM is that the Moon is not waging a war of conquest, they’re waging an independence war. So it’s not that they’re engaged in “strategic bombing”, they’re actually engaging in a terror campaign aimed at reducing civilian support for a military campaign to retake the Moon.
How many nukes would it take to shut down the mass driver?
ad9 @ March 14, 2026 at 12:34 pm
Not many, which is why they build a second hidden catapult. Which is almost completely out of rocks when the Federated Nations crack and recognize Lunar independence. As someone else said here, it wasn’t a surrender, just accepting the Lunar demands. Luna doesn’t occupy Earth or anything like it, they just don’t have to send any more free grain.
(In recent years, many people claim the catapult couldn’t be effectively hidden because the waste heat would be easy to spot, given what a good insulator lunar soil is.)
“So it’s not that they’re engaged in “strategic bombing”, they’re actually engaging in a terror campaign aimed at reducing civilian support for a military campaign to retake the Moon.”
…they’re the same picture.
@Ben L
Strategic bombing is, at least nominally, meant to destroy industrial capacity as one of its goals. It’s attacking the source of materiel as well as will (drink!). Terrorism is, almost by definition, only about the latter. An insurgency might blow up railway lines and factories as well as conducting a terror campaign, but those infrastructure targets would not typically be called terrorism on their own (unless done in bad faith by a propaganda campaign).
The lunar rebels targeting is pretty complicated- by and large they avoid hitting populated city centers right up until the end, but do hit targets increasingly close to cities, such as “Dallas spaceport” which is visible to a population of ten million people and which is a huge flat expanse where you can have a mushroom cloud go up from a falling rock dropped by the lunar mass driver with relatively limited civilian casualties. Given the context (this was the 1960s and it was expected that WWIII would involve annihilating conflict with thermonuclear missiles), the lunar rebels are clearly intended to be presented as fighting just about the “cleanest” war possible that can conceivably be resolved quickly against an industrial nation-state with the weapons available to them. We can imagine a still less destructive sort of conflict today, but mostly because of the advent of small, very precise weapons that did not exist and were mostly not foreseen in the 1960s.
Meanwhile, in the book, Terra has a substantial though not infinite number of ships capable of reaching the moon and even landing invasion troops, while Luna has very few defenses against a ship- it cannot hit them with rocks from the mass driver, and the ship is armed with short range nuclear weapons that can devastate nearly anything on the lunar surface if it actually manages to make a close approach without getting hit by repurposed mining drill lasers or whatever.
The tension in the climax of the book comes in large part from the ‘Loonies’ running out of mass driver ammunition (not enough steel casings for the rocks) and having to face the threat of nuclear-armed attack by spaceships, while trying to force Earth’s surrender using only the ‘falling rocks’ that are already inbound towards Earth.
The moon becomes a significant agricultural resource sort of by historical accident, I think. First, the Federated Nations open a prison on the moon and start letting Earth nations ship prisoners (specifically including political prisoners such as Professor de la Paz) to it. Presumably, the prisoners are expected to feed themselves using crops grown from lunar ice mining; the original source of other volatile elements such as carbon and nitrogen is not addressed, except insofar as the ‘Loonies’ are shown to be very cautious about wasting those elements in a non-recoverable way.
My hypothesis is that as the lunar population of convicts grows to be actually significant, the Federated Nations realizes that the lunar colony is the only place it really controls itself, and it does have a workforce there, and can in fact grow grain there as long as the water supply (and potentially other volatiles not mentioned) hold out.
The F.N. is clearly supposed to be a somewhat more muscular descendant of the United Nations as it existed in the 1960s. It does not actually have full power over its subject nations and cannot prevent them from building up substantial defensive military forces, even though by treaty agreement it has a monopoly on offensive systems such as long range missiles and space-based weapons of all kinds. As a result, the F.N. presumably has political limits on how much money it can extract via taxation… and this is before the Green Revolution when it was taken for granted by people like Heinlein that overpopulation-induced famines on Earth were inevitable or nearly so. Thus, any source of F.N.-controlled food, however limited it might be, becomes a significant political bargaining chip. And thus, given that again this is the 60s and the environmental movement is in its infancy, it is taken for granted that the moon will be pressured to accelerate its grain production far past the point of sustainability, to pursue the political aims of the F.N.
The issue with the idea of Frenen picking up recruits on other planets is that recruits are likely to be more interested in things like loot and power than genocidal destruction and religious extermination. The war would look more like conquest than like the planetary populations and religions being wiped out.
What happens if the Fremen have money (via the Spacing Guild and CHOAM and spice) and lasguns and learn how to use them? The issue with lasguns is that them impacting a shield causes a nuclear explosion. If you have fanatics who don’t CARE if they die and are aiming for maximal destruction, how much damage could a small number cause?
They might not be actively going out of their way to cause genocidal destruction and religious extermination, but plenty of mercenary armies or other less ideologically inclined forces manage to commit mass atrocities. Take a look at your pick of any 16th-17th century European war and you’ll find a whole lot of civilian butchering no matter which side or who raised the force.
This discussion makes me realize how fortunate I am to have not read any of the Dune sequels. (I tried reading the second book, bounced off, tried a different Herbert book, didn’t like it at all, and mentally filed Herbert under “authors who wrote one worthwhile thing and a lot of trash not worth my time.”) Subsequent conversations with other people strengthened my impression that I made the correct decision to give the rest of Herbert a pass.
I disagree.
The problem with the first book is that it’s not the complete thought. It’s the high adventure story, the charismatic leader taking over the kingdom that we’ve seen ten thousand times. It’s not until you get to later books that you realize how horrifying this all is. The first book stops before the jihad; it’s only in the second and third that you get a sense of just how messed up the universe becomes after that. Jessica having people killed for delays in ritual responses, for example.
There definitely is a tonal shift in the sequels. “God Emperor of Dune” is probably the climax of the series, because it’s only there that you really see the Golden Path and grasp the nightmare of Paul and Leto II’s actions. But it’s not the normal sort of sci-fi/fantasy climax. The normal ones tend to resolve conflict through violence; “God Emperor of Dune” resolves the tension philosophically. (Whether one agrees with the philosophy espoused or not–and I do not–does not negate the fact that the book resolves the philosophical tensions built in the previous books.)
The last two books are….weird. They almost present an inverse of what “Dune” was. I can forgive anyone excluding them from the discussion, and stopping at “God Emperor”.
I will admit that they are not easy reads, and Herbert expects the reader to do a lot of work to get to the heart of the books. And that’s not everyone’s style, which is fine; I can only read them if I’m in the right mood (an irony I’m well aware of).
Indeed, it’s hard not to get the impression (from reading interviews with Herbert) that he was kind of annoyed that some readers of the original books didn’t get the subtle hints he put in, and instead read it as a straight chosen-hero-comes-of-age-and-wins-against-evil-through-violence. Messiah is a direct retort against that reading. I wonder if those who dislike it strongly do so because it criticises the naive interpretation of the first book that they hold.
I also agree that the first 3 books form a coherent narrative, the 4th a philosophical epilogue that capstones it, and the 4 afterwards a mostly completely different story. They’re very space-opera-ish and the final 2, written by Herbert’s son, are substantially worse and filled with dull scifi tropes.
I liked the prequels Herbert’s son wrote (with Kevin J. Anderson, who wrote some of the better Star Wars books) when I was a kid. Going back and reading them as an adult, especially after reading the ones the father wrote, was impossible. They are just objectively bad. There are some good ideas, if you read them as a straight space-soap-opera, but the execution….. Do writers not have editors anymore?
I haven’t even tried the later books.
For my part, the “Dune” series consist of “Dune”, “Dune Messiah”, “Children of Dune”, God Emperor of Dune”, “Heretics of Dune”, and “Chapterhouse: Dune”. The rest are some weird series that has characters with similar names.
Editors? You can’t even get a publisher to convert double-spaces into single-spaces for printing anymore.
That was a very fun little read. I agree with you on near all of it, Just the one Logical Consequence is that most likely, All the Great Houses would not be uniform in resistance. Some would stay neutral, some would ally, some would be busy fighting their own rivals.
Course Caveat that I have only ever read the first book so dont know how it turns out, I thought it was very good writing but I hated and I quote, Literally Every Character which was not pleasant, not in the least because of the Time Skipp was jarring little jump.
Still good writing, and that prologue monologue or whatever you call it to set the scene of each chapter was really good.
For one thing, alot of those Great Houses are going to be tearing out the throats of their rivals now that the Empire is in shambles, so in alot of Cases if its anywhere remotely Sane Paul most likely is going to get alot of allies of convenience to wage warfare. I hate so and so, you will help me kill them, All hail the Emperor.
That is probabbly going to be one of the key things, as well as the monopoly on space and travel.
the big Empires using alot of auxiliaries and local peoples to fight their wars for fun.
Like one of the simplest is most likely returning to their old home world to recapture control, and get their Resources, and local support back on tract to fight for them. that alone especially if he uses and abuses the wealth at his hands to brute force that world to be a Industrial production plant… well.
I also imagine that the war would have alot of pauses to plan then overwhelm this or that place all at once, if he really does have all the spice everyone is a bit fucked in the waiting game which would be brutal.
Course the whole trying to fight the guy that controls the literal Space is its own issue, goes against the mystique a bit, but how much just dropping big rocks on planets that resist then invading in the aftermath is going on is its own issue.
Still, all in all a fun read, the bit on the Local conditions so yeah winning on home turf works well.
but yeah whats it called, élan vital, or the The Cult of the Offensive is actually quite useless in the face of Machine gun and artillery fire. Very shocking I know.
The Will of man is useless to da Machine and all that.
Good fun! thank you for messing with this. Always a Delight when you do something like this.
I assume Herbert was at least partly inspired by the Arab Islamic conquests of the 7th C.
Do we know what the population of Arabia in the 7th C was, compared to say the Byzantine and Sassanid Empires? Based on demographics and economic potential, how likely were the Arab Islamic conquests, which at the high point stretched from Spain to bits of India?
We don’t have demographics. It’s also virtually impossible to find English-language research on the history of Islam that isn’t directly funded by American Evangelical religious organizations or people involved financially in real estate development in the Hejaz, unless you go back to pre-WWI Orientalists. So when we do know stuff as amateur historians it’s all tainted with tendencies that are hard to discern, beyond how tendentious most history is to begin with.
We know that Mohammed died between the consolidation of Arabia and the big conquests, and this is probably what Herbert is referencing with Paul’s vision of the Fremen Jihad’s inevitability. We know that the Persians were in a civil war and the Caliphate mopped up all the factions and you would expect that to create a local peace and lower classes grateful for it plus a lot of out-of-work soldiers, but who knows? We know the Egyptian and Palestine Romans were in a perpetual state of religious violence and also regular civil war and you would expect that the Caliphate coming in and settling those disputes might make those places much more productive and loyal to the new overlords than they had been to Constantinople, but who knows? We know many of the rural people in the Maghreb retained a sense of the Semitic identity they had before the Punic Wars and you might expect that to make them eager to accommodate Semitic overlords beyond what they’d been willing to do for Visigoths, but who knows?
This definitely shows the contingent nature of the Jihad.
With Paul you have a leader who can consistently draw to an inside straight. To extend the poker analogy he can not only see his opponents cards but knows what cards they think he has. Prescience also takes the House nukes off the table. Paul knows where the Great House weapons are stored and can neutralize them before they can be used. This would allow the Jihad free use of the Houe Aterides and House Corrino nukes.
In my opinion, second only to prescience is the advantage of Paul being Emperor. This gives him access to the House Corrino frigates, only part of which were on Arrakis, as well as the imperial levies. While no match for the Fremen or the Saudauker they could provide rear area security to hold the ground the Fremen take. As Emperor Paul has access to the House Corrino industrial base which would allow him to issue shields to the Fremen.
Given the advantages Paul has I could see the Jihad with him as a leader being possible. Without him I agree that it is impossible.
“. Paul knows where the Great House weapons are stored and can neutralize them before they can be used.”
He doesen’t actually even need to do that. Mind I’m not certain how the delivery systems work but I don’t think they can reach between star systems (at least not without hitching a ride on a guild heightliner) and Paul controls the heightliners.
So he can nuke your world, but you can only nuke… your world.
I’ve said this elsewhere, but that’s not technically correct. You don’t need the Guild and its Navigators to go FTL. You just need to do so to well, navigate safely. I forget exactly where it’s said, but somewhere in the series someone says it’s about a 1 in 5 chance to go off course and never be seen again if you try to just brute force it with a holtzmann field spaceship of your own.
MAD still works in Dune even without the Guild, as long as you send enough nukes to be sure that enough get through even when you figure a 20% failure rate from them not making it through space safely.
But how many anymore have ships with engines to try that?
It has been what, millenia since Guild was founded and took over interstellar transportation.
It is likely that nobody but Guild anymore has any ships that can travel between stars with 20% failure rate.
Lost technology is a thing. There are classic examples like water steel (Damascus steel), which was kinda-sorta rediscovered (99% of what you see is pattern welded, which is a different thing). My favorite, though, are food preservation techniques. We haven’t lost them–in the sense that we still have the information available–but almost no one uses old-school techniques anymore. Refrigerators and freezers are simply too convenient. Likewise, I imagine that in the Dune universe the technology to travel between stars without the Guild isn’t lost–people know how to do it–it’s just that society has shifted such that no one uses it anymore.
Imagine if an American president ordered an attack in which 20% of our navy would inevitably be lost before they could fire a single shot. There’s an alternative–more expensive, but at least the military would arrive and have a chance to fight. How many hours do you think an American president would last if he ordered the first option? And who would take the risk in the first place? The Fremen, certainly–but they had the Guild (mostly) in their pocket. Some desperate Bene Gesserit may, but we’re talking individuals not armies. IX would try it to test out equipment, but experimental equipment doesn’t make for great military tactics. We’ve pretty much exhausted our options here.
Lost tech can be a thing, but more relevant is the fact that nobody has used those ships in centuries or millenia.
So they most likely do not have ACTUAL ships. You cannot travel to different stars with idea or knowledge of starship, you need the actual physical ship.
Odds of someone just having one hanging around ready to go are extremely tiny.
To build one, you need blueprints. Most planets might have some sort of crude descriptions, bit like cutouts of WW2 tanks in history books, but you would have trouble trying to build one out of those.
And even if you had blueprints, you also need materials, tools and workers to build those ships. Again something most planets likely would not have.
Places most likely to have all the pieces would be guild shipyards and those would be firmly in guild pocket.
And guild is deep in Atreides pocket.
@Dinwar Absolutely. People have lost the knowhow to do some really basic things. Stuff like ‘how to make fire’ and ‘pottery’.
This article walks through the process using the arctic ‘Dorset’ culture as a case study, and is quite informative. ‘Forgetting’ isn’t really a singular process, it’s three potential processes (changes in environment changing the balance of benefits to cost, enforced forgetting through the loss of key knowledge-holders, and ‘deliberate forgetting’ where a culture deliberately expunges knowledge of a technology/skill). It then walks through a number of different examples.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/archaeology-of-forgetting-the-dorset-and-arctic-antiquity/61E459647D0AAA3EA7D4AB6900769F11
I feel like people often don’t appreciate that ‘remembering my grandpa used to do something’ and ‘me knowing how to do something’ are very different things, and the more complex the thing the bigger the gulf becomes.
Of course, in Dune you might luck into having a genetic memory of said grandpa, though for something as complex as FTL travel, you’d need someone’s grandpa for every step of the process that’s been lost for there to be no difficulty in reconstituting the lost technology.
Aside from the large risk involved with the Navigatorless FTL travel, a big issue is how would the Great Houses know where to travel. They may end up playing Whack-a-Mole against the Fremen. If we assume there is no FTL communication either without the Guild, any world under Fremen attack would have to send FTL ships to their allies to ask for help, probably two ships for every ally to increase the odds. If large amount of the allies are willing to come to help, then the Fremen attack force can just decide that the resistance is too powerful, have the Guild transport them out of the system and instead attack one of those allied worlds that just depleted their own defence forces.
The Fremen can just keep jumping around and wait for the defenders to jump after them with 20% losses.
I broadly agree with the other points here in the comments, about Paul being able to recruit from other populations, about his wealth thanks to his control of CHOAM and spice production, about his access to the emperor’s resources, and especially about the psychological impact of his victories leading to other worlds and houses surrendering. I also don’t think the Jihad was primarily a war of annihilation, but rather that planets were destroyed (I’d imagine largely from orbit) to make an example of them. If the population of a planet did rise up in unison, they’d be orbitally bombarded and destroyed.
I think the key piece that makes this all work, however, is the nature of the Imperium’s economy. My impression is that it was heavily reliant on interstellar trade, of spice but also of other resources. Interstellar transport is expensive for soldiers, but much less expensive for goods and the like, and highliners have a huge capacity and travel times are relatively short. Furthermore, the forces with the most power in imperial society (the Guild, CHOAM/the emperor, and even to some extent the other great houses) are all invested in perpetuating the dependence on trade, whether to maintain their stranglehold on society (for the guild), or just as a way to extract a profit. As a result, Paul’s ability to cut off trade would be a devastating threat; for some planets, it would likely mean losing access to most advanced technology (see below), while for others it would likely cause massive food shortages and starvation.
Attendant to this, it seems like most planets are relatively de-industrialized. Almost all high-tech manufactured goods seems to come from only a few planets (mostly Ix and the confusingly named Richese). It isn’t mentioned where things like shields and ornithopters are produced (as far as I know), but given everything, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to suppose that they are also not made on most planets. This means that even with a total mobilization, it would likely take a very long time to ramp up production, especially if your supply chains for literally everything are basically nonexistent. The US in 1939 had huge industries, but they weren’t devoted to military production. Most planets in Dune probably do not, and those that do are likely dependent on interstellar trade.
One further point is that while this would certainly not eliminate all religious tensions, in the universe of Dune, most planets’ religions 1: come from earth religions, and include aspects of multiple; and 2: have for millennia been manipulated by the Bene Gesserit in certain ways to prepare the way for the Kwisatz Hadderach. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that Paul/the Jihad tapped into these seeded beliefs, making conversion much smoother. I don’t know that this is particularly realistic, but it is what’s presented in the fiction.
In summary, the Imperium is a society which was manipulated for years by certain groups (but especially the guild, CHOAM, and the BG) to their own ends and to ensure their own survival. Paul is able to win by essentially hijacking these patterns. The guild has shaped imperial society to make itself absolutely indispensable, but Paul has essentially total control over the guild. The BG have shaped society to welcome their chosen one, and Paul is that chosen one. CHOAM (and through it the Emperor) controls a huge portion of galactic economic activity, and Paul controls CHOAM. The Fremen in this picture are almost immaterial. They serve to allow Paul control over the spice (and therefore over the guild), and as an elite fighting force able to enact great violence when it is necessary (backed by the economic and logistical power of CHOAM and the Guild, and the forces of whoever is willing to fight with Paul), but the thing which makes the difference is ultimately his control of the Guild and of CHOAM.
As a final nitpick, you mentioned that the guild “might just be willing to roll the dice” on opposing Paul. This is absolutely 100% not the case. The Guild is an organization built entirely around survival. Survival is their reason for living, and because the navigators are prescient, they are able to essentially guarantee their own survival under normal circumstances. As a result, they are immensely risk averse, because they are used to dealing with risk. Because Paul is prescient, and therefore not visible to their own prescient vision, they are thrust into a situation with which they are psychologically and organizationally totally unable to cope, and therefore choose the safest option available, which is to ally with Paul. While they do eventually move secretly against him, they only do so in alliance with basically every other significant faction in the reformed Imperium, and even then are extremely skittish and let the others take the risk (and eventually the fall) for it. They also are still unwilling to publicly withdraw support, because they do not know that they would survive it.
Given those casualty numbers, are we certain he didn’t just drop asteroids on the first few worlds that didn’t surrender and use there threat to get the rest in line?
There’s explicitly a lot of ground fighting; a guy getting blinded by a nuclear-powered weapon employed in a ground engagement is a key plot point in Messiah.
“a guy” 😉
It is absolutely the case that readers in 1969 would have assumed that orbital bombardment up to and including planetary ecocide was a core part of the Fremen war strategy. Some places might have been worth landing on to fight for, but Herbert would not have felt the need to explain to readers that nuclear and pseudo-nuclear holocaust was on the table.
I think I’m going to have to disagree here.
Paul (and whoever succeeds him if he dies) has at Arrakeen captured what amounts to *the entire imperial state apparatus*. He’s emperor, he controls the Guild. He has captured a good chunk of fleet and a lot of others are *trapped* because the Guild is now prostrate: Each star system is now isolated and at Paul’s mercy.
My impression of the Jihad is, essentially, that after this Paul controls the galaxy: The rest is basically the fremen mopping up anyone foolish enough to resist, which most aren’t doing: The Great Houses are literally going to die if they resist, even if Paul does not fire a shot. (melange withdrawal is fatal) Paul controls a massive amount of the economy and can interdict whatever bits of it he doesen’t control.
I presume most of the Great Houses just bend the knee right then and there. (and at least revert back to their old assassination ways rather than trying to fight an enemy with complete space superiority)
Getting shields, or other heavy equipment would then be relatively simple: Just ask for them and if not, well, you’re not getting anything out of the system you’re in. He has what amounts to a close-to-perfect blockade. Anyone who does not cooperate will be starved die from withdrawal. While note veryone will cooperate presumably many will.
Enough to get a fleet going, presumably a big enough one to overwhelm any single in-system fleet anyone else has, and if that happens… Well, the sterilized worlds are presumably bombarded from orbit.
I also don’t think we’re supposed to read the Fremen as launching a war of conversion: Other religions continue to exist after all, so much as that they squash anyone who actually tries to fight back or refuse to cooperate. It’s just that the galaxy is a big place and that means murdering billions.
The problem with this, as is repeatedly referred back to in the article, is the key feature of Paul realising that he’s powerless to stop the jihad (even to the point of his death being insufficient), after that having been something he repeatedly foresaw and dreaded.
It’s also apparent in some of the final passages of the book when Paul makes it apparent what the future of the Fremen will be. Characters are horrified at the notion of them being “unleashed” upon the galaxy.
The jihad isn’t Paul’s war to consolidate conquest. It’s the Fremen’s war of spiritually motivated vengeance upon the society that persecuted them and their ancestors. They are enabled by the fighting techniques and resources afforded them by Paul, but they’re driven largely by their own motives, along the lines of assuming and projecting that their saviour figure appearing and winning the planet for them is a divine providence that the time for such vengeance is nigh.
If Paul would die, he would be martyr of Fremen.
His sister and mother would become the public face who would handle the diplomatic side.
So even if he died, war goes on. But alive he still had means to keep the bigger issues in check, his sister and mother might not have had influence or desire to do so.
One should not consider jihad to be monolith either. If we think of crusades, they were only part religious fervor and there was large amount of glory hunting involved. And one major aspect was valve for built up amount of younger noble sons who would not inherit anything.
Likewise jihad in Dune would have multiple aspects to it, none of them dependent on Paul.
Just thinking.
12 years is 4380 days.
60 billion dead means *13 million dead daily* for that period, give or take.
So every day, every single fremen (men, women and children) kill a bit less than 1 person.
That’s a pretty staggering pace of killing!
It is not that much. Few MIRV to one major city is potentially millions of dead in moments.
Few big asteroids dragged and dropped to high population world is easily hundreds of millions to low billions in first couple days and then rest over period of few years.
As before, I object: Dune is a society syeadfastly non-industrial, like British shipbuilding in its 1850-1940 golden age, where advanced products are made by the hands of individual artisans.It can support many fewer people, and the text suggests, by contrasting depopulating ninety worlds entrrely with kill count of 61 billion that those ninety worlds each had much less than a billion inhabitants. An average population per extirminated planet of about 300,000 would bring that count to 27 billion, leaving 34 million kills to be distributed across other worlds. If we assume that’s 200,000 per other world, ttat’s 170, for a total of 260 planets brutalized by Jihad.
> only to find themselves facing an opposing force five million or fifty million or five hundred million foes is not out of the question.
It is wildly out of the question. Fifty million is the limit if the planet mobilizes at USSR levels; more likely it is under a million, the pehsntry being very poorly treated. They simply do not have the population to mobilize; Fremen numbers are only a single order of magnitude below the average planet.
Exactly. Local mobilization is meaningless when at any time you can just take off and nuke the planet from orbit until you’re sure.
My personal headcanon has always been that Caladan immediately flips over to the returned Atreides cause, and provides much of the needed industry. Not that this would help much in the overall balance of ressources of course or explain how the jihad would succeed without a living Paul.
My impression was that the Jihad would continue even if Paul died because Alia and Jessica were still there, able to step into leadership roles over the Fremen. Alia is almost as wise as Paul, just as legitimate an heir to the Atreides name and influence (and its allies among the Great Houses), and several times as crazy.
I don’t think this is explicitly suggested anywhere in the books, but with control of the spacing guild, couldn’t the Fremen basically bring all inter-planetary trade to a standstill and cause a universe-wide social and economic collapse? The ability to interdict all trade and communication amongst your opponents pretty much at will seems like a pretty decisive advantage. Though at that point the Fremen would start to look more like the British Empire than the Islamic Caliphate.
From the later books, (Messiah, Children) that didn’t happen. There are lots of casualties but also lots of surviving Great Houses, even the Corrinos. Organisations like the Spacing Guild and the Bene Gesserit may be less powerful than before, but they aren’t crushed into wreckage.
Hum…
What about some kind of domino effect ?
After the Fremen capture a first planet from a Great House, they get their first industrial base and the surviving part of the local army to join them to attack the second one. And so on. Sparing the planets offering the least resistance and destroying the others. Add to that the prestige of the new emperor and some planets might even join them willingly. And it all becomes entirely possible.
There is no shortage of historical precedents.
Alexander the Great conquering the whole middle east with a small Macedonian army… The Mongols, who didn’t know how to lay siege to a city, but who quickly recruited men capable of doing so… Herman Cortes conquering the Aztek empire with the help of their local ennemies…
But anyway, that was interesting consideration. Thanks for that.
I had envisaged something more akin to the tribal groups of the migration period. Absorbing other people’s as they went, while still being labeled Hun, Goth etc.
So as planets fall under the jihad they become labeled as Fremen ornate least the jihad.
Or when confronted by defeat becoming part of or client to the foreign enemy become desirable when compared to the alternatives.
Vichey France anyone. French troops fighting on both sides. Or the Italians switching from fighting with the Germans to against in a short phase. Foreign SS units fighting on the eastern front while their own countries were occupied.
Id also saw that as a planet was taken over the resources of that place dont just dissappear. The industry and those that make it work are still there… largely… and while some resistance may hold out as many would willingly accept the new order and its benefits and the rest are as affected by the vocal minority and follow along with the status quo. Bringing with them the ability to make weapons, shields, frigates etc.
After all I cant imagine the population of Gedi prime and its slaves doubling down on resiting to bring back the joys of Harkonen rule …. MGGA Make Gedi-Prime Great Again.
While the Harkonen seem to be the worst of the House system as much as the Atredies the “best” how many populations would see the “liberation” offered by the jihad as better than their current feudal oppression. Especially considerably the alternatives.
Its not to say that Herberts points don’t need scrutiny.
But also thinking on how whats described could work.
As my dad used to say. “If it could happen, how would it happen”
While the points above are sound, its in a binary view which doesnt feel like all of what ive read.
Giedi Prime was handed over to Gurney Halleck, IIRC.
I think that to understand what the Jihad looks like without Paul, we should consider the futures Paul saw where humanity goes extinct or near extinct. It’s very easy to see paths where the Jihad doesn’t have much military success off planet but does collapse space travel. Plunged into sudden isolation and with the elites dying of spice withdrawal, many worlds collapse and trillions of people die. The Fremen with their monopoly on space travel secure an empire of sorts but 99% of the old empire is wiped away. The survivors that the Fremen rule over have one hell of a grudge and the Fremen are not benevolent overlords so decades or centuries of brutal asymetric warfare follows. Plausibly this results in the collapse of the petty empire the Fremen set up and the extinction of the guild navigators making the long night absolute. In the centuries or millennia that follow, worlds that survived the initial collapse die off from their terraforming failing without maintenance.
It’s a grim future and one that the great houses could easily understand, especially as space travel starts slowing. As the collapse gets going one can imagine plenty of houses would be willing to surrender at any price as long as it gets them some spice to avoid their personal deaths and collapse of their worlds. The chaotic adjustment period would be terrible and a lot of people would die, not at the hands of the Fremen but at the hands of their fellow desperate citizens of the same planet. This adds up to a Jihad that wins but is overall a far worse fate for everyone involved.
It’s worth remembering that Frank Herbert thought the interesting questions were ecological, not political.
One more thing: You’re talking about the rebels having time to react to Paul’s forces and tactics but would they? With the guild in control it would seem relatively easy to impose information quarantines, at least on specifics.
Typo: “back lack large industrial systems and notably lack the ability”
Probably should be “but lack.”
I have to second most of the objections here, and add a couple:
A. First, thanks to the Arrakian forces controlling the spice (remember the tag, he who controls the spice controls the universe), and thereby controlling the Spacer’s Guild, which controls *all* interstellar transport and communications, the Fremen can defeat the Great Houses in detail, one after the other. Given how spread out the empire is, it is very likely that the Fremen outnumbered any locally deployed force by ten to one or more when they invaded a planet, and given that they inflict wildly disproportionate casualties when facing equal odds (you can argue whether this is at all plausible, but this is the world presented to us), the Fremen taking minimal casualties during the jihad is very probable.
B. Yes, the Allies in WWII were able to retool their industrial bases for war rather quickly, but part of the reason they were able to do that was because everyone already thought of war as something that you engaged in mass mobilization of the populace for and had the administrative capacity to oversee that change.
Meanwhile, in Dune, The Great Houses not only do not think in these terms, as to them war is exclusively the province of the elites and their retinues, meant to be limited in scope. Given how long this paradigm has been going, that their thinking would have ossified so far that they did not even consider retooling their economies to put them on a war footing is entirely probable within the dozen years of the jihad is entirely probable. Furthermore, they almost certainly do not have the administrative capacity to make the switch even if they wanted to, which they almost certainly don’t. Better, for most of them, to bend the knee and accept a subordinate but still prominent position in the new order rather than to arm the people and potentially lose your place entirely.
Of course, probably some of them did decide to roll the dice on that, and those planets are probably the ones where the religions were exterminated and the billions of people were killed because the Arrakeen forces engaged in orbital bombardment. And before you say “The Fremen wouldn’t have thought of that,” they probably wouldn’t have. The Spacer’s Guild, or a turncoat Imperial, on the other hand? Different story.
C. As to the scale of it–this is less a “Frank Herbert has fallen victim to the Fremen mirage” and more “Sci-fi/fantasy writers tend to be very bad at scaling their armies properly.”
I think this is discounting the fact that the Fremen can sieze industrial bases. Take Ix first and all their supply problems are solved.
On “first tier” Fremen using shields and “second tier” without, I would think that even a small proportion of fighters using shields would make Lasguns ineffective. If 10% of the fighters have shields, a badly aimed Lasgun shot has a 10% chance of hitting a shield, with catastrophic consequences for either opponent.
Wouldn’t that simply prevent Lasgun usage, leaving the “superior melee” of the Fremen to win out?
What proportion of the shots do we expect to be badly aimed? That’s something that can significantly shift those odds.
Even then, I think “uncertain risk of causing explosions within one’s own ranks” does not trump the advantage of “slice unprotected enemy force to shreds from range”.
Keeping in mind that these aren’t Star Wars blasters; lasguns produce a sustained and continuous beam.
It does trump the advantage.
When your laser hits shield result is same as nuke going off.
Even if you win you lose because odds are that you are withinf area of effect for that nuke even if it takes place at opposite end instead of your end or any point between.
Sure, it is an option if you no longer have hope of/care about survival, but people around you might not agree.
As mentioned in the article, the lasguns are a distraction. Artillery throwing chemical explosives is a technology that exists in the setting, the Harkonnens bring some to Arrakis and use it in view of the reader. You just use that, and boom*, the unshielded 90% of the Fremen force is dead. If that is too difficult to tactically maneuver, no big deal, just reinvent its more portable counterparts, such as the mortar, and the grenade launcher, and the hand grenade, or for that matter the bolt-action rifle.
*: maybe multiple booms would be required to blanket the whole force
I’ve not read any of the Dune books for a very long time; while I like Dune when I read it (and may again do so were I to re-read it today), I found the remainder quite unsatisfactory. I do not bring a historian’s perspective to this, but there is so much wrong with the world-building in Dune and its (increasingly poorly written) sequels that I’ll not revisit them. The biggest ones are that the gigantic sandworms existence, itself, is completely unsupportable and the massive desertification may well have caused an ecosytem collapse severe enough so the atmosphere would no longer be breathable.
If the Fremen are viewed as an existential threat to the Major Houses, at least some of them would become actively allied and many end their antipathy to “thinking machines” enough to reconsider things like guided weapons. I’m sure it would be trivial to produce flocks of drones that can home in on shields.
On a related note, the idea that “soft” societies don’t produce “hard men” is nonsense. The existence of current military units like the SAS, SEALs, and GIGN rather prove that.
“The biggest ones are that the gigantic sandworms existence, itself, is completely unsupportable and the massive desertification may well have caused an ecosytem collapse severe enough so the atmosphere would no longer be breathable.”
Both of these are addressed. Some of it is a mystery, sure, but the oxygen issue is directly tied to the worms (hand-waving biochemistry, but this isn’t a textbook and hand-waving alien biology is required to describe alien biology). For my part as long as the author has considered it and given a semi-plausible mechanism–and “the alien metabolism does something weird that releases oxygen” is a semi-plausible mechanism for this purpose–I’m happy with it. I’ve seen worse in scientific publications. There are potential stromatolites on Mars, for example, and the best alternative explanation is “Maybe something weird is happening that we don’t really understand but still isn’t life”. And that sort of non-explanation is considered sufficient by the scientific community to not call these potential stromatolites fossils. “Hard to study alien biology produces oxygen, we just don’t fully understand how” is much more well-established than that!
And the massive sand worms are explained through the sand trout, an earlier stage of life for the worms (the full life cycle isn’t described, but much of it is). Basically Dune is a world where the biosphere is mostly subterranean. And since there’s increasing evidence that a huge portion of the biosphere on OUR planet is subterranean (not merely soil, but deep bedrock life), this hardly counts as implausible. One may argue size, but our own planet provides examples of gigantism occurring in oceans and on islands. I’m not willing to say it’s impossible. Highly unlikely, but that’s a different story.
The planet would have to start off with much smaller open bodies of water than Earth, but that’s hardly implausible. I doubt the sand trout could encapsulate the Pacific, but they clearly can encapsulate the Great Lakes; if the planet was mostly ground, with large but less than ocean-sized bodies of water scattered around it, it would be perfectly reasonable for the sand trout to eventually encapsulate all the water. We see glimpses of that process in one of the later books. And all it would take to get a planet like that is a different chemistry. Earth has oceans, fundamentally, because Earth has an uneven distribution of felsic and mafic crust. If the distribution were more even–Mars, say–you wouldn’t get large areas that were lifted high above the surrounding crust (ie, cratons). Oceans would form in impact craters or small depressions. These could contain a tremendous amount of water while individually not being very big.
I have not read through the full post yet, but I stumbled over this?
> In particular, the reduction of Stilgar from the clever, charismatic, thoughtful figure of the first film to the blind fanatic of the ending scenes of the second film is astoundingly powerful and well-delivered.
Sorry, but what? I remember that me and my friends agreed, after watching the second movie that he was turned into a bumbeling comic relief character, with no other relevance then advancing the message “Old people stoopid, young people smort.”
Yeah, it didn’t seem to me that he had an arc so much as he became an entirely different character off-screen between movies.
It’s possible that reading an ageist message into it was projecting a little.
Since, I am at least 20 years younger than the actor, and probably also the character, I doubt it?
And it is not like the message is subtext you know? There is a scene were a group of young Fremen is sitting together talking about how stupid this Muad’Dib stuff is the older men are believing. Maybe it was a problem of the localisation I watched it in, but there was not much room to project.
One possibility that occurs to me is that while Paul’s prescience tells him that the jihad will occur and have far-reaching consequences whether he lives or dies… That doesn’t mean it ends the same way with or without him.
The jihad with Paul ends with Paul and more significantly his son as emperor of the known universe, the Great Houses broken, and a new eventual order emerging along the ‘Golden Path.’
Perhaps the jihad without Paul ends with the Fremen carving their way into the Great House system, various pro-Atreides houses rallying around Paul’s sister Alia (who is much more dangerous than her extreme youth might lead one to believe), widespread civil war within the decapitated Empire, and an eventual balance of power in which the Fremen are a dissipating force, one that disrupts but does not dominate the order of the known universe
It’s pretty stark how implausible the Fremen Jihad is. Because it’s driven by (implicitly) Fremen wrath towards the water-fat societies of the Imperium as whole, it is fairly unbelievable they would accept or attract many recruits from within the Imperium, they would be assaulting the basis of the faufreluches and thus weakening any reason for Great Houses to cooperate and aid Emperor Muad’dib in repressing the “revolts” which presumably the individual conflicts of the Jihad would take the basic shape of, and they have all the disadvantages of being highly adapted to Arrakis.
Indeed, one under-noted fact of Dune technology is that it’s possible to travel faster-than-light without the Guild even prior to the technological innovations of the later novels, it is simply very dangerous by comparison and the Guild retaliates strongly under normal circumstances… but these are not normal circumstances and the Guild is most likely to look the other way given that they would clearly resent their subjugation by Paul even without looking at Dune Messiah. But at the very least, the “stone burner” from that novel explains quite easily how the Fremen could sterilize planets.
Is it ever spelled out just what happens if you attempt a jump without the aid of a Navigator and it goes wrong? Does the ship dissolve into scattered atoms in hyperspace? Does it jump to a random point in space. hopelessly lost? Do the engines explode? And what are the odds? Near-hopeless? 50/50 crapshoot? I could see a sufficiently motivated and ruthless House being willing to gamble on an invasion fleet having only a ½ chance of arriving at its destination, in order to bypass the Navigators and strike without warning.
In the Frank Herbert books, IIRC without a Navigator about 20% of the time ships just don’t arrive at their destination. They disappear into foldspace and that’s it. I’m not sure about the exact percentage – it might be given in one of the later sequels – but it was high enough, even with computers, to give the Guild Navigators an almost instant monopoly as soon as they existed.
A sufficiently ruthless House might be willing to gamble on a non-Guild invasion fleet, but who else knows how to build interstellar capable spaceships? The Ixians probably, but why would they want to annoy the Guild? See Dinwar’s comment elsewhere about lost technologies for the rest of the Imperium. (Surface to orbit frigates and other ships, sure many Houses could build those.)
Also, soldiers are not resources or tokens to move around, but humans. History shows plenty of brave soldiers who were willing to risk horrendous casualties from enemy action. Ask your soldiers to effectively roll a dice and die if your number comes up, without even getting to the battlefield? My guess would be that your army morale falls dramatically. Your House might get fragged, your soldiers who survive the jump might decide to defect to another House that isn’t so casual about killing them off.
It occurs to me that if as speculated Paul would embargo Spice to houses who don’t submit to his rule, a shipload of spice bought from a smuggler with one crew willing to take the risk for their House would be worth it.
Yes, but that has several points at which it can easily fail (the smuggler has a combined 64% chance of surviving a round-trip, the smuggler may be intercepted at the point where he picks up the spice and then his crew risked their lives for nothing). It’s the kind of thing that can easily happen within the broader story of the Fremen Jihad and its aftermath, but the fact that it happened doesn’t nullify the Jihad as a whole.
I think there are a few things you fail to note about the Fremen that would make the jihad impossible.
First, every Fremen is a spice addict from birth. All of them rely on a continuous supply of spice to survive. This is not an unknown; Paul points it out to Jessica before their contact with the Fremen. This is not a problem on Dune, because literally everything is made of spice there, from the food you eat to the paper it’s wrapped in. But once you go to other planets the spice becomes extremely rare. One assumes that the Fremen, who were in contact with smugglers, would be aware of this, but it’s going to put significant strain on their supply lines. A huge portion of their logistical capacity will be taken up by supplying drugs to addicted troops, because the alternative is for huge numbers of the troops to be totally incapacitated or killed.
Second, look at what happened with North Korean soldiers in Ukraine. The Fremen are basically an insular, oppressive culture. It’s likely due to the necessity of water discipline, but still, it’s oppressive. North Korean soldiers in Ukraine demonstrate what happens when oppressive regimes send troops out to areas where the oppression cannot be as effectively maintained (note that the troops are still in environments that we would consider oppressive): They find all sorts of ways to enjoy the entertainments previously denied to them. I’ve heard stories of N.K. troops being quite distracted by the availability of adult entertainment, among other things.
And it’s not just N.K. that this happens to; there’s the whole stereotype of Catholic girls in our culture (I went to a Catholic school, so this is a familiar trope for me), or the kid who never drank in high school becoming an alcoholic in college. The mutiny of the Bounty was caused in part by this as well–the British Royal Navy was extremely oppressive and brutal, and Tahiti was most definitely not, and so the sailors opted to stay in the more pleasant environment (I’m very much aware of the over-simplification here; an equal factor was Bligh’s inability to maintain discipline and his personality). It seems to be part of human nature that when oppression eases people opt to not behave in line with the oppressors’ preferred mode of behavior.
Paul’s jihad is taking a bunch of people from the most oppressive culture in the galaxy and turning them loose onto planets that would, for them, be paradises.
The planetary governments don’t need to fight the army. It would be very easy to simply seduce them with unlimited supplies of water, among other things. The text gives evidence that this happens–in one of the books (I forget which) it’s noted that water discipline on Dune has declined in part due to the experiences of the jihad, where Fremen saw water falling from the sky. Figure the troops will react to this within a given range–some will fall to the temptations, some will resist, some will try to become more Fremen to show they aren’t tempted, etc. But it’s safe to assume that a portion of the troops will simply go AWAL and set up camps in what is, for the, Paradise.
I think that there are some factors you have not considered. Or maybe you did and you were just too subtle. Find that hammer and hit me with it.
I think the key observation is that your presentation of the jihad seems to show it as achieving its results by hand-to-hand combat of ethnic Fremen against the universe. But it isn’t. It’s a religious jihad that sweeps the galaxy. I think we have to take that literally. I think that shows up in four ways: (1) the institutions of the jihad provides access to needed resources separately from conquest, (2) sterilization of planets can easily more than all of the casualties of the jihad, (3) submission of great houses to the inevitable can easily explain most of the thousands of worlds conquered, and (4) the military leaders of the jihad would know what they need to do to overcome their initial disadvantages. The result is a jihad with few major critical battles at which lots of Fremen would need to fight and lots of minor battles that don’t make it into the narrative and could easily have been handled by non-Fremen forces with a little Fremen oversight.
First, in Dune Messiah and Children of Dune, we see the institution of the Jihad moving to the fringes of the Atreides’ control, at best. The Qizarate is at least a part of that institution, and it wields power. This can’t be a primarily Fremen institution. In Fremen society, women are the religious leaders, but we only hear of men leading the Qizarate. An institution of religious men among Fremen would be pretty powerless. So this has to be something that derives most of its power from offworld.
We heard in the books of 41 religions being destroyed. How did this happen? 15 million Fremen are not enough to enforce religious orthodoxy on a society that survives 61 billion people dying – even without them being children or needed for fighting. Again, the books tell us that the Bene Gesserit have been manipulating religion for millennia, preparing the galaxy for the coming of a messiah. The Bene Gesserit thought that they were only one generation away from the messiah – the child of Feyd and female Paul (Paula?). So their work had nearly reached its crescendo. I’d expect the first wave the Jihad was not fighters but missionaries. And that these missionaries could have been wildly successful, because the Bene Gesserit had prepared the way.
The success of these missionaries would produce several things –
1. A pool of people willing to join the Jihad personally. On worlds where he great houses just tried to keep their heads down, the missionaries would also become recruiters for the jihad.
2. Great houses that legitimately convert. The great houses are people too. You have to think that there would be some that genuinely join Paul’s religion.
3. Great houses that see benefit in acting like they are legitimate converts. As soon as you get some legitimately converted, plus a few sterilized planets, this starts to look really good.
All of these are relevant to the manpower problem that otherwise afflicts the Fremen ethnicity as a military machine. Would you still need crack units of Fremen? Yes, but the vast majority of any particular force could be non-Fremen. Is that enough? If you have 5 million Fremen fighters, can you get the casualty rate among remen low enough that they are not all exterminated by year 6? That’s a much harder question. But it’s plausible.
Something that I don’t think the books answer is the degree to which the Qizarate also takes control of extracting economic resources for the jihad. You can imagine that the Qizarate does exactly that, to some degree becoming the kind of extractive bureaucracy that is missing from the imperium before Paul, which I chalk up to the guild being the force that prevents evolution of any highly effective administrative state. Paul has the guild checkmated, so the guild can’t prevent the jihad from developing the kind of advanced administrative state that is otherwise absent. You can also imagine that the richese of any planet would quickly recognize where the new structures for administrative power lie, and quickly get on side. But it’s not narratively interesting, so it was naturally offscreen if it happened. That means that I can’t prove it, but I don’t think it’s necessary to the argument. Perhaps CHOAM survives as the only thing resembling an extractive bureaucracy. But if so, the emperor and the guild together control CHOAM well enough to fund the jihad.
Second, we have to honor the number given for the sterilization of planets. For whatever reason, this simply was not a tactic taken during the imperium. But it should be trivially easy for the guild to carry out. Put a large enough Holtzmann generator on a fast-moving asteroid, wait until it is moving at the correct vector, and translate it headlong into the target planet. Repeat as needed. The guild can’t maintain its independence of action by using that tactic against anyone without first taking over Arrakis itself (which they say that they can’t because they have foreseen how it comes out) – and can’t after Paul discovered how to destroy the spice forever.
The sterilization of 90 planets could legitimately cover more than all of the 61 billion dead claimed by the jihad. That’s an average of only two-thirds of a billion. That’s like 8% of earth’s current population. So we don’t have to imagine that the Fremen landed on planets and killed even 1 billion people through melee.
The effects of sterilizing a few planets synergize with the institution of the Jihad. Again, go back to the idea of destroying 41 religions. How would you go about that if you were the Qizarate, wanting to get to a effective religious monopoly? First, you would carry out pogroms against religions where they were in the minority, and especially on planets friendly to you. Second, in particular for religions that claim divine protection or have a single leader who is purportedly the embodiment of the religion, sterilize that planet. It wouldn’t work against all religions – Christianity thrived when persecuted – but discovering that the divine does not favor your religious leaders is a pretty strong reason to change your worship.
And using utter destruction of a besieged target to induce surrender in the next target has a long, long history in humanity — even before the 10+ millennia that pass after we leave earth!
Third, what does it mean for the jihad to have conquered thousands of worlds? The biggest fight for the jihad is to have the appearance of inevitability. The great houses will clearly think that, if you are definitely going to lose, you ought to just make the best deal you can and get on with it. So the vast majority of those conquests should be primarily symbolic, once the jihad gets to a certain level of success. The norm becomes that the great house submits, swears fealty to a new overlord, receives their existing holdings in fief, establishes a Jihad temple in their capital, visibly converts to the new religion, etc. That takes maybe a thousand Fremen, many of whom would not necessarily be fighters otherwise. Part of that deal is presumably that the great house has to pony up some resources – that could be military units, it could be industrial base, etc. Combining that with the fact that sterilizing 90 worlds ought to produce more than all of the casualties of the jihad and we have a jihad that might have had only a dozen hard fights. After an initial phase (described below), we ought to see the jihad pick easy targets, to give other easy targets a reason to submit quickly when demanded.
Fourth, we have to give the jihad credit for knowing what it has to conquer first. The claim that the Fremen will be at a disadvantage offworld seems to assume either that industrial capability if evenly distributed throughout the imperium (except on Arrakis) or that the jihad is unable to figure out where it is. If shield technology is genuinely hard to manufacture and it’s a critical military supply, the jihad will go after those worlds first. Since you have to take those worlds intact, that explains by we would have stories of tough battles. Those fights would be against people with comparatively plentiful shields. They would have been earlier in the jihad, before the Fremen become fully accustomed to fighting with shields (meaning tactics, not just individual fighting styles). To me, this is where the jihad could have failed. Lose the first three battles to control shield-rich worlds, and the jihad is over. But I think the books give us the answer on this, too.
The big part of the answer is obviously the Harkonen home world, which — the books emphasize multiple times — are heavily industrialized. Somehow, the Harkonens get enough shields to supply Harkonen forces over very long periods of time on Arrakis, where the sand tends to wear them out faster, even if the worms don’t eat them. So that’s equivocal evidence that the Harkonen home world produces a lot of shields. And the Harkonens – surely not loved even on their home world — sent their entire military force off to a desert world where it was slaughtered, leaving its entire industrial base for the taking. So that’s probably the first conquest off Arrakis. And it could critically overcome the Fremen lack of an industrial base.
Perhaps part of the answer is that Paul as emperor gets control of House Corrino assets. Maybe those include shield industries; you would think that the emperor would want his own shield supply. And, to the manpower point, we have to assume that it includes Sardaukar to some degree. Why would you not ty to convert and recruit the remnants of the second-best military force in the galaxy – especially one where the Fremen mirage is real and the home world of the Sardaukar is in some ways as much of a hellhole as Arrakis? Sure, Paul as emperor can’t rely on the solidity of his control over Corrino assets. And we can’t place too much emphasis on this point – if Paul died in the duel with Feyd, he is no longer emperor, so we don’t know whether Corrino assets would be available to the jihad in that counter-factual. But one could also imagine many
Beyond shield industries, what else does the jihad need to take early? We don’t know. But it is fair to assume that the jihad will know. And will go take that first. That, combined with the jihad’s ability (through the guild) to enforce a total embargo on any world, should make it easier to conquer worlds as time goes by. (Absent the specific reference to 90 planetary sterilizations, I’d have expected 61 billion deaths from embargo alone.)
So what does that leave us with? A jihad where we hear about a few battles (some of which honestly seem insignificant and appear for other narrative purposes), but we don’t really hear about huge battles after huge battles after huge battles going on for a decade. This seems consistent with the jihad rapidly taking the resources that it needs from then on, the Qizarate rapidly mobilizing non-Fremen resources, planetary sterilization accounting for the vast majority of deaths, and semi-voluntary acquiescence to the new galactic reality being the norm, with battles being the exception.
There’s my counter-thesis. Tear it apart.
There is also the fact that a large amount of the aristocracy depends on spice to prolong their lives, and many are outright addicted to it – and Paul can completely cut their supply. They can stall for a time while their reserves hold, but sooner or later they need to either submit or find a way to launch an offensive against Arrakis – and that would require to break the taboo against using thinking machines, a taboo that is *extremely* strong.
Would they go that far, just to depose Paul? He is, after all, a *legitimate ruler*. Kinda. if you squint. He married the imperial princess and got the Corrino to surrender their assets. The new regime isn’t, at the end, all that different from the old.
Sure, many would resent an Emperor that is also in direct control of Arrakis, since that gives him a much stronger leverage over the houses (This was, after all, the whole reason why Arrakis was left under the stewardship of a house in the first place). But even so, i think many houses wouldn’t go into open rebellion just for this.
And once Paul has the support of even a few houses, he can snowball over the rest rather easily.
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That said, the alternate scenario, where Paul dies and the Fremen just solo the whole empire on their own without a way to legimitize their rule, that is just nonsense.
There is one bigger issue than “mere” taboo of AI.
It is that they do not possess anything like AI they could work with.
In later books it has taken centuries of research for Ix to start getting where they can travel from solar system to another.
Even if great houses wanted, they did not have means to pull it off. And that would require that they knew what was coming, and with FTL communications not existing, they had no way to do that either.
I always put the victory up to the mystical side of Dune. Some more subtle but wider reaching effect like the Voice the Bene Gesserit use, perhaps? I can’t think of anything in the books to support that outright, but my reasoning was simply that a military victory is too far-fetched.
I wonder if it’s even less likely than presented here because the Great Houses have atomics. Of course, they’ve all agreed not to use them, but Paul does first. Yes, he uses them again geography and not people, but I can’t believe that nowhere in this society which uses manipulation and propaganda as key tools of control is someone who can turn that into a reason to deploy House Atomics against an existential threat.
Given the option that knives made from the teeth of sandworms proved a more destructive weapon than nuclear weapons, it always seemed the Jihad must not have been fought with something else.
We’re even told explicitly that the defenders of one world, Naraj, used a Stone Burner (so, a type of fantastical nuclear weapon that can apparently destroy planets) against the forces of the jihad.
Six million Fremen combatants and ~ sixty billion deaths works out at ten thousand people killed by the average Fremen. Seems implausible for hand-to-hand combat, especially by comparison with Fremen battles on Arrakis.
But it does sound plausible for a war that consists mostly of blockades and nuclear bombardments from orbit. That will not get you to everyone letting Muad’dib into their hearts, but it is enough to let you rake off some of every planets GDP, which is all the previous imperial government was doing. It is also all that the original Arab conquests did, which are presumably what Herbert was thinking of when he wrote his book about the religious politics of a giant desert.
OTOH, it is hardly set up by the book itself, which contains no description of any such campaign. The rationalisation seems not to be supported by the book whose conclusion it is rationalising.
“which contains no description of any such campaign”
It actually sort of does. There’s a mention of how one of the defenders used a stone burner (some kind of fantastical WMD that is triggered by a nuclear weapon but is not itself a nuclear weapon and can destroy a planet) in Dune Messiah.
It doesn’t need to describe a nuclear annihilation, it was written for people who’d learned about nuclear annihilation in elementary school and had been reading about it in fiction for years.
While there is no world-spirit, this blog has shown many examples of societies being more or less, shall we say functional, in ways that endure for significant periods (sometimes centuries). Sparta being uniquely low in human development. Single-army monarchies (i.e. most of them) vs. the Julio-Claudian dynasty and its rare ability to have multiple armies in the field while the Emperor sits at home, without an army. This last week’s discussion of how institutional regimes are more “vital” than personalist ones.
For more contemporary examples, there are some societies (and regional parts of larger societies) that have ended up in a trap whereby various kinds of projects — from apartment blocks through subways to electricity transmission lines — are expensive and thus uncommon enough that they are treated as meriting political attention and requiring broad popular legitimacy, and then the steps taken to achieve this purpose in turn cause the uncertainty, slowness, and consequent expense. At the same time, some otherwise extremely similar societies (or other regions of the same society) managed to avoid the same trap, thus extremely similar projects are treated as routine, thus the judgment calls involved in their details are beneath political/popular attention, thus they are done faster, more cheaply, and indeed in numbers justifying labeling them as “routine”. As far as we are concerned identical peoples with agency, in tremendous numbers making decisions with their free will based on how all the other people around them make their decisions, nonetheless ended up in either a more “vital” condition, or in one where they seemingly “can’t get anything done”.
I think a lot of that can be readily put under “contingent decisions”. Rome was not militarily effective because of some essentially powerful Roman spirit or the favour of Mars, but because of a number of ad hoc factors (some of which built upon or incentivized one another) that so happened to create an effective system.