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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.

Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation, I think, does a better job than any other at selling the impending horror of the jihad. Indeed, the David Lynch adaptation wholly fails at this, imagining Paul close to an uncomplicated hero, rather than as something approaching a horror villain.
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.

While *Frank Herbert’s Dune* (2000; the sci-fi miniseries) doesn’t engage much with the concept of the jihad, its sequel, *Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune* (2003), opens its treatment of *Dune Messiah* with this stark scene of the destruction wrought by the jihad, necessary for understanding the story to come. As always, it is limited by budget, but I think the sequence is effective.

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.

While the Spacing Guild can handle interstellar transport, **frigates** are going to be a huge limiting factor for the Fremen, as they are required to make the descent from orbit to the surface and are armed warships in their own right. In the books, the Fremen have to damage all of the Corrino ships in order to prevent the emperor’s escape, so their fleet is not immediately ready to fly as here.
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.

We haven’t seen how Villeneuve will tackle this in his adaptation, but Frank Herbert’s *Children of Dune* (2003) does have this scene at the beginning which includes forced conversions and executions for those who will not convert. Certainly from Paul’s own description of his jihad – with forty religions wiped out – the implication is that this was a war of forced conversion.

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’s long been believed the constantly rising costs of new home construction, and lackluster improvements in construction productivity more generally, are fundamentally a problem of production methods. Most houses in the US are still built on-site, using manual labor and hand tools, a manner of construction that doesn’t seem all that different from construction in the 19th century. By contrast, sectors like agriculture and manufacturing have shifted from this type of “craft production,” where work is done primarily by skilled manual labor, to industrialized, factory production, where work is mainly done by high-volume, highly automated machinery. Direct labor — the labor needed to actually physically produce something — makes up only about 10-12% of the cost to manufacture a modern car, while it’s roughly half of the cost of building a new single family home. Extending this line of thinking suggests that if construction could be similarly industrialized — if homes were built in factories and then delivered to their sites, rather than built on-site, by hand — we’d see the sorts of falling costs and rising productivity in construction that we’ve seen in manufacturing and agriculture.

The concept of industrializing homebuilding by bringing the process into the factory began to be articulated almost as soon as the benefits of mass production became apparent. Around the 1920s Alfred P. Sloan, president of General Motors, extolled the virtues of industrialized production, noting that an $800 Chevrolet would cost $5000 if it were made by hand, and suggested that the costs of building a home could be similarly and dramatically reduced using factory methods. In 1928, the German architect Walter Gropius noted that between 1913 and 1926 the price of new cars had halved, while the price of construction had doubled. Gropius later attributed this to the different production methods of car manufacturing and homebuilding, declaring that contemporary building methods were “far behind the times” and “not fit to solve the problem” of building affordable homes:

The greater proportion of hand-work involved in building increased the price in accordance with the increasing labor costs. Refinement of mass production methods, on the other hand, considerably lowered the price of automobiles. A decent dwelling became unattainable for the poor, yet the car became an everyman’s tool.

The potential efficiency gains and cost savings of factory-based construction have been a driver of numerous prefabricated — factory-built — homebuilding efforts. They were behind the Lustron Corporation, which received $37.5 million (over $500 million in 2026 dollars) in government funding to produce an enameled-steel panel home in an enormous former aircraft engine factory following WWII. They fuelled Operation Breakthrough, a 1970s US government initiative to kickstart the industrialized production of housing. They formed the core thesis of Katerra, a construction startup that in 2018 raised over $2 billion in venture capital on promises of driving down the costs of construction with factory methods (disclosure: I formerly managed an engineering team at Katerra).

However, these hopes have yet to bear out, and achieving cost savings with prefabricated construction has proved to be highly elusive in practice. Factory-based building methods have been tried extensively both in the US and abroad, but it’s hard to find examples of prefabricators achieving significant cost savings above more traditional methods. The savings that have occurred are frequently in the realm of 10-20%, a far cry from the huge reductions that followed the industrialization of car manufacturing. Often these cost savings don’t materialize at all, and prefabricators instead emphasize other benefits of factory methods like reduced construction time and increased quality. In cases where major savings do occur — such as with mobile homes — it’s often within somewhat narrow categories of building that have not generalized to the broad construction market.

What should we expect from factory-based homebuilding?

Before we look at the history of cost savings with prefabricated construction, it’s worth articulating what, specifically, we might hope to gain by using factory-based construction methods.

Prior to the age of mass-production, cars were assembled using craft production methods. In “The Machine that Changed the World”, a study of Japanese car manufacturing methods, the authors describe how cars were assembled at Panhard et Levassor, a French machine-tool company which at the end of the 19th century was the world’s leading car manufacturer:

P&L’s workforce was overwhelmingly composed of skilled craftspeople who carefully hand-built cars in small numbers…different contractors, using slightly different gauges, made the parts. They then ran the parts through an oven to harden their surfaces enough to withstand heavy use. However, the parts frequently warped in the oven and needed further machining to regain their original shape.
When these parts eventually arrived at P&L’s final assembly hall, their specifications could best be described as approximate. The job of the skilled fitters in the hall was to take the first two parts and file them down until they fit perfectly. Then they filed the third part until it fit the first two, and so on until the whole vehicle — with its hundreds of parts — was complete…by the time the fitters reached the last part, the total vehicle could differ significantly in dimensions from the car on the next stand that was being built to the same blueprints.
Because P&L couldn’t mass-produce identical cars, it didn’t try. Instead, it concentrated on tailoring each product to the precise desires of individual buyers.

This was a time-consuming and labor intensive process, and cars produced in this manner were expensive: in the early 1900s a new car cost on the order of $2000 to $3000 ($77,000 to $116,000 today).

Henry Ford and his systems of mass production changed all that. By introducing a series of manufacturing improvements — machine-made interchangeable parts, the moving assembly line, special-purpose automated machine tools — Ford was able to dramatically reduce the cost of producing a car. In 1908, Ford’s Model T cost $850, far less than competing cars. And as production methods improved and manufacturing scale increased, the costs fell even further: by 1925, a Model T was selling for just $260, a reduction of more than 80% in inflation-adjusted terms.

Notably, the enormous reductions in cost didn’t come at the expense of quality. An analysis of Buick’s 1911 Model 10, a competitor of the Model T, noted that “[a]nyone comparing a Model T Ford side by side with a Model 10 Buick would be unable to find anything superior on the Buick other than it had more brass trim. The Buick is crudely constructed, in essence years behind a Model T Ford in terms of manufacturing ease and serviceability, performance, and reliability. The Buick Model 10 is slow, heavy, and small.” This increase in quality meant reduced maintenance costs; the Model T cost around $100 a year to maintain at a time when other cars cost $1500.

Since automobiles transitioned from craft to industrialized production, the cost of cars has continued to fall in inflation-adjusted terms. And we see this pattern more broadly with manufactured goods: they tend to get cheaper over time. If we look at categories of manufactured goods in the consumer price index over the last several decades, nearly all of them have fallen in price in real terms.

Notably, this shift to industrialized production isn’t dependent on the success of a single firm. Ford’s share of automobile sales peaked at around 60% of the US car market in the early 1920s, but by the 1930s it had fallen behind General Motors and Dodge, and by the middle of WWII the company “was on the brink of collapse,” to the point where the government considered taking it over. But even if Ford had gone out of business, the industry wouldn’t have shifted back to craft-methods of production. Similarly, a dramatic decline in the overall car market — car sales declined by about 75% during the Great Depression, and by nearly 50% following the global financial crisis — didn’t cause a shift back towards craft methods of production. Once industrialized production arrives, is benefits ensures that it sticks around even in the face of market downturns.

The promise of factory-based construction then, is that the new methods that are so superior, and result in such great decreases in cost while offering equal or even superior quality, that going back to the old methods is unthinkable, even in the face of major firm failures or market declines. People will often articulate other benefits of prefabricated construction, and these benefits are often real and valuable, but it’s the promise of durably improved efficiency and reduced cost that has continuously inspired enthusiasm for the concept.

A brief history of prefabricated homebuilding

The history of prefabricated construction dates back hundreds of years. In 1624, English colonists brought a prefabricated panelized house with them when they arrived at Cape Ann, Massachusetts which was disassembled and reassembled several times.

During the California Gold Rush of 1848, thousands of prefab homes were exported to California from the eastern US as well as England, France, Germany, and even China: by 1850, 5000 homes had been ordered and shipped to California from the New York area alone. In 1861, the lumber dealers Skillings & Flint patented a “portable house” made of panelized wood construction which could be erected in three hours, many of which they sold to the Union Army during the Civil War. In 1892, Ernest Hodgson began to sell prefabricated cottages made from wood panels, which the company continued to sell in one form or another until the 1970s.1

But it was really in the 1930s when the idea of prefabrication as a strategy for reducing the costs of building a home began to emerge. The ongoing Depression, and the high costs of housing, had put homes out of reach for many Americans. The success of mass production, or “Fordism,” in driving down the costs of cars inspired many entrepreneurs to try a similar strategy with homebuilding. An article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle from 1935 noted that “mass production of prefabricated housing promises to revolutionize homemaking for the average family.” One early example was the Motohome, which debuted that same year as the “prefabricated house that comes complete with food in the kitchen.” Promotional material for the Motohome noted that other goods had become cheap thanks to mass production, and it was only logical to apply such methods to homebuilding:

THE greatest social and economic problem that has grown out of the depression has been the necessity of reducing the cost of homes to a price that is not out of balance with the price you pay for other necessities of life. Home building for years has remained on an antiquated basis. That is why the cost of homes has been going steadily higher and higher in relation to the cost of other things that have been lowered through the aid of mass production. It is obvious that by manufacturing homes on a mass-production basis, the cost can be brought down to a point where you may again afford to own your home and give your children their chance in life.

The Motohome was not particularly successful, selling only 150 units, and subsequent home designs from its manufacturer American Houses reduced the extent of prefabrication to “precutting [material] and partial preassembly of panels.”

But other prefab companies found more success. In 1934, Foster Gunnison, a salesman of lighting fixtures, founded “Gunnison Magic Homes” (later shortened to Gunnison Homes), which aimed to “bring the full benefits of mass production technology to a backwards industry.” Gunnison hired manufacturing experts from car manufacturing, and developed a system of panelized construction using stressed-skin plywood construction (where the plywood exterior carries the weight of the structure, rather than wood studs) first developed by the US Forest Products Laboratories. Gunnison aimed to make his company “the General Motors of the homebuilding field,” and by 1944 Gunnison Homes’ factories were producing 600 houses a month. And in 1940, brothers George and James Price founded National Homes, producing prefabricated wood panel homes in their factory in Lafayette, Indiana. Within two years, National Homes had produced over 3600 homes. Overall, between 1935 and 1940 prefabricators produced an estimated 10,000 homes in the US.

Prefabricated construction gained further traction during WWII, when it was widely used to rapidly build homes for war workers moving into defense production areas. The 1942 Lanham Act authorized five manufacturers to produce 70,000 prefab homes for $153 million, and by 1943 there were at least 20 firms which had each manufactured more than 1000 houses, and several firms which were producing several hundred prefab homes a month. By the end of the war an estimated 200,000 prefabricated homes were built, roughly 12.5% of the 1.6 million homes built in America during the war.

A few of the many prefabricated homebuilders operating during WWII, via Architectural Forum.

Following the war, US housing expediter Wilson Wyatt planned to use prefabrication to rapidly build large numbers of homes to address an “acute housing shortage”: 250,000 prefab houses were planned for 1946, and 600,000 for 1947. This didn’t come to pass — Wyatt resigned after less than a year, and the actual number of prefabs built in 1947 was around 25-35,000. But by the 1950s prefab construction was nevertheless beginning to carve out a meaningful, and increasing, fraction of the US housing market. In 1954 prefabs were around 5-8% of total single family home construction; by 1959 that fraction had risen to 6-12%.

Many of these prefab homes were mobile homes: permanently occupied travel trailers. But prefabricated construction of conventional homes was also becoming more popular. National Homes, in particular, became a force to be reckoned with in the prefab industry. In 1953 National Homes produced just over 14,000 homes, roughly 2% of all US houses built. In 1959, the company merged with seven other prefabricators, giving it a network of nine plants across the US (some of which it was eventually forced to divest thanks to an anti-trust lawsuit). In 1956 the company had produced its 100,000th home; by 1960, it had hit 200,000, and by 1963 a quarter of a million. Founder James Price had the audacious goal of being responsible for 50% of ALL US housing starts by 1975.

Wall panel being made at National Homes’ factory, circa 1959.

During the 1960s mobile homes, today known as manufactured homes, also began to rapidly gain in popularity. Mobile home sales rose from 90,000 in 1960 to nearly 600,000 in 1972, at which point there were mobile home factories in 45 states. By 1974, Skyline, the largest mobile home manufacturer in the US, was producing 50,000 homes a year, more than any other homebuilder, and the Mobile Home Manufacturer’s Association had become the world’s largest land developer as part of its efforts to build new mobile home parks. By the early 1970s, mobile homes along with other types of prefabricated, factory-built construction made up on the order of half (and possibly more) of all single family home construction.

But the early 1970s proved to be the peak of factory-built housing in the US. During the 1970s, many prefab firms went out of business or otherwise struggled. In 1972 the largest prefab factory in the US, owned by Behring Corporation, closed. Gunnison Homes, which had been purchased by US Steel in 1944, stopped producing homes in 1974. EL Hogdson similarly went out of business in the 1970s. National Homes entered a period of decline, losing $10 million in 1973 and $20 million in 1974, though the company managed to remain in business until the 1980s. Operation Breakthrough, a major government effort to kickstart large-scale production of factory-built housing, failed; despite $72 million in investment (plus millions more in Section 236 financing), 20 of the 22 building systems funded by Breakthrough were no longer being produced by the 1980s. Between 1973 and 1976 the number of mobile home factories in the US declined by nearly 40%, and the number of wood panel home factories declined by nearly 60%.

Since the 1970s, prefab has continued to gradually lose ground in the US housing market. Cardinal Industries, which was the largest prefab homebuilder in the US following the demise of National Homes, declared bankruptcy in 1989. By 1990, mobile homes (which had since been confusingly renamed “manufactured homes”) and other prefabs together were down to around 20% of the US single family home market, and almost certainly a much smaller share of the multifamily apartment market. Manufactured homes saw an uptick in popularity through the 1990s, buoyed by lax lending standards, but sales collapsed in the early 2000s as lending standards tightened and repossessed homes flooded the market. Other types of prefabricated homes declined significantly following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis.2

In the 2010s, there was a raft of US startups which spent enormous amounts of money to try and bring factory-based methods to homebuilding. In addition to Katerra ($2 billion), there was Veev ($475 million), Blu Homes ($217 million), Mighty Buildings ($100 million), Entekra ($75 million), and others. These companies all went out of business or otherwise failed (Mighty Buildings, for instance, pivoted to selling exterior cladding systems).

Today, prefabricated construction remains a small fraction of overall homebuilding in the US. For single family homes it’s around 10%, most of which are manufactured homes. For multifamily apartments, it’s roughly 3%.

Thus the lack of a robust prefab housing construction industry in the US is not for lack of trying. Many firms have taken swings at being the “Henry Ford” of housing: often these firms have been backed by very substantial investments, and many of them have produced thousands of homes. But none of them have catalyzed a transformation of the American homebuilding industry the way that Ford did for the car industry.

Prefab outside the US

Prefabricated home construction has a similarly long history of use outside the US. In the UK, following WWII the government funded the construction of over 150,000 prefabricated homes as part of its “Emergency Factory Made” housing program. The most notable of these was the AIROH house, which was designed to make use of now-surplus aircraft manufacturing plants and the 100,000 tons of scrap aluminum that no longer needed to be turned into airplanes. Over 54,000 aluminum-framed AIROH houses were produced during the program, each one using two tons of scrap aluminum.

AIROH home under construction, via Google.

More recently, the UK government has poured enormous amounts of investment to encourage the adoption of prefabricated construction (what they refer to as “Modern Methods of Construction” or MMC). As in the US, this effort has been marked by numerous high-profile failures and bankruptcies. Tophat, a modular builder formed in 2016, secured over £160 million (~$215 million) in funding, then operated at a loss between 2020 and 2023 before declaring bankruptcy. Legal & General, a financial services company, formed a prefab homebuilding division in 2016; by the time it closed in 2023, it had lost £236 million (~$316 million). Ilke Homes, a modular homebuilder founded in 2017, closed in 2023 owning £320 million (~$429 million) in debt. Today, prefab construction remains a small fraction of the UK’s homebuilding industry, around 5-10%.

In Germany, prefab construction has had more success. Millions of precast concrete apartments were built in East Germany during the Cold War, and since the 1990s prefabricated construction (much of it using wood-panel construction) has gradually become more popular. From less than 10% of new housing units in 1990, prefab today accounts for more than 25% of new German homes.

Japan has similarly built large numbers of prefabricated homes. Prefabricated construction began to gain popularity in the 1960s, and by the 1970s Japan was producing over 100,000 prefabricated homes annually. Since the 1960s more than 10 million prefab homes have been built in Japan, and prefab makes up roughly 15% of the Japanese housing market.

But the country that has adopted prefabrication more than any other country is Sweden. Roughly 85% of single family homes, and 30-40% of multifamily apartments in Sweden are prefabricated.

It’s clear, then, that factory-based construction methods have been tried extensively, both in the US and around the world. It’s also equally clear that, in general, these methods have not displaced conventional construction. Outside of a few Scandinavian countries, prefabrication does not appear to be the primary method of homebuilding used in any major country.

Prefab’s record of cost savings

One major reason for the relative lack of success of prefab construction is cost. Unlike car manufacturing, where industrialized methods rapidly and dramatically reduced the cost to manufacture a car, the cost savings yielded by prefabricated construction have historically been much more modest, if indeed they’ve occurred at all.

The chart below shows the price per square foot of prefabricated homes built by different US manufacturers in the 1950s. It also includes the price per square foot of a typical conventionally-built US home in the 1950s.

And this chart shows the price per square foot of several prefabricated homes (not including land) circa 1947.

We can see that most prefabricated homes cost roughly as much, or more, than conventional construction. Only six of the 22 1950s homes have a lower square-foot cost than conventional construction, and none of the 1947 homes are.3 And the lower costs that do exist are somewhat modest, ranging from 5-20%. What’s more, some of this cost savings comes from prefabricated homes having fewer features, rather than any sort of factory-based productivity improvement. National Homes’ 1953 catalog, for instance, notes that to keep prices low, “certain minor features come to you unfinished.” The National Homes low-cost “Cadet” model didn’t include interior paint, had a concrete or plywood floor in lieu of things like carpet or tile, had no closet doors, and had no attic or garage (though a carport could be added for an extra fee).

Gunnison Homes claimed that their construction costs were “as much as one-fifth less” than conventional construction. Via House and Home 1953.

Skipping ahead to the late 1960s and 1970s, we see a similar pattern. The 1969 report “Building the American City” from the presidentially-appointed Douglas Commission included a section on factory-based construction methods. It estimated the potential savings of a fully factory-built house as being around 16.5% when compared to conventional construction. Likewise, the 1975 publication “Good Shelter: A Guide to Mobile, Modular, and Prefabricated Houses” notes that in 1972 the average prefab home cost on average $9 to $12 per square foot. This is a substantial savings of 33-50% compared to the average cost of conventional home construction (around $18 per square foot that year), but it’s likely an outlier; the same publication gives prices of $18 to $20 per square foot for 1974, only slightly less than the average conventional cost of around $21 per square foot that year. A 1977 issue of the homebuilder publication “House and Home” gives a typical prefab house cost of $15 to $17 per square foot, plus the cost of shipping. This is substantially less than the typical conventional construction cost that year (around $29 per square foot), but that’s the cost the builder pays the factory, and doesn’t include any of the necessary site work (foundations, utilities), the cost to install or finish the home, or the builder’s profit margin. Once these are added in, the cost advantage becomes more marginal: the article notes that that price allows the builder to be competitive with conventional building methods, and offer some modest cost savings (which trades off against the reduced flexibility of prefab construction).4 It states that builders choose prefab to “get houses up quickly, or to sell in remote areas where assembling crews for conventional building would be difficult, or to control costs more accurately,” not for any major cost savings.

Operation Breakthrough, an ambitious government program to industrialize US homebuilding, provides another example of limited cost savings of prefabricated construction. Breakthrough began in 1969, and funded the development and construction of 22 housing systems (out of several hundred applicants) in the hopes that some of them would eventually achieve true mass production. Several thousand Breakthrough housing units were constructed at demonstration sites around the country, and HUD financed the construction of tens of thousands more under its Section 236 program for low-income housing.

As part of the program, the housing system producers estimated the cost of the systems they were developing. Only 5 of the 22 systems estimated their costs would be less than conventional construction, and once again these estimated savings were modest, on the order of 5 to 20%. And it seems unlikely that in practice these savings were achieved: the government paid tens of millions of dollars to the demonstration site developers to cover the excess costs of the housing systems beyond their market value, and by the 1980s 20 of the 22 housing systems (including every “low cost” system) were no longer in production.

By the 1980s, US prefab homebuilders had largely given up trying to compete by offering low-cost homes, a segment which was increasingly dominated by mobile homes. From a 1981 article in House and Home:

Ten years ago, [factory-built housing’s] banner had been “affordability,” and it had cultivated the image of an industry about to spark a revolution that would stand the conventional housing industry — slogging along with supposedly antiquated building methods — on its ear.
That revolution never came…
The sentiments expressed by John Baxter, manager of operations for Boise Cascade, are typical of how the industry sees itself now. “Modular housing is not going to be the answer for affordable housing in the next ten years,” says Baxter. [National Association of Home Manufacturers’ John] Kupferer agrees, and gladly passes the affordability banner on: “Mobile homes really have the answer when it comes to affordable housing.” And instead of that revolution, Kupferer sees modular’s share of the housing market growing via evolution.
The thrust of this evolution, says Kupferer, is that “dollar for dollar, you get much more value in a manufactured house.” There will be no more trying to stress a lower cost-per-square-foot than conventional builders: “We never say we can beat the other guy’s price. We don’t want to be known as the cheaper house.” (house and home march 1981).

The trends of prefabricated construction offering modest, if any, cost savings continued into the 1990s. A 1991 article on Utah prefab homebuilder Valgardson Housing System gives its costs per square foot as around $44, around a 19% savings compared to average conventional construction costs that year (deseret news, census). A 1998 HUD/NAHB study comparing conventional and factory-built homes found that a factory-built house would cost around 15% less than an equivalent conventional, site-built house.

This state of affairs continues today. Successful prefab homebuilders in the US rarely tout their cost savings, and instead emphasize benefits like faster build time or higher quality. High-end prefab homebuilder Bensonwood states on their website that “[a]pples to apples, we build a more consistent, higher quality product for less money than can be built with conventional construction methods. We are not, however, price-competitive with stick-built homes built to code-minimum levels.“ Vaughan Buckley, the CEO of modular multifamily builder Volumetric Building Companies, noted that cost savings of prefab was on the order of 5 to 10%, and that “It’s not a huge swing in cost that our clients typically seek modular for. It’s the reduction in schedule.” The founder of prefab design firm CleverHomes stated that “while there can be some savings with modular prefab construction, the more substantive benefits are the predictability of budget and process, the quality control, the speed of construction.” Derrick Seitz of construction management firm Windover construction stated that “[o]ne thing we always make clear at the forefront with clients considering modular is that the construction costs are the same as conventional methods.”

Outside of the US, we see the same thing. Sweden, as we’ve noted, has adopted prefabricated construction more than almost any other country; 85% of single family homes, and 40-45% of multifamily apartments in Sweden are prefabricated. But this hasn’t yielded low housing costs. Per Statistics Sweden, in 2023 the average price per square foot for a new single family home in Sweden was more than 70% higher than the average price in the US. And over the last 25 years construction costs and housing prices in Sweden have risen roughly as fast as they have in the US and above the level of overall inflation, rather than less than inflation like other manufactured goods.

In a New York Times article about Swedish prefabrication, Stefan Lindbäck, an executive at Swedish multifamily prefab company Lindbäcks admits that their construction costs aren’t lower than conventional builders, but suggests that they make up for it in other ways:

Building quality homes, whether on-site or off-site, will never be cheap. You don’t want to scrimp on materials or labor, and the savings of factory-built homes might not be obvious at the start, Lindbäck told our group. A conventional builder might bid lower than Lindbäcks, but then there are the costs of supervising the construction on-site and paying for delays in interest charges. And conventional builders profit from changes late in the process.
With factory-built houses, modifications are minimized because customers generally select from a standardized framework and changes are allowed only up to a certain point. The factory builder’s advantage is quality control and speed. Real profit, long-term profit, comes from streamlining the building system for predictable outcomes and fast delivery.

Similarly, Germany’s prefab home portal Fertighaus.de notes that “which construction method is cheaper, prefabricated house or solid house [on-site concrete or masonry construction], then the answer for an equivalent design is: None.” German homebuilding platform Massivehaus.de asks: “Is a prefabricated house cheaper than a solid house? In short: no. Prefabricated house prices as well as those of solid houses exist in a wide variety of levels, and none of the construction methods can be assessed as cheaper or more expensive today.”

German prefab homebuilder HUF HAUS likewise lists the advantages of choosing prefab construction, but these advantages do not include “lower price;” instead they are things like short construction time, energy efficiency, and a guaranteed fixed price.

In the UK, the CEO of prefab builder Vision Modular noted in 2023 that what drove demand for factory-built construction methods was “certainty of cost, of programme and of quality”, as well as sustainability and ESG requirements — not any cost savings. The numerous failures of various UK factory-built housing producers likewise suggests an inability to achieve any sort of major (if any) reduction in building costs. When the Swan Housing Association closed its factory in 2022 after five years of operation, it noted that “it is simply not financially sustainable to continue to build homes using modular construction, with Swan’s factory having been running at a loss.”

In Japan, the trajectory of prefabricated construction mirrors that of the US: an initial focus on using factory methods to achieve low costs, followed by a pivot to focusing on higher quality when that strategy failed. A 2003 study of Japanese prefabricated construction noted that:

During the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese housing manufacturers focused solely on the ‘mass production’ of their products, resulting in a supply of virtually identical, rather monotonous houses. Due to the ‘inferior’ image associated with the low-quality appearance of these houses, the public immediately rejected them. Since then, manufacturers have placed greater emphasis on improving industrialized housing quality…

The same paper notes that as of 2000 per-square foot costs of prefabricated construction in Japan were on average 8% higher than site-built construction. Likewise, the Japanese homebuilding platform japanese-architects.com notes that the least expensive method of building a new home is typically local, on-site builders, rather than prefabricated construction.

Toyota is an illustrative Japanese case. In the 1970s, in an attempt to apply its manufacturing expertise to other industries, Toyota formed a prefabricated homebuilding division, Toyota Home, which still exists today. But while Toyota’s manufacturing expertise, and its low-cost, high-quality cars, allowed it to become the largest automaker in the world, it hasn’t had the same success in homebuilding. Toyota Home has consistently been a minor homebuilder in Japan, and like other prefabricators it seems more focused on delivering high quality than on achieving low price (unlike with car manufacturing, where it successfully achieved both). In 2008 Toyota’s home prices ranged from $200 to $300 per square foot, far more than average prices in the US that year (around $90 per square foot per the US Census).

When there is cost savings, it’s often because a prefabricator can locate their operation in a place with low-cost labor, and ship it to a place with high-cost labor. Modular manufacturer Autovol is able to manufacture modules in their Utah factory (where labor costs are low), and ship them to California (where on-site labor costs would be high). Stack Modular uses a similar business model, manufacturing modules in China and shipping them to the western US and Canada. But this requires a substantial labor price differential, and the high costs of transporting large, bulky prefabricated building components means that there’s a limited number of places where this strategy works.

Location of Autovol’s prefab building projects. High-cost California cities dominate. Via Autovol.

Thus wherever and whenever we look, we generally see the same story: factory-based homebuilding yielding at best relatively modest cost savings, and often no savings whatsoever. This is what we see in the US historically, it’s what we see in the US today, and it’s what we see in countries around the world.

Manufactured homes and cost savings

The biggest counterexample to this general trend that I’m aware of is manufactured homes, formerly known as mobile homes. Mobile homes were originally camping trailers, but over time have evolved to more closely resemble conventional homes, and today’s manufactured homes can be hard to distinguish from site-built homes at first glance. Unlike other types of housing in the US (including other types of prefabricated housing), manufactured homes don’t conform to local building code requirements, but instead follow a federal code authored and administered by HUD.

Modern manufactured home, from Clayton Homes.

Unlike other types of prefabricated construction, manufactured homes have consistently been substantially cheaper than conventional construction. The cost of a “single-wide” – a manufactured home that comes in a single unit — has generally been 55-65% less per square foot than the cost of a conventional home. “Double wides” — larger manufactured homes that consist of two units stitched together — are somewhat more expensive, but still dramatically less than conventional single family homes.

Do manufactured homes show that factory-based construction can, in fact, yield substantial cost savings?

One challenge when comparing the costs of manufactured homes and conventional homes is properly adjusting for differences in quality. Historically, manufactured or mobile homes were of lower quality than conventionally built homes, both in their performance characteristics and the level of interior finish. Prior to the introduction of the HUD code in the 1970s, for instance, mobile homes were sometimes known as “ten second trailers” because of how quickly fire would spread in them. Ralph Nader’s Center for Auto Safety published a book in 1975 called “Mobile Homes: the Low Cost Housing Hoax,” documenting various deficiencies of mobile homes, such as leaky pipes, bowing walls, and faulty wiring and HVAC systems.

The quality of modern manufactured homes is far higher than it was historically, but there are still performance and finish differences in manufactured homes as compared to conventional homes. For instance, manufactured homes will often use vinyl-on-gypsum (VOG) panels with visible seams for the interior, rather than higher-quality (but more expensive) drywall, and manufactured home energy efficiency requirements are far less than conventional home construction.

Determining the extent to which factory efficiencies are behind manufactured homes low costs requires adjusting for these sorts of performance and interior finish differences, and comparing a manufactured home to a similarly-specced conventional home. This sort of comparison was done in a 2023 study by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard. The study compares the costs of a single-wide, double-wide, and conventional house which each have similar numbers of bedrooms and bathrooms, interior and exterior finishes, appliances, and HVAC systems. The study also included the costs of a CrossMod, a relatively new category of manufactured home designed to be similar enough to conventional site-built homes that it is eligible for Fannie Mae financing. CrossMods have permanent foundations, more stringent energy efficiency requirements, higher quality interior and finishes, and features like porches or garages.

Per the study, single-section manufactured homes ranged from 35-47% of the cost of a conventional home, depending on the region of the country where they were built. Double-sections ranged from 60-64%, and CrossMods, which are the most similar to a conventional home, ranged from 73-80%.

However, even this comparison does not fully account for quality differences between manufactured homes and conventional, site-built homes. The adjustments made in this study do not include any differences in code requirements, which include things like higher energy efficiency. Even the more stringent energy efficiency standards of the CrossMod are lower than conventionally-built home requirements, and the requirements for single and double-wides are lower still.5 The study also does not include any differences for things like wind speed design, which in many areas will be substantially higher for conventional construction. But these differences, while real, are likely relatively minor in terms of added cost, and are probably only responsible for a fraction of the cost differences between manufactured homes and conventional construction.

Another important factor when analyzing the cost of manufactured homes is how those costs have changed over time. We noted earlier that most manufactured goods typically rise in price less than overall inflation over time. However, this is not true with manufactured homes, which rise in price at roughly the level of overall inflation.6

So despite being factory-produced, manufactured homes do not see the same sort of cost trajectories as other manufactured goods — their cost trends look much more similar to those of conventional construction.

Overall, manufactured homes show that factory-based construction can, in certain cases, yield substantial savings over conventional construction. Even taking into account quality differences, a single-wide manufactured home is probably on the order of 40-50% cheaper than an equivalent site-built home. But manufactured homes also show us the limit to these sorts of factory savings. The greatest savings in manufactured homes are achieved with single-wide construction, when the entire house can be delivered as a complete, single unit, minimizing on-site work and eliminating any difficulties from breaking a home into multiple parts. But this is only feasible for homes small enough to be shipped in one piece. As you move away from this to larger and more complex homes, the cost savings of manufactured homes get eaten away: double section homes have less cost savings than single-wides, and with CrossMods — the homes that are most similar in features and performance to conventional construction — we approach the 15-20% “best-case” savings that we see with other forms of prefabricated homebuilding. And the fact that the cost trajectory of manufactured homes looks more like conventional construction than it does for other manufactured goods suggests that even with manufactured homes, factory-based construction hasn’t been an unlock for sustained productivity improvements.

Conclusion

The history of prefabricated construction is remarkably consistent. Cost savings of moving to factory-based production for homebuilding have consistently been much less (5-20%) than many practitioners hoped for, given the enormous reductions in cost that were achieved for things like car manufacturing. Often savings fail to materialize at all. Exceptions to this do exist, in the form of things like manufactured homes, but they serve as much as an illustration of the limits of factory-based homebuilding as they do its potential. Though many have tried to claim the mantle of “the Henry Ford of housing,” none have yet matched Ford’s achievements of transforming a craft-based industry into an industrialized one, driving down prices in the process.

This doesn’t mean that industrialization of homebuilding, or of construction more broadly, is a doomed enterprise. But they do show that it’s an enormously complex problem. The long history of prefabricated construction shows that we can’t merely move the construction process into a factory and expect enormous productivity improvements and massive reductions in cost. The problem must be tackled at a lower level of abstraction — understanding, what, specifically, is changing when a process moves from craft to factory production, how those changes result in productivity improvements and decreases in cost, and figuring out how we might apply those sorts of changes to the construction process.

One source claims that Hodgson sold 100,000 homes by 1942, but this seems like it must be an overestimate.

Mobile homes may have also declined following the GFC due to lower interest rates.

And its possible that costs are even higher than listed here, as for many of these houses its unclear if the price includes the lot. I’ve assumed that it does to be conservative, but if it didn’t, and only included construction costs, things would look even worse for prefab.

The article notes that that price allows prefab builders to “compete quite handsomely with the small stick builder, even allowing a price cushion for the relative inflexibility in design and plan.”

CrossMods can meet energy efficiency requirements by conforming to the 2009 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC), but most states have adopted newer and more stringent versions of the IECC. Regular manufactured homes are even less energy efficient than CrossMods.

We see similar trends in other areas of factory-based construction outside of homebuilding. The least expensive way to build a parking garage, for instance, is using precast concrete (concrete components which are cast in a factory and then delivered to the jobsite and lifted by crane into place). But the cost-per-parking space of a precast parking garage has risen roughly at the level of overall inflation.

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