Broadsheet

Another month, another war — this one looking like a complete c*******k. I spoke again with my go-to military historian, who among other things has thoughts about shoes. Here’s a transcript:

. . .

TRANSCRIPT:
Paul Krugman in Conversation with Phillips O’Brien

(recorded 3/12/26)

Paul Krugman: Paul Krugman here with another conversation with my favorite military historian/expert, Phillips O’Brien. We do this every time there’s a new war, which means I guess we’re gonna be having a lot of them at the rate we’ve been going.

Phillips O’Brien: Yeah, I’ll see you when he attacks Cuba, right? That’s the next one. So we have Iran now, and then Cuba in a few weeks, I think.

Krugman: I’m not sure we have the resources for Cuba, but yeah. So okay. We’re recording this a bit less than two weeks into this new war with Iran. There are a couple of specific areas I wanna talk about, but first, do you have anything to say that might be a useful starting point?

O’Brien: I don’t think they know what they’re doing. And I don’t think that they had a plan. He basically did what megalomaniac leaders do. They underestimate their enemy and they think they will do this quickly. It’s what Putin did to Ukraine in 2022. “We will just march in, we’ll do what we want. We have this great military.” He was boasting about American military power, and I think he just thought this would be relatively straightforward. He liked to refer to the Venezuela model and I think he thought, ‘okay, what I’m gonna do is blow up the leadership, kill the leadership, and then I’ll get a new leadership that will be much more compliant and do what I want. I don’t wanna actually bring any kind of freedom or democracy to the Iranian people.’ Because, by the way, he’s talking about a leader for the next five to 10 years. So he is actually talking about putting another authoritarian in place. And he thought it would happen, a little bit harder than Venezuela it seems, but not much harder. And he completely underestimated what he was taking on. And what he’s done is caught himself without a strategic plan. They never thought through the second and third order effects, they were nowhere down wondering what would happen if the Strait of Hormuz was cut and they couldn’t get anything out of the Gulf. And I think they’re just making it up now as they go along.

Krugman: Yeah. That’s what we’re all seeing. I wanna come back to that a bit, but, your specialty has been air power, sea power, and strategically how wars are fought that way. And in a way the United States came in with “the O’Brien Supremacy.” We have vastly more, in normal terms or in historic terms, complete air superiority. We have the Navy but actually, let’s talk first about air power. In some ways it seems more effective. It can do big things.

O’Brien: Well, the United States and Israel can blow up anything they want in Iran. Or practically anything they want in Iran. They can’t get to the deep nuclear stuff, or at least they don’t. They’re not sure if they can get to it, but otherwise they could blow up any target on the ground they want to blow up and there’s nothing the Iranians can do about it. Their air defenses, from what we can tell, have mostly been neutralized.

The issue with air power is, it’s great for blowing things up if you have air supremacy, but it’s not great for putting anything else in its place. And this is what they hadn’t worked out. They thought, ‘Okay, we’ll blow things up and something we want will come along and start ruling Iran in a way that we’d like.’ They also didn’t understand that Iran has air power. Not to defend itself, but to strike back. So they totally missed the Iranian capacity to strike back. And Iran has struck back with very cheap drones and very cheap sea drones from what we can tell. And so the Americans haven’t been able to take out Iran’s strike power coming back at them. And it’s why we’re left in this situation.

The US and Israel can destroy anything they want in Iran. And that’s what they’re doing every night. But that doesn’t leave them in the ability to keep Iran from striking back. It doesn’t allow them to put anything else in the government’s place.

Krugman: They can destroy anything they can find. I guess part of the issue is that there’s stuff you can’t find.

O’Brien: This is what I was just saying in the article for The Atlantic. I know it’s only been over a year into Trump’s second term, but already I think we see signs of rot in American institutions. They spent months preparing for this, and on the first day they attacked a girl’s school on one of obviously the high priority targets. You would’ve thought they would’ve had the best intelligence possible. They had a long time to prepare this, but what they did is they committed a massive war crime. Because they didn’t have good intelligence, that alone should set alarm bells off. If you’re planning this intricate military campaign, you would think, at least on the opening strikes, you would have some idea of what you were attacking, but clearly they didn’t have an idea of what they were attacking and if that was the quality of intelligence that they had when it started, now that the Iranians are probably hiding more, spreading things out, trying to protect themselves, we don’t know the quality of the intelligence that they’re gonna have.

They don’t seem to have gotten the second supreme leader. So they got the first one because they knew where he was. But since then, they’ve seemed to have had more trouble tracking down the Iranian leadership. So I think it’s a sign of rot that the Trump administration has brought to US institutions.

Krugman: Yeah, I was really struck by the decapitation strike. That was an intelligence triumph—not the weapons that were there, but actually being able to find, basically, the entire leadership and wipe them out on the first day. That seemed to say that they had very good intelligence. And yet on the same day, they struck this girl’s school. And I don’t know how to reconcile that.

O’Brien: Well, they had very good intelligence on one strike package, but they didn’t have the depth of intelligence throughout the system. A lot of good people have left the US government, a lot of good analysts, so they might have had enough ability to do the strike on the leadership with, by the way, the help of the Israelis. We assume Israelis played a big role in providing a lot of that intelligence, but they haven’t had the depth and they didn’t have the depth to protect those troops in Kuwait. They clearly left American soldiers in Kuwait, unprotected. And unable to fight to protect themselves from what they should have anticipated coming at them. So there’s just all these really worrying signs. The US military is still gonna win every battle it fights with the Iranians. That’s not the issue. They can win any battle. But what we don’t know is if they can maintain the high level of excellence to actually triumph in this war.

Krugman: Just as a very casual observation, the Israeli IDF seems to be less degraded as a force. I don’t like at all what Israel has done. Gaza is a massive war crime. But the IDF seems to be functioning in a way that I’m not sure the US military is.

O’Brien: No, I think the Israelis have maintained a higher level of military efficiency. What Israel has done, a very small country, arguably has the second most powerful air force in the world, or third most powerful air force in the world. We don’t know how the Chinese one would actually operate, but we could say that the best air power in the world is the US, China, and Israel probably among first rank. No one else would be in that category. And the Israelis also have great intelligence of what is happening in Iran. So that is absolutely key. On the other hand, the Israelis seem to also have a much harsher group of political objectives than the United States. Not that the United States’ objectives aren’t harsh, but the Israelis seem to be wanting to go for full regime change. So they’re helping the United States, but in some ways they’re also leading the United States down a road that the United States might not want to go down.

Krugman: And it is striking that they don’t seem to be able to take out the drone sites, the missile sites. How is it that the Iranians are managing to keep these things hidden?

O’Brien: Because they’re small, they’re really easy to launch. The US has been thinking in terms of taking out the air power of another country by taking out its major air bases where it keeps its expensive aircraft in actually relatively small numbers. A few hundred would be a very large air force for most people. And you can’t spread all these aircraft around everywhere because they need maintenance. So actually the ability of anyone to exercise traditional air power with fixed wing aircraft would have a relatively limited number of targets. With drones and missile launchers, they’re cheap, they’re unpiloted, you don’t need to build a lot of military support and you can spread ‘em around. So if you have them spread out, it’s very hard to find all of them.

Remember the Iranians have been preparing for this since last summer, since they were first attacked in that campaign by the Israelis and the United States. So clearly they have been thinking about some kind of strategy of response since then, and it seems what they have done is dispersed a lot of these drones around the country in very small numbers, which is making it difficult for the US and Israel to track them all down.

Krugman: That now is astonishing to me. I thought that they must have been doing that and I’m a pure amateur. But just watching the conflict in Ukraine, it was obvious that drones, cheap missiles were going to be major tools of this war. And that if you didn’t have a strategy for neutralizing those, you didn’t have a strategy. How is it that the US didn’t know that?

O’Brien: I really think Trump believed he would’ve had a few days of air raids, decapitate the government, and that would be it. I just don’t think it entered their mind, and because no one stands up to him. Supposedly, there were some military warnings, people saying, ‘the Iranians might fight back and you have to have preparations in case they do. But he seemed to not take those on. And these are people who wear shoes that are too big for them to make him happy.

That story about Marco Rubio, that picture reveals a great deal about where we are. I don’t know how he kept them on, but he did and he was humiliated, because Trump gave him those shoes. If that is the culture you create around you, you’re gonna make really bad decisions. You know what I thought? I actually thought, and I’m not saying Trump is Stalin but it’s very much the culture Stalin had around him where he humiliated everyone around him by making them look and be faintly ridiculous. That was actually something he did deliberately. And what happened, of course, is that all they would do is reinforce all his prejudices. And that’s why you end up with Stalin saying, “Oh, Hitler’s not gonna attack me in June, 1941. Never! Not gonna happen!” And everyone around him going, “Of course Joseph, of course they won’t do that.” And that’s where we are. We basically have a Stalin-like court around Trump and we see the decisions that such a court makes.

Krugman: Now I’m trying to understand. I think we knew what conventional air power could do. What are the capabilities of the kind of stuff that the Iranians have left? In Ukraine there’s a kill zone, but there’s also a lot beyond that. So can you tell me about that?

O’Brien: They have a very great geographical advantage. They control the coast of the Gulf to the north. That’s basically all Iran. So the Iranians are the north coast of the Gulf, and what they really have to attack to keep that closed is shipping. And ships are slow. They’re slow and big and not that difficult to hit with a drone and they can’t maneuver. They’re not gonna be able to maneuver out of the way. And these are civilian ships that don’t have any protective devices on them. No one seems to want to go in and protect those vessels. So actually the Iranians have a very easy job in that way, that the targets they’re going for are targets that really are not protected and as long as they can keep attacking those with a small number of drones, they don’t need a lot. As long as they can keep shutting down shipping, they are going to put massive pressure on the Trump administration.

Oil prices are already up. They dipped a little bit when Trump acted like the war was almost over. They’re back up. We’ve seen real problems with nitrogen supplies and real trouble with helium supplies. And the irony is, the only country shipping out of the Gulf is Iran. Iranian shipments of oil are up, so Iran is sending everything it wants out of the Gulf and they’re sending oil directly to the Chinese. I think the Chinese are laughing at this, that they’re seeing the US unable to have its allies get their oil out.

Krugman: Yeah. There were Chinese chartered ships going through the Strait of Hormuz broadcasting in English. “We are a Chinese ship carrying Iranian oil,” and they were transiting the strait. But just to enlarge this a bit, there’s a lot of talk about how the Strait of Hormuz is 33 kilometers wide at its narrowest point, but in some ways I think that, as I understand, it’s irrelevant. Essentially, the entire Persian Gulf or Arabian Gulf is easy drone range for the Iranians, right?

O’Brien: Yeah. It’s a very narrow body of water considering the vital shipping that goes through it. Far more vital than I understood. I had no idea of the value of the nitrogen exports or the helium exports that went through. I had no idea. If someone had told me that 20% of the world’s fertilizer supplies came out of the Gulf or something like that, I would’ve had no idea. But considering what a narrow body of water it is and how long the Iranian coast is, Iran runs along the Gulf for hundreds and hundreds of miles. It just means the Iranians can really pick and choose their targets and the United States and Israel are gonna be left scrambling trying to find every little drone. It’s a real needle and haystack kind of situation.

Krugman: Yeah. Again, Ukraine. There’s obviously tremendous intellectual crossover between these two wars and in Ukraine we talked about this sort of 40 kilometer wide kill zone, but that’s a kill zone for, like, tanks.

O’Brien: Yep.

Krugman: And the kill zone for oil tankers has gotta be basically....

O’Brien: There is not a safe place in the whole Gulf for an oil tanker. I can’t believe there’d be any safe place. And by the way, the Americans are acknowledging that because the tankers have asked for American escorts and the United States won’t even send warships into the Gulf. The fact that the United States is rebuffing requests for escorts means that they don’t believe that they can keep US war ships safe in the Gulf right now. And that’s a pretty damning indictment. If you go to war and have not anticipated that you might need to protect your own warships in this vital body of water… It reveals a lot about the shoddy nature of the strategic planning we’re seeing.

Krugman: I’m not even sure what an escort would do.

O’Brien: An escort might essentially try to shoot down the drones with Gatling guns or different kinds of technologies that they would have. They could use Aegis or other very expensive systems. But you might try to just shoot down all the drones you can with the escorting ships.

Krugman: As I understand it, the Ukrainians have developed some of these technologies since we keep on not giving them Patriot missiles. They’ve developed systems that shoot down drones that are substantially cheaper. The Ukrainians had actually offered to sell them to the United States and are now going to sell them to, like, Saudi Arabia. What exactly is the Ukrainians’ role in this?

O’Brien: Well, the Ukrainians understand the cost and expense of the way this war goes. The issue that the United States has been faced with is these drones probably cost the Iranians $30,000 to make, some say 50, some say once you get to mass production, they’re even cheaper. But let’s say $30-40,000 for one of these Shahid type drones. The United States, if they shoot them down with a Patriot or a THAAD, is spending millions of dollars to take down a $30,000 drone. That’s an unsustainable kind of exchange. And plus, the United States stockpiles weren’t that great to begin with. The United States has fired more Patriots in the few days fighting the Iranians than they’ve given to Ukraine the entire war. That’s to give you a sense of the kind depth of fire.

What the Ukrainians understood is they’re not gonna be able to rely on their expensive systems. They’ve been trying to keep their Patriots to defend themselves against the very expensive Russian missiles, the hypersonic missiles, the ballistic missiles—that’s what they keep their Patriots for. So they said we have to come up with a system that will protect ourselves against the cheaper drones. And so they’ve come up with anti-drone drones. That’s what these are, they’re basically smaller anti-drone drones, and they cost between $1000 and $5,000. So that actually is a very good cost balance ratio. The United States just didn’t have that. And American partners didn’t have them ‘cause they were relying often on American technology.

So Trump will never say thank you, but as soon as they ended up in this situation and their air defense stock came under pressure, they turned to the Ukrainians. To the point, and this is actually something that I think should make people stop and think: Ukraine has provided the United States with more aid in 2026 than the United States has provided to Ukraine. United States provided no aid to Ukraine in 2026. Ukraine has provided military aid to the United States and to American allies in the Gulf. And people might think about that.

Krugman: Yeah, there was almost none already in 2025. There’s this chart from the Kiel Ukraine Support Tracker that shows that US aid just disappeared already last year. And it’s all European aid at this point. And Ukraine’s helping us more than we’re helping the Ukrainians.

So, as I know from your writings, air power has been tremendously effective in wars, but there’s a context to that. Let’s talk a little bit about what the US is trying to do now.

O’Brien: Air power is changing. We used to think about air power from an American point of view, and I think the US Air Force probably still did going into this war. And air power was, first of all, shutting down the ability of the other side to attack you. So you would suppress enemy air defense and destroy the other side’s ability to strike back. And then once you did that, you would go and take out all the targets you wanted. So it was a phase process, but the first phase was to neutralize the other side’s air force. It might be now that you cannot do that. Then you cannot fully neutralize the other side’s air force and air power because the other side can produce quite cheap drones in large numbers. So until you actually have a good defensive system, you can’t do what would’ve been doing in the first step in (classic) American air power, which is to neutralize the other side’s air power, which is why in some ways both sides can still attack, and that is a change in air power.

We’ve normally seen air power as a struggle for dominance. One side wins, and when one side wins, it can overwhelm the other side. But we are now in a situation where both sides can continue fighting and actually striking. I mean, my own view on this is that it’s gonna lead us down a very dark road. I wrote a little piece on it saying The future of war seems to be ranged fires and war crimes, because no one’s gonna be able to stop people from having some kind of ranged air capacity. And it will be very tempting to rely on war crimes to try and get your way; threats and that kind of coercive behavior. But it does seem to me that we will have a lot of long range fires and aggressive firing for this period of warfare.

Krugman: Yeah, I found myself reading a little bit about Normandy in World War II and where the Germans had a terrible time just getting forces to the front. To go back to Ukraine, both sides are in that position now because of these ranged fires. Neither side has air superiority and both have air superiority in the sense that there’s this wide zone of death.

O’Brien: In the second World War, you would think, “oh, the United States made so many aircraft.” The United States made, I think, 88,000 aircraft in 1944 at the absolute high point of production. For one year it was 80 or 90,000 aircraft. Ukraine’s gonna make 7 million drones this year.

Krugman: I didn’t know it was that big.

O’Brien: The number of systems that are being thrown in the air are so much larger. They’re not always that effective, but they don’t have to be. It’s gonna be impossible to shoot them all down now unless you have a revolution in the ability to do air defense. And so we are dealing with a world where air power is going to be everywhere and it’s going to be very hard to deal with.

Krugman: And so how does all this compare with Venezuela, which was a limited operation?

O’Brien: My view on Venezuela was, this is not regime change and it’s not bringing freedom to the Venezuelan people. It’s basically replacing one dictator with a compliant dictator. So it’s been great for Trump. It’s been absolutely brilliant for Trump and God knows where the money’s going and who’s getting kickbacks in these business deals. But he has a leader in Venezuela who is, I think, playing for time right now. And as she plays for time, she’s going to make sure that she doesn’t get him upset. I didn’t understand even the total venality of what he was doing. Everyone was saying, “Oh this is all Rubio trying to bring some freedom and openness to Venezuela.” That’s just nonsense.

And I think in Iran the problem is, even that is much harder to do. It’s much farther away. The Iranians have a far more capable military. They’ve been preparing for this. And also, by the way, the Russians and the Chinese are going to help the Iranians. No one was gonna step in for Venezuela. But I don’t think the Russians or the Chinese are quite keen to see a pro-western, pro-US Iran. And they’re not going to go down without a fight. So far, the Russians have been helping the Iranians kill Americans. Quite clearly they’re helping them do that. And it will be interesting to find ou—if we ever find out later—what the Chinese have been doing, but I’m assuming they’ve been helping as well.

Krugman: There was a comment by Adam Serwer, I think just a day or two ago, that Trump doesn’t understand people who act on principle, that the Venezuelan regime was just thugs. It was just a mafia. The Iranians are thugs, they’re horrible, they’re murderers but they actually also believe in something. They’re genuine religious fanatics and that actually seems to have completely caught Trump and his people off guard.

O’Brien: Exactly. He just thought someone would play ball for him. Some second rate, second ranking leader would be brought in to take control. They’d install him and then they would start cutting deals. He has no idea what he’s doing, and that’s the scariest thing, that there’s just so many things they haven’t thought about because they assumed it would be easy. He’s got a very different kettle of fish in Iran than Venezuela, and he was a fool to think that they were similar cases.

Krugman: I am surprised that the military didn’t manage to get through at least a sense of fear in Trump.

O’Brien: You know, what did Trump do when he first came in? He had an excellent chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Brown. They got rid of him for no other reason, probably because he was a black guy and he was appointed by Biden. And they went through and they’ve been purging officers. They’ve been getting rid of officers who they do not trust. And yeah, they’ve been doing things like cutting off Ivy League institutions from sending officers there. There is a strong intellectual chill in the US military now, and you get promoted, not because you’re good. You get promoted if you’re considered loyal to the regime. So it will be interesting to see, but I don’t think that the US military is capable now of pushing back because I don’t think the personnel who would do it are near the positions of power to try and have that influence.

So I really think what we’re seeing is something that the Trump administration helped bring about by destroying independent thought in the US military. It’s why they’re sitting there now not knowing what the heck to do. If the generals did have courage, they’d go to Trump now and say, “This is a disaster.” But they don’t.

Krugman: You must have more contact than me, but I’ve known some people in the military. I’ve given talks at West Point, even. This was back in the Obama years, but I was always struck by how smart, well-informed, almost intellectual the US military was. But no sign of that now. I guess you’re saying that it took only about 13 months to undo all of that.

O’Brien: Sadly, there had been a growth of a MAGA officer corps from the first term.

Krugman: I didn’t know that.

O’Brien: There were a lot of pro-Trump officers. And I think they knew who some of them were from the first term. And there were a lot of military people who were backing Trump. And my guess is they are the ones now who have been freed by all this to bring their own ideologies to go higher. I don’t think under any other president we would’ve had an officer say, “This is a holy war where we’re going to crush the infidel,” and that’s what’s happened. That officers are feeling empowered to say that is really scary.

Krugman: Oh boy. That worries me not just about the Iran war, but about domestic stuff.

O’Brien: Yes. There are reports that the Iranians might be about to launch some kind of attack on the west coast, from a ship that has some drones in it. This is now a possibility. And I’m like, do you think Kash Patel’s FBI is up for the job of protecting against a counter-terrorist operation on US soil? I don’t. Kash Patel’s FBI is killing Americans.

Krugman: We should also think about Tulsi Gabbard as our chief intelligence official. Good God. So we’re now in this stage of war where the attempt to, at one stroke change the regime has failed. Also one in which it’s clear that the air superiority ain’t what it used to be. How does this campaign unfold?

O’Brien: I think the real question is shipping in the Gulf. That is the thing that will bring the crunch. If there was no shipping problem in the Gulf, they could keep pounding away for a few weeks and see if they could bring regime change by pounding away. But they cannot have a sustained shutoff of shipping in the Gulf. It just cannot happen. Already oil prices have gone up by 50% and that was even after they thought this might not be a long conflict. If shipping actually stops in the gulf. It’s going to have massive economic ramifications. So my guess is that they are stuck. This is the rock in the hard place, right? They either have to, in some ways, accept they’ve lost and say to the Iranians, “we’re gonna back down now. You just behave and let shipping through.” Or they have to send ground troops into southern Iran to clear out a buffer zone and allow the shipping to go through. Those seem to be the only other options. They have to get the shipping through. And they’re gonna have to do it relatively soon. So it’s either back down or ground troops.

Krugman: I can’t imagine we have that many ground troops.

O’Brien: We certainly don’t have that many in the theater, I think. They built up air power and sea power. They didn’t build up ground power from what we can tell. So they’d also have to have really good intelligence to know where they would put those ground troops ashore. I assume they’d need a port to bring in sustainment, to bring in supplies. It’s a big operation if they’re gonna send in ground troops. But if they just rely on air power, they’re going to really have to hope they have such good intelligence that they’ll be able to hit every Iranian drone before it takes off to hit a tanker, otherwise the tankers aren’t gonna go. They’re simply not going to head through the Gulf. Trump urged them to head through the Gulf a few days ago. And what happened is a lot of them were hit by drones. So I just don’t see it working in the present way.

Krugman: I’m wondering about things like helium. I had not even thought about that. But helium is really critical for the production of I guess semiconductors, right?

O’Brien: Yeah, absolutely. I guess a lot of it goes to Taiwan. And if that trade dries up, there’ll be a helium rush around the world. Everyone will be trying to get helium. The price will double, and that means the price of electronics and computers will go up enormously. Everything’s going to go up if this goes on.

Krugman: We’re already having this massive crunch with semiconductor memory prices skyrocketing because of the data centers and AI and all that. But I was thinking, I actually didn’t know at all about the shipping of helium. One of those things you never thought you’d have to think about. But there are other ways out of the Gulf. There’s even a pipeline that gets you out to the Red Sea, although that ain’t great either. But I was wondering whether maybe you could start somehow or other trucking helium out to the Mediterranean.

O’Brien: I have no idea. I had no idea. The Trump administration never had an idea, right? They simply had not worked this out.

Krugman: So you’re basically saying, the one scenario has been basically, “Let’s destroy Iran, wipe out their power plants, their water systems, basically…”

O’Brien: That’s a war crime too, by the way.

Krugman: That is a war crime. At least the Israelis have definitely committed war crimes on that front and I’m afraid that the US may be doing it too. But the idea that this would be a sustained thing, something like what the Russians have been trying to do to Ukraine, trying to knock out the power systems. But you don’t think that we have time for that.

O’Brien: I think the Republicans face Armageddon in 2026. The longer this goes on, the worse it is for the Republicans. And it’s already March. They’re not that far away from the election. We’re only eight months away from the election. So I can’t see it going on, say, over the summer. Then you’re into the campaigning season and this is already the most unpopular military intervention in US history. No intervention has started with such a low base and all the independents are against it. Basically, Republicans are for it, and Democrats and independents are very strongly opposed to it. So I personally think politically the Republicans are really in a bind here. If Trump had another year, if this was his first year in office, maybe he could continue it for longer, but it’ll be hard politically to keep it up. Now, maybe he doesn’t care and maybe he doesn’t plan to have free elections. But these are issues that they’re gonna face if they’re gonna go in and really try to clear out Southern Iran to allow the shipping through. But it’s not gonna be quick.

Krugman: One of the things I’ve been wondering, and again, this is not original, but it’s not clear that the Iranians would agree to a quick ending, even if the United States basically admits defeat.

O’Brien: That is the real wild card. On the whole, you would think Iran would like some time to consolidate its rule after getting all this bombing. But of course they now have a lot of cards. The Iranians have real cards to play over everyone else in the region by dominating shipping in this way. And so they might demand a lot to stop fighting. If Trump decides to throw in the towel, which he might, I think there’s a chance this is over relatively soon, because Trump just simply can’t sustain it politically. The Iranians might ask for a lot. In fact, they’ll come out of this in a better situation. They’ll make no more concessions on their nuclear program. Why would they? And they’ll demand the end of sanctions. Why wouldn’t they? Trump really needs to get out and get out soon. The Iranians are in a very powerful position.

Krugman: And there’s even the concern that the Iranians may want to see a lot of suffering, just independent of what the United States offers. They just might want to make the point that they can inflict massive damage, and the only way to make that absolutely clear is by actually inflicting massive damage.

O’Brien: Yep. And they also will want to preserve their leader. That is one thing. Having blown up one leadership, they probably don’t wanna lose another, one assumes. I’m not an Iranian expert, so what the heck do I know? Whenever I’ve tried to put my own rationality in a leader’s mind, it’s always wrong. I thought Putin would never invade Ukraine in 2022. That’s such a disastrous decision. Of course, then they go ahead and do it. So I have no idea what the Iranians are going to want. But certainly, objectively, they would be in a very strong position if Trump needs to get out now.

Krugman: Okay. So basically you think the sustained war crime campaign is just untenable from the US point of view. And so then this question of how does an exit happen?

O’Brien: Well, remember what he did last summer. He bombed Iran once, decided it was over, then ordered the Israelis to turn around. So he can actually do something like that. That’s the way he behaves. He doesn’t care about other countries really. And therefore, if he decides he’s gotta get out to save himself, he’ll get out. So there’s some talk he’s gonna say to the Europeans, “You clean up the Gulf, I’m outta there. I made the mess and you’ll be the janitors.” And that might be where we are.

So if he decides to cut and run, he’ll cut and run. That I think is clear. He’ll just get out, but he’ll leave a mess behind. But, he is weakening the United States. This might be one of those moments as a marker in American decline. Making the United States weak, making the United States seem or be less powerful than it was. We could be seeing quite an important historical moment here. The Chinese are laughing.

Krugman: Yeah. And just at the moment when we really need allies. And so in other news we just launched section 301 investigations against everybody. It’s trade sanctions against all our erstwhile allies. It’s really scary. But let’s go back to Ukraine for a few minutes here. What is happening in the Russia-Ukraine war?

O’Brien: What is interesting is that Russian advances basically haven’t stopped, but the Russians are taking less and less, and for a while the Ukrainians took more than the Russians. I think the Ukrainians also are not taking a lot now, but the analytical community was talking about how Ukraine is going to have this massive manpower crisis, and collapse throughout 2025. “They needed more men at the front. They’ll have to draft all these young kids.” They’re really quiet on that now. I haven’t heard a lot of talk about the Ukrainian need to draft everyone and send them to the front. The frontline is what the frontline is now. It is the kill zone. And the Ukrainians can make some advances when they have communications help, so actually the Starlink cut from what we can tell helped, but there was more than that.

But the Russians can only make advances when they sacrifice large numbers of soldiers. And the reality, from what I’m hearing, and this is anecdotal, is that the quality of the soldiers the Russians have is going down. You have to be a pretty odd duck to join the Russian military. If you’re gonna join the Russian military, you are having a bit of a death wish. So we are left now with a land war which probably won’t change a lot for the next few months and it will be this ranged war that we see. The Russian winter campaign did a lot of damage to Ukraine, but the Ukrainians have made it through. The weather will get better. It is getting better. It’s already warmer.

Clearly, Trump helped Putin launch that massive assault by saying, “Oh, Putin’s gonna have a ceasefire.” Remember that? That actually seemed to be a coordinated action where Trump helped Putin go for the big enchilada, and the Russians threw everything into that massive two days of attacks in a short period of time to try and drive the Ukrainians out of the war, deprive them of power. That didn’t work. It was pretty horrible. There were a lot of cold and dying people, but the Ukrainians are making it through.

I think the question is, what happens now in the spring-summer in the ranged war? Ukrainians’ systems are getting better. They’re getting more effective. They still don’t get the big Western systems they’d like, like the German Iris-T. I think the Russians are what the Russians are. They’re going to keep pounding away at infrastructure. So, I don’t wanna say it’s swinging towards Ukraine, but it’s actually better for Ukraine now than it was a while ago.

Now Trump has come to Putin’s aid by attacking Iran and driving up the oil prices. Russia’s making an extra $150 million a day now because of what’s happening in the Gulf. I think the Russian economy would’ve had real problems in terms of generating income over the summer, but now they get help with that. So I think we’re still in a bit of a stalemate.

Krugman: One other striking thing is that—although the US is a net exporter of oil—the US, if you take a national accounting standpoint, is a little bit richer because of oil prices, but the US government doesn’t capture any of that. It’s not there. There is no “we.” There is no United States. There’s only oil companies and there’s everybody else. And in Russia, Putin captures a lot of the extra revenue. So it’s actually a weird thing where this benefits Putin but not the United States. And in a way, the Russians have already tried using the dark side of the force against Ukraine, and that’s the US-Israeli approach to Iran now. “Let’s just knock out the infrastructure.” But it didn’t work. I don’t think they have freezing cold winters in Tehran, but anyway, we’ve certainly done incredible damage. We’ve all seen the photos of the poisonous black smoke covering it. But I don’t think there’s ever been a case where a terror bombing campaign really worked.

O’Brien: No. And a city like Tehran has very tenuous water supplies. If the US and Israel were to go against that, that would create a famine of really quite extraordinary proportions, we could compare it to a drought of extraordinary proportions. But the thing about the Iranian people is they don’t seem to be at all convinced Trump wants to help them. Trump said, “Rise up and I will back you.” And in neither case did he back them. And they understand that. I think what they’re hearing is that he wants to put in place someone from the old regime.

So the Americans didn’t try to actually work with the Iranian people. They didn’t seem to work with any of the opposition to try and overthrow the regime. So the Iranian people for now just seem to be keeping their heads down. Again, I’m not an Iranian expert, but we don’t see signs of an immediate uprising to go along with these US and Israeli air attacks. That does not seem to be happening. And that’s probably because of what Trump has done and how he’s shown them what he stands for.

Krugman: Well, I’m actually a little personally worried—not that I’m gonna be killed by an Iranian drone, but I have plans. I’m supposed to be doing various stuff in Europe in the spring and now, is there going to be jet fuel supplies? How much of the world economy is gonna be really disrupted by this? And I guess you’re telling me that this goes on until, not only Trump cries uncle, but he cries uncle convincingly enough to get the Iranians to go along.

O’Brien: Yeah, again, it might happen soon because I think there must be huge pressure on him now to get out.

Krugman: I’ve never been the kind of person who is constantly checking the markets, but I’m just looking at the price of Brent Crude, which is $101 as we speak.

O’Brien: All right. Now it’s over a hundred again. It was down in the eighties when Trump said the war would be short. And now the markets are figuring out it’s not going to be short. But that’s going to put big pressure on him to end this soon. How much is oil now in America for a gallon? If you go fill up your car—

Krugman: The national average was like $3.65 or something, as of yesterday, and rising. And apparently the real thing is diesel. Diesel has gone up more than a dollar a gallon. And there’s a lot of red-hatted truck drivers who are very unhappy right now.

O’Brien: Yep.

Krugman: I’d say let’s have another conversation, but I’m afraid we only have conversations when terrible things happen. But thanks for the rather grim update.

O’Brien: You know, none of this makes sense to me, Paul. None of it makes sense. What the United States is doing, what it’s become, the lack of professionalism in the US government. It just seems like a farce.

Krugman: I spent a year in the US government more than 40 years ago. It was the Reagan administration. I was just at the sub-political level but I was shocked at the level of ignorance and incoherence that I saw in 1983. But people said, “Oh, this is just the Reagan administration, this won’t happen again.” And these guys make the Reagan administration look like consummate professionals.

O’Brien: Oh my God, I can’t imagine. The picture of the shoes did it for me. Just look at this group of clowns. They’re clowns performing for a ringmaster. Supposedly Trump would just guess their shoe sizes. And if he guessed the wrong size, they didn’t have enough courage to actually get a pair of shoes that fit. They’re wearing shoes because Trump guessed the wrong size. That is a sign of mental illness, I think.

Krugman: Yeah. Brings new meaning to the cliché: “If the shoe fits, wear it.”

So on that note—God help us all.

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.

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