Dreams With Words

Posted by Bret Devereaux

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This week, time for something a bit silly: we’re going to think about the plausibility of the warfare in Frank Herbert’s Dune! In particular, I want to approach the question in two parts: first asking if the model of warfare among the Great Houses we’re introduced to in the first book of Dune (that is, in the first third of the book) makes sense given the fantastical technology and social structures Herbert has created to enable it. Then, next time, we’re going to return to ask, given that model of warfare, if the success of the Fremen jihad, occurring in the space between Dune and Dune Messiah actually seems plausible. Could a military society like Dune‘s Great Houses exist given their technology and if they did, could the Fremen have conquered them?

I should note here that while I am going to use a few images from the recent film adaptations, I want to focus here strictly on the combat model as presented in the books. Villeneuve’s film adaptation gets closest to replicating Herbert’s system of warfare – the other adaptations succumb to the temptation of simply introducing lots of guns of one kind of another – but there’s enough small changes or variations that I want to stick just to the books and the ‘pure’ expression of Herbert’s vision of futuristic warfare.

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).

Warfare Under Shields

Of course for those who know books (and at least the Villeneuve film), the fundamental technology shaping warfare among the Great Houses of Dune is shields. This is a production of the fictional ‘Holtzman effect’ which is the (again, fictional) physics principle in the Dune universe which enables the folding of space for faster-than-light travel (but not the safe navigation thereof), ‘suspensors’ that allow objects and people to be levitated and finally the operation of energy shields which would repel any object attempting to pass through above a certain minimal speed.

Now I’ll note that Herbert’s physics here is actually a bit dodgy. We’re told that the reason for the minimal speed is to allow air-flow into and out of the shield, but my understanding is that even in room temperature air that feels quite still to us, the individual gas molecules move very fast (something like c. 450m/s), so a velocity-lower-limit wouldn’t work effectively as a ‘filter’ to let in air but not, say, bullets. But I am prepared to just accept that the shields work the way they are described, permitting slow-moving objects (and also air, for some reason) but repelling faster moving objects.

Of course in a way, the reason shields work this way in Dune is that it produces the fighting system that Herbert wants: shields effectively nullify missile weapons and explosives of all types, leading to a return to contact weapons, particularly knives. That has all sorts of knock-on effects on the structure of armies in this universe which we’ll get to below, but let us stay focused here on individual combat. We’re repeatedly told that the fighting style that results from this near-total emphasis on shields is unusual and to a degree artificial, demanding combatants keep their offensive movements slow enough to penetrate a shield.

So we might first ask if this fighting system, at the individual level, makes sense given the fantastical constraints Herbert’s shields impose. And I guess my answer is…sort of? I think the idea of a return to contact weaponry in this context works in the main, but with two main exceptions, which is that the style of contact weapon fighting that dominates is not what I would anticipate and second that the way Herbert also excludes laser weaponry strikes me as perhaps not fully thought out.

When it comes to style it is important to separate the various film adaptations – particularly Villeneuve’s (which features a lot of armor) – from the books. In the books, the strong impression is that body armor is not a typical supplement for shields: we never hear about heavy armor and instead hear about shields being attached to fabric uniforms (such as when Duke Leto’s uniform is torn where the shield attachment was ripped off). Meanwhile, the contact weapons of choice seem almost invariably to be short blades, described as daggers or knives. The most common weapon of the Great Houses was the Kindjal and it is described as having a 20cm blade, which is quite short, very much a dagger rather than a sword (the smallest of swords generally still have blade-lengths upwards of 45cm).

That is great for producing lots of cool, dramatic knife fights, but honestly doesn’t make much sense to me given the constraints. The main factor in the decline of body armor was, quite famously, the fact that it became increasingly impossible to armor against firearms without massively thick armor that was impractically heavy. But shields remove this problem: the velocity (and thus energy delivery) of any strike is now strictly limited, meaning even relatively thin and light armor will be effective. Under those conditions, a combatant wearing armor could render most of their body’s surfaces functionally immune to contact weapons without a serious loss of agility, forcing an opponent to aim only for things like joints that cannot be armored easily with solid (if articulating) plates. Whatever agility is lost would be more than offset by being able to target all of an opponent’s body while only offering a tiny portion of your own in response.

People in Dune are often super-humanly intelligent, fast and agile, but they do not appear to be super-humanly strong to the point that they’d be able to, say, drive a knife through a millimeter of steel (or whatever exotic science fiction equivalent might be furnished). In short, I would expect armor to dominate formal combat in things like open battles or duels where fighters had time to put it on.

That in turn is going to mean that combat is going to consist of a lot of grappling, because to actually get a weapon through the relatively small gaps offered by that armor – or for that matter to slide a dagger at relatively low speed through a shield – it is going to often be necessary to get an opponent on the ground and to some degree pinned. Knives would be useful in that context, but speaking historically so would many polearms, designed for hooking and levering attacks that do indeed occur at speeds sufficiently slow to function through shields, in order to throw opponents to the ground. Alternately if for some reason body armor does remain rare, then the obvious optimal choice for combat is the spear, given the tremendous advantage that reach poses and the fact that a spear’s pin-point piercing attack has no problem penetrating a target even at low speeds.

The related problem is the relative lack of formation fighting. Now I want to be clear, there is some formation fighting in the books, particularly the note that the Sardaukar can be recognized in combat because they split into groups of three fighting in a triangle back-to-back when pressed. But we don’t see mass formation fighting in groups larger than three. But of course in the real world we’ve had a lot of experience with societies where close-combat fighting was core to military success and those societies almost without exception formed up their armies in large blocks of soldiers fighting together. Spacing and such might differ, but formation fighting was a near constant for armies that expected to do most of their fighting hand-to-hand. So while upper-elites might be trained mostly in a dueling culture, I would expect the common soldiers to be trained to fight as units. Those needn’t be massive units, but something less like the Sarduakar in their trios and more like a Roman maniple (120 men), with enough men to present a clear ‘front’ to an enemy that is hard to get around.

As an aside, this is one point where I think the Villeneuve adaptation really pushed the source material. We see the Atreides fight in armor, using long polearms and with a clear formation fighting technique, particularly the scene in the fall of Arrakeen where the Atreides soldiers are defending the stairs – and appear to be succeeding until the Sardaukar drop in behind their formation. All of which is to say, instead of being dominated by ‘swordsmen’ fighting unarmored with knives built for cutting attacks, I would expect this system of warfare to be dominated by armored fighters wielding primarily polearms, supported by thrusting daggers (something like a rondel dagger), whose primary method of fighting mostly consisted of formation fighting in groups and grappling when fighting alone.

The second problem I see is the laser weapons of the setting, ‘lasguns.’ I honestly find it strange that Herbert felt the need to even include militarized laser weapons, given that they seem to me to create pretty substantial problems that he only imperfectly resolves. The limitation imposed on lasguns is that if they strike a shield, the result is ‘sub-atomic fusion’ (the fiction’s term) which immediately produces a nuclear explosion, which occurs at a random point anywhere from inside the shield to at the lasgun or along the beam between the two. The idea is that this creates a powerful weapon which in the fiction can only be used against enemies without shields. In the context of the first book (the only one of the originals in which the military systems of the Great Houses are really functioning), that mostly comes up in the use of lasguns against the Fremen, since they do not use shields. The idea being that using a lasgun against an opponent with a shield is simply too dangerous.

And the problem here is that there are just obviously a lot of military targets which might be protected by shields where it would be worth risking the destruction of what is, I must stress, a man portable weapon-system in order to destroy through a shield. The most obvious would be the main palace of one of the Great Houses: it is very important that the Atreides residence in Arakeen is protected by a powerful shield generator, but why wouldn’t an enemy take the risk of sneaking a lasgun close to the shield and discharging it? Your soldiers needn’t even be present (nor must you use some sort of ‘thinking machine’): a simple egg-timer attached to the trigger of a concealed laser weapon would be enough to ensure your team had time to retreat out of the blast radius. Even if the explosion didn’t emerge within the shield, triggering an untraceable nuclear blast in the middle of an opponent’s capital or in the middle of their field army would be a really effective tactic and so one would expect ‘suicide’ lasgun attacks all the time. Especially in a society that engages in “wars of assassins.”

Now I cannot find if it is ever made clear if lasgun-shield explosions fall under the Great Convention’s ban on atomics (nuclear weapons) in the setting. I suppose if they do this is a partial fix: no Great House could openly use the above tactic without breaching the convention. But then of course the problem becomes the deniable or surreptitious use of these tactics, because in most cases the very act of a lasgun-shield attack is going to obliterate all evidence one might use to determine the perpetrator and given that all of the houses have both lasguns and shields, any such explosion could have been an accident.

It always seemed to me the storytelling solution here was curiously simple – just make the lasgun-shield interaction detonate just the lasgun and do so rather less intensely than a nuclear blast and you achieve the same results in terms of the story.

All that said, moving forward in this bit of silly analysis, we’re going to assume that the fighting system works as advertised: shields make basically all projectile weapons largely useless, reducing combat to contact warfare. Lasguns are powerful and reasonably readily available, but too risky to use in an environment where shields might be common.

What kind of warfare does that produce among the Great Houses and does it make sense?

Armies of the Great Houses

The in-universe term for the society of the Great Houses has never made it into any of the adaptations and so may be unfamiliar but it will be useful to us: it is the faufreluche system, with the plural, ‘the faufreluches’ used to mean the whole of imperial society.

What we see in the societies of the faufreluches is that they are intensely stratified and rigid, to the point of nearly being a hereditary caste system.  This system is rules over in turn by the Great Houses who are responsible for enforcing it in their domains.  They do that with their armies and the sense we get from the Great Houses that we see is that these are intensely militarized social institutions, wholly bent around the provision of violence in society.  They are, in practice, military aristocracies.

They’re also small.  Really small.  House Atreides is the government for a planet (initially Caladan, then Arrakis), but it’s decision-making core is perhaps a few dozen people, as small or smaller than Alexander’s companions or the war council of a Roman general.  Administrative capacity is also clearly severely limited: Duke Leto’s best response to having functionally no knowledge or control over the ‘Deep Desert’ that covers most of his planet is to send one guy (Duncan Idaho) on a mission to go check it out.  We get no hint of the sort of vast administration we might expect from a modern administrative state governing even a mid-sized county, much less a planet.

The other bit of evidence we have is that their armies are also really small. We get a sense of what the largest sort of offensive operation the setting might generally see with the Harkonnen invasion of Arrakis. We get in snippets that the Harkonnen committed “ten legions” (which required something on the order of 2,000 ships), along with two legions of Imperial Sardaukar. The latter we may assume is a relatively small portion of the emperor’s total forces, but I think we should assume that the Harkonnen force represents essentially their entire offensive military potential. Thufir Hawat is utterly shocked by the scale of the assault and Vladimir Harkonnen notes that the cost of it meant burning through House Harkonnen’s considerable reserves of cash.

Now nowhere in the core text is the size of a standard legion ever stated, that I could find, but the broad fandom generally accepted – I believe from the Dune Encyclopedia – that a Dune legion consists of 30,000 men, divided into ten brigades. It would have to be a fairly standard unit size across the houses in order for it to be useful for both Hawat and the Baron as a tool to think with, so I think we can assume this is a more-or-less standard unit size for major operations.

That would make the sum total of offensive Harkonnen power around 300,000 troops. Presumably some further forces were held back on Geidi Prime or couldn’t be transported, but this force had to represent the lion’s share of Harkonnen forces simply because it expected to outnumber the Atreides defenders, which was all of the Atreides troops and House Atreides is a peer competitor to House Harkonnen and both of them are in the top rung of Great Houses in terms of military power directly behind the emperor himself (to the point that the emperor is threatened by the rising power of House Atreides and later by that of House Harkonnen).

I want to stop here and answer a key objection I know is coming which is that it is only the artificially high costs the Spacing Guild charges for transport that keeps armies small. The problem with this is of course when the Harkonnen attack Arrakis, while Harkonnen offensive power is limited by guild transport costs, Atreides defensive power is not: The Atreides gave up Caladan to come to Arrakis, so they are all there, the entire military force of a first-rate Great House. And yet the Harkonnen still expect to outnumber them. That suggests not that these Great Houses have huge mass armies they can’t transport, but rather that the Harkonnen, with a heavily industrialized homeworld, can build marginally more shields than most opponents and so have an unusually large army (which they can only move, because it is so large, by burning off a generation or more’s worth of wealth gained through the exploitation of the most valuable planet in the universe). So it is not just the Spacing Guild that keeps armies small – evidently these societies cannot reliably raise much larger armies even for domestic defense.

(That said, I do think a factor in the durability of the Great Houses is likely that few houses can do as the Harkonnen did – transport a large fraction of their overall military power for an offensive operation – because of Guild costs, leading to a strong ‘defender’s advantage’ in warfare in the setting. Of course the Atreides do relocate under this same regime with – we are told directly – the entire House, but we might assume that for such an ’emergency’ measure (which is actually a trap with the Guild complicit) those heavy costs were reduced or perhaps supported by the emperor.)

So I think we may say this is a military system in which 300,000 men is a lot for a ‘first tier’ Great House (excluding the House Corrino) to have as its military. Most Great Houses would have had smaller armies, presumably.

Which might sound big but these are the militaries of entire planets which are actively on a war footing. The Red Army in the Second World War reached a frontline strength of over ten million and it represented only one (very large and powerful) country. If Great House armies were similar in structure even to modern peacetime standing forces, we might expect their total strength to be in the tens of millions, just to match the level of militarization we have here on Earth during a period of relatively low warfare. These armies are very clearly not that large. The fact that an Atreides force trained by Duncan Idaho – a single person – is understood to be a potential threat suggests how small they are and how impactful relatively small bodies of troops are understood to be.

I actually think these elements fit together fairly well in suggesting a certain sort of society. It certainly isn’t that this is a depopulated universe – Arrakis is treated as an underpopulated, resource-poor wasteland and yet Arakeen is clearly a major city (and there’s another even larger center, Carthag, we hear about but do not see). Geidi Prime is described as a heavily industrialized world as well, implying a substantial population. This is a populated universe, but one with very weak states, which control relatively little of the real day-to-day activity.

We actually get one of the strongest suggestions of this with the scale of the Guild Heighliner that takes the Atreides to Arrakis: the whole of House Atreides fits within a relatively small portion of its interior. But presumably these ships were not built comically large because it was funny, rather much of the rest of that space is going to be taken up by regular commercial traffic – the movement of goods and private persons – which would then dwarf the size of the movement of the entire Atreides military. Which again, implies that there are a lot of people and production happening below the level of the Great Houses.

And that in turn fits with what we are told about the nature of the faufreluches as a social system: it is rigid, hierarchical, and stratified, with limited mobility under the motto “a place for every man and every man in his place.” Under that sort of system, we might expect the lower classes to be systematically de-militarized and indeed it seems like they mostly are. Local magnates might have access to small amounts of armed force, but mostly it is only the Great Houses that wield large amounts of armed force, with which they rule over their planets.

So what we have are relatively large societies ruled over by quite small Great Houses which as a result cannot reach or effect most of what people are doing, akin to the very weak states one often sees in the pre-modern period: the state can enforce tax collection, but it doesn’t really provide services (except violence) or have much of a role in regulating the day-to-day interactions. Given the strong sense of hierarchy in how the fraufreluches are described, I think we should probably understand that the common person is instead ‘ruled’ on a day-to-day basis by smaller local Big Men (probably substantial local property owners; in-universe the term for this class are the richece) who wield force notionally in the name of the Great House but in practice do so with minimal interference from ‘the state’ such as it is.

That structure enables the personalist, patrimonial sort of rule the Great Houses seem to exert, but also inhibits severely their ability to actually mobilize the resources of their society. House Atreides very evidently lacks even just the basic administration to, say, put all of Arrakis on a ‘war economy’ footing. If 300,000 men was the best the Harkonnen could do from an entirely industrial planet, they too lack this sort of administration (this even after building a war chest harvesting spice on Arrakis for years!). Instead, with weak administrations, the Great Houses survive by siphoning off only a relatively small portion of overall economic activity in order to perform their primary purposes: continuing to extract that small portion and using what of it they can to wage their petty wars.

Does It Work?

I actually think this more or less works given what we’re told about warfare. The key factors that seem to support a society being structured this way are the sharp limits to how many fighters a society can produce and the specific kinds of industrial military power available.

To simplify, there are basically four components of military power for the Great Houses as a result of their technology: trained fighters, shields, aircraft (ornithopters) and frigates (the term for the standard space-going warship/transport of the setting, capable of surface-to-orbit flight, but requiring a Guild Heighliner for interplanetary travel). We’re going to set aside the latter two for now except to note that they exist and matter quite a lot.

What the system needs to work is that shields are expensive and fighters are hard to train, but without both, a military in this technological setting is extremely hard to make and keep functional.

First, shields are an expensive piece of equipment. This is repeatedly stressed: the Fremen do not use shields because they enrage the sandworms, but also they cannot afford them. Duke Leto assumes it will take a long time, even with the massive income of Arrakis, to accumulate the wealth necessary to equip the Fremen with shields (which he assumes is necessary to use them militarily). So the cost of shields is going to shrink armies.

And it is going to shrink armies a lot. Again, the implication of the setting is that the armies of entire planets consist of perhaps a few hundred thousand shielded fighters, which certainly implies that shields are massively expensive. The normal counter-argument here is that it is in fact the cost of guild transport that keeps these armies small, but we’ve dealt with that already. I have a hard time imagining exactly what sort of man-portable device could be so expensive than an entire planet could field only tens of thousands of them, but we might imagine the effect to be something like a supercharged version of the way national air forces have changed as the cost of aircraft (and their capabilities) have risen. Despite being enormously more productive today than it was in the 1940s, the United States maintains only a few thousand modern fighters (the world’s largest fighter fleet) compared to the several hundred thousand far cheaper fighters the United States built during WWII.

Evidently in the Dune universe, even a man-portable body-shield seems to be an economic expense on the scale of something like a modern fifth generation fighter, so whole planets can afford only small numbers of them.

The other aspect, of course, is the supply of trained fighters. Of course one of the fantastical elements of Dune’s universe is that human training and learning is capable of producing far greater results than in the real world, a result of the refinement of human learning and training after the abandonment of ‘thinking machines’ in the Butlerian Jihad. As a result, the gap between a trained fighter and an untrained one in close combat (a distinction that will matter a lot for next week) is very large. The Baron Harkonnen observes that the two Sardaukar legions that accompanied his army to Arrakis might well be able to overwhelm them, despite being outnumbered five-to-one. Now what we see of the Harkonnen does not suggest their warriors are well trained – the Harkonnen military is a quantity-over-quality military, attempting to leverage its industrial capabilities to the degree it can to make up for what seem like poorly motivated and trained soldiers – but the fact that such performance gaps are possible is notable.

But it is also clear that training good fightiers in this society means demanding decades of focused effort. So not only do these societies need to support the production of what seem to be extremely expensive weapon-systems (shields), the fighters who use those shields are also really expensive, demanding an enormous amount of training in order to be fully effective.

Which then results in a military environment in which a small number of shielded warriors could dominate a very large ‘weekend warrior’ militia force. Shades of heavily armored knights on horseback: expensive weapon-system, difficult and rare training, leading power to concentrate in the relative handful of individuals (in Frank Herbert’s universe, seemingly always men) who possess both. I can see such a system, more or less, emerging under the conditions set out.

The problem I see, such as it is is that this system does not strike me as stable and the one thing we are told quite clearly in the text is that it is extremely stable. The basic structure of the Imperium under Corrino rule, we’re told, persists for ten thousand years and Leto II’s entire baroque plan (the ‘golden path’) has to be calibrated to in part to break the tremendous inertia of society under the faufreluches.¹

The problem with this system being stable is pretty simple: these small noble houses are perched atop very large, complex societies, which are capable of supporting a modern administrative state. As noted, we don’t seem to have such a state apparatus: House Atreides arrives to Arrakis almost entirely as an army, to the point where they have to hire local housekeepers. Likewise it is notable in the banquet scene, the major local notables are “a stillsuit manufacturer […] an electronics equipment importer, a water-shipper […], a representative of the Guild bank […], a dealer in replacement parts for spice mining equipment” and so on (Dune, 128). What we don’t see are the heads of major bureaucracies – the Minister for Spice Refining or the Secretary for the Transportation and Orbit Administration, that sort of thing – because there don’t appear to be any.

Instead, the Great Houses are basically ‘all army’ and forced to contract out or delegate other functions to the local notables, the ‘richece.’ Which again, above, explains why these Great Houses can only siphon off a relatively small portion of the productive capacity of their worlds: there’s a wealthy upper-class that is essential to their administration which can resist extraction.

The problem for stability is that these societies have the technology (rapid communications) and the ability (large surplus population, capacity for mass education) to create a modern administrative state and the first Great House to do so would massively improve its economic and military position. Moreover, the richece themselves almost certainly are running large, administration-heavy bureaucratic organizations – those stillsuit factories and electronics importation operations do not run themselves – and so are actively building the class of educated bureaucrats that the nobility could harness (or the wealth to displace the nobility and rule themselves). So I would expect this system to be unstable, either tipping over into the emergence of modern, high-capacity administrative states or – if the importance of that training remained high enough – with repeated conflict between the richece (with their wealth and administrative capacity) and their Great House overlords (with their armies of trained fighting men) leading the rule of the Great Houses over their own planetary fiefs to feel profoundly precarious.

Either way, the setting ought to proceed quite rapidly from the somewhat ‘medieval Europe’ feel of its governing structures into an ‘early modern Europe’ feel of instability, political foment and fragmentation, potentially leading to the emergence of far more capable states (some under their old hereditary monarchies, some under the richece as republics). But in-universe that doesn’t happen: the social system is instead presented as extremely stable, only able to be disrupted by a major impact from outside of it: the Fremen.

And that’s where we’ll head next week: how do the Fremen fit into this? Could they disrupt the system? Would they win?

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