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.

But first, as we’re going to cover below, equipping a fighting force with Dune’s version of modern military power – shields, ornithopters and frigates – is expensive. If you want to help me equip a Great House of trained fighters to challenge the Imperium, you can support this project over at Patreon. If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).

Wars of the Fremen

We should start just by outlining exactly what the Fremen do, both what we see in Dune and what we are told about in Dune Messiah.

The Fremen are, at the time Dune begins, the native population of Arrakis and we are told there are about 15 million of them. They maintain some small levels of industry – mostly things which can be rapidly moved – back lack large industrial systems and notably lack the ability to produce any of the elements of industrial military power (shields, aircraft, frigates) essential to the warfare of the Great Houses, though they do at time capture and use this equipment.¹ The Fremen are already highly capable warriors, but because they lack these elements of industrial military power – especially shields – it is easy for the militaries of the Great House to oppress them. In particular, the Fremen have no defense against laser weaponry, which is devastating against unshielded opponents.

When Paul arrives, he organizes the Fremen for what is initially a classic protracted war campaign against the Harkonnen occupation, which eventually sufficiently disrupts spice production to bring the emperor himself to Arrakis. The result is something of a science-fiction rerun of Dien Bien Phu: the foreign occupier, convinced that his industrial military renders him unbeatable in a conventional engagement intentionally and arrogantly extends his force into enemy territory only to be cut off and defeated.

A few things make this Fremen success work. First, the Fremen operate from a terrestrial base that their enemies cannot attack effectively (the deep desert). The Fremen also operate with tremendous local knowledge: because they are the indigenous population, it is easy for their agents to infiltrate into the settled zone the Harkonnen control, meaning that the Fremen have good visibility into Harkonnen operations even before their leader becomes a prescient demigod. Perhaps most importantly conditions on Arrakis negate most of the advantages of industrial military power. As Hawat notes, ornithopters suffer substantial wear-and-tear on Arrakis, making it expensive (but not impossible) to maintain large fleets of them; shields too apparently are hard to maintain. The large sandstorms that rage basically anywhere except in the small area protected by the ‘Shield Wall’ mountain range (which is where all of the cities are) can disable shields at almost any scale. But most of all, shields attract and drive mad the large local sandworms, making their use on the ground in the open desert essentially suicide.

Consequently the Fremen able to win in part because they occupy the one place in the whole universe where the military ‘package’ of the Great Houses does not work.

And to be honest, I do not find the way the Fremen win on Arrakis to be wholly implausible. Given their mastery of the local terrain and infiltration of the local population, it makes sense that the Fremen would be very hard to uproot and might steadily bleed an occupying force quite badly over time. At the same time, the idea that Shaddam IV and House Corrino might – somewhat arrogantly – assume they that could safely extend themselves down to the surface is the sort of military error regular armies make all the time. Finally, it also makes sense that the Harkonnen and Corrino armies coming to Arrakis might fail to adapt to Fremen warfare – fail to adapt to warfare without shields, for instance – because they do not perceive their primary security threat to be the Fremen (the Harkonnen, we’re told, consistently underestimate how many Fremen there are). So while they should respond to the Fremen with guns and artillery, it makes sense that initially they respond with the sort of armies that work for all of their other problems: trained melee fighters with shields.

And if – again, we’re accepting this for the sake of argument – if the Fremen are the superior close-combat fighters, the result of that effort might well go this way. Especially with a prescient leader pushing them forward to victory. Crucially, the victory at Arrakeen fundamentally depends on these local factors: Fremen knowledge of terrain enables Paul to mass his forces undetected and observe the Corrino disposition safely and to thus to stage a coordinated surprise attack against his opponents. Sandworms enable him to deliver an attack force rapidly through a sandstorm and the storm itself disables the defender’s shields, enabling him to disable their frigates and also neutralizing much of their airpower. Fremen victory is almost entirely reliant on factors unique to Arrakis.

So that is more or less fine. The problem I have is really with everything that happens next.

What Happens Next…

I think we should be clear what Dune and especially Dune Messiah lead us to understand comes next to avoid unnecessary wrangling in the comments. While we do not see it, the Fremen wage an absolutely massive, known-universe spanning war in which they conquer thousands of worlds and kill sixty-one billion people (the statistic given in Dune Messiah).

Equally, we are supposed to understand that this result was inevitable. Indeed, this is one of the central themes of Dune, that by the time Paul’s prescience has developed sufficiently for him to understand the road to his Jihad, it is already too late to stop it. As we are told of Paul’s thoughts, “He had thought to ppose the jihad within himself, but the jihad would be. His legions would rage out from Arrakis even without him. They needed only the legend he already had become.” Just after, right before his duel with Feyd, he thinks, “from here, the future will open, the clouds part onto a kind of glory. And if I die here, they’ll say I sacrificed myself that my spirit might lead them. And if I live, they’ll say nothing can oppose Muad’Dib” (Dune 482, emphasis original). The point is the Jihad happens either way.

I want to stress that: even without Paul Atreides’ prescience, the Jihad happens and at the very least burns across the known universe doing massive destruction; in fact, even without Paul the Fremen win.

That position – that the destruction of the Fremen Jihad is not merely possible but inevitable to the point that Paul cannot stop it – puts a very, very high bar on its military plausibility. In particular it rules out any defense that Fremen victory is simply because Paul, as a prescient military leader, can simply pull an endless series of ‘inside straights.’ Remember: the Fremen explicitly still win even in Paul Muad’Dib Atredies is dead at the hands of Feyd Rautha Harkonnen. It is not enough for it to be possible for the Fremen to win, it must be impossible for them to lose.

Now in the thematic world of Dune, that is because military victory is fundamentally a product of the Fremen Mirage: societies have an inherent vitality to them and the Fremen are vital, hardened by the harshness of Arrakis, in a way that the Great Houses are not. In Herbert’s mind, that is enough: the ‘hard men’ created by the ‘hard times’ of Arrakis will inevitably triumph once an event – the emergence of Paul as a heroic figure – spurs them into action. Paul is thus die Weltseele zu Pferde, “the world-spirit on horseback,” the archetypal ‘great man of history’ who embodies supposed historical forces which are larger than him, which act through him and which would act without him.

Except of course the problem is that both the Fremen Mirage and the Great Man Theory of history are, to put it bluntly, rubbish– grand historical narratives which simply do not fit the contours of how history actually works. ‘Hard men’ from ‘hard places’ and ‘hard times’ lose all the time. Societies only seem ‘vital’ or ‘decadent’ when viewed in retrospective through the prism of success or failure that was contingent, not inevitable. History is full of movements and moments which cannot be explained through the agency of ‘great men.’ There is, in fact, no ‘world spirit’ guiding history like an invisible hand, but rather a tremendous number of contingent decisions made by billions of people with agency acting with free will.

So rather than simply assume that because the Fremen are moving with the ‘universe spirit’ of history as it were, that because they are a vital people, because they are ‘hardened’ by Arrakis, that they win by default, we’re going to ask are the Fremen actually likely to win in their Jihad? Remember: the books present this not merely as likely but inevitable. Is it likely?

Oh my, no.

The War With the Great Houses

I think we actually want to think through this conflict in two rough phrases. Initially, the Fremen leaving Arrakis are going to be confronted by the traditional militaries of the Great Houses. We’re never told how many Great Houses there are, but it is clearly quite a lot – the institution still very much exists in God Emperor of Dune despite the fact that we’re told 31 Houses Major (the upper-rank of the Great Houses) had collapsed. The implication is that 31 Houses Major do not represent even a majority. Likewise, the entire political system of the Corrino Imperium only works if the Houses of the Landsraad collectively had more military power than the Corrino Sardaukar, such that the emperor had to keep them divided at all times (and such that, acting collectively, groups of them might force concessions from the emperor). Given that Baron Harkonnen thinks just two legions of Sardaukar could easily overwhelm his entire offensive force of ten legions, the implication has to be that there are quite a few Houses Major with military forces on the scale of House Harkonnen.

In short the Fremen are likely to be faced by many dozens of ‘House armies’ ranging from the high tens of thousands to the low hundreds of thousands, probably collectively representing several million trained fighters with shields (I’d guess a few tens of millions, once Houses Minor are accounted for), ‘thopters,’ frigates and all of the other components of ‘modern’ (for the setting) warfare.

The main advantage the Fremen have – and it is a very significant advantage – is that their control over the Spacing Guild (via control over the spice on Arrakis) means that they can face these forces one-by-one, rather than having to face a large coalition of the Landsraad all collected in a single location. The secondary advantage the Fremen have is that the Great Houses are likely to try to meet them with the same rigid, formulaic armies they have long prepared for use against each other: trained fighters using shields engaging in melee combat. They will probably not be, in the first instance, rapid military innovators – they aren’t set up for that.

But the disadvantages the Fremen face are enormous. First and foremost – and this is going to be central – Fremen manpower is fundamentally brittle. On the one hand, the Fremen do not have a civilian class – all of their people are trained fighters, so basically their entire adult population is available for combat. The problem is that means that there is no underlying ‘peasantry’ as it were to refill the ranks of their losses and the harsh conditions of Arrakis – essential to the entire Fremen thing – are not conducive to a ‘baby boom’ either. Fremen losses will thus be functionally permanent: every Fremen Fedaykin lost is lost forever – a long-term reduction in the total Fremen population and thus available Atreides military force. Meanwhile, Hawat estimates the total Fremen population at roughly 10 million. That represents a fundamentally finite resource which cannot really be replenished: it must provide for offensive forces, for casualties, for garrison forces to hold conquered worlds and with enough left over to maintain both the logistics of the Jihad and the basic rhythms of life in the sietches of Arrakis.

The other major problem the Fremen face is that most of their key advantages evaporate once they are off of Arrakis. Indeed, some invert. The Fremen knowledge of local terrain was crucial to their victory on Arrakis but if anything the Fremen are remarkably badly equipped to understand and fight in other terrains. These are men who cannot conceive of a thing called a ‘sea,’ for instance and one supposes they would not fair well in snow or forest either. Urban terrain is also, crucially, mostly foreign to them. Their mastery of stillsuits, of walking with irregular strides in the desert, of concealment in sand, of the use of sandworms all matter exactly not at all off of Arrakis and in most cases will be active hindrances. At best they will have to face the armies of the Imperium in ‘stand up’ fights, at worst they will be repeatedly ambushed.

What is even worse, the Fremen are stepping into a kind of warfare they are unfamiliar with, for which their society was not designed. Remember: Fremen victory on Arrakis depended on most of the technology of industrial warfare not working there. Sandstorms grounded ornithopters and shields were broadly unusable outside of the towns and villages (and disabled by a sandstorm for the final battle). None of that is true the moment the Fremen step off world.

Worse yet the Fremen supply of industrial ‘firepower’ is fundamentally limited. The Fremen themselves are incapable of manufacturing any of this. One of the sleights of hand here is that while the Fremen disable all of the Harkonnen and Corrino frigates at the opening of their battle at Arrakeen – blasting the noses off – these very ships are handwaved back into functionality for the off-screen Jihad. One wonders how the Fremen – who have never seen this technology before, technology which is built nowhere on Arrakis (we’re told the Harkonnen’s equipment is all off-world import, nothing is manufactured locally) – were able to swiftly repair dozens of high-tech spaceships. Equally, the Fremen lack both the ability to manufacture shields or ornithopters, but also lack the knowledge to maintain shields or ornithopters.

They have exactly what they captured from the Harkonnen and Corrino troops and nothing else, with almost no means to repair anything that breaks – this is where my earlier point that shields evidently require a lot of maintenance and replacement matters. While the idea of running an army entirely off of captured weapons is a thing often thought of, functionally no one ever actually makes it work: open the hood on armies claiming to run primarily off of captured equipment and you almost invariably find foreign sponsors providing the bulk of their weapons. The Fremen have no such foreign sponsors – or at least, won’t have them the moment it becomes clear they intend to burn down most of the known universe – so their access to military material is going to be limited.

As a result, the Fremen are going to be a remarkably two-tier force: a small body of troops equipped with looted shields and supported by what aircraft can be maintained, with a larger body of Fremen fighting ‘light’ as they did on Arrakis, but without storms or worms or mastery of local terrain.

On the one hand, the Fremen would presumably be able to outnumber the first individual Great Houses they targeted. Great House armies are small, as we’ve noted, so while the Fremen would have an overall numerical disadvantage (the Imperium has more trained fighters than there are Fremen) locally they would have the advantage, created by their control of the Spacing Guild. It would be less overwhelming than you might first think though, for a fairly simple reason: though the spacing guild is compliant, the Fremen only have the space transports they can capture. Note that the Spacing Guild supplies heighliners, not frigates and the Fremen do not know how to build frigates. So their ground-to-orbit and orbit-to-ground capacity is going to be limited. High – the Harkonnen and Corrino fleets captured on the ground at Arrakeen were large – but limited. Still probably enough to give the Fremen local numerical superiority everywhere they went.

The problem would be attrition: Fremen manpower is brittle. This is made worse by the fact that achieving numerical superiority on multiple fronts – and we’re told this fight encompasses a great many worlds (and planets are big things – most of them do not have all of their major settlements packed in one small area like Arrakis does), so they fight on multiple fronts – would require deploying large numbers of those ‘second tier’ Fremen forces. Those Fremen are going to be lethal in close combat, but extremely vulnerable to the industrialized firepower of the setting: one thing we’re told very clearly is that lasguns are evidently extremely powerful against unshielded enemies.

Meanwhile, as capable as the Fremen are, we also know they are not trained how to fight in shields (it is an entire plot-point in Paul’s duel with Jamis that they do not understand Paul’s slower movements), so once forced by military conditions outside of Arrakis to fight shield-against-shield, some part of the Fremen qualitative edge will be lost even for the ‘first tier’ troops.

And simply put, a few million Fremen is probably not enough to actually sustain that campaign, though I will admit it could end up being borderline, depending on the size of Great House armies and the loss-ratios the Fremen are able to put up. Once you have siphoned off the tens if not hundreds of thousands of soldiers required to garrison worlds that have been taken and accounted for losses fighting technologically superior opponents in unfamiliar terrain, I would guess that Fremen manpower would end up badly overstretched.

Very roughly, we can start with 15 million total Fremen. While Fremen women are trained to fight and Chani is on the front lines, we do not see any other women do so: the Fremen do not employ their womenfolk offensively as fighters, as a rule.² So accounting for women and children – in a society that we may assume has almost no elderly – that 15 million total Fremen might give us 5 million military aged males available for offensive deployment. Some portion of those will still be needed on Arrakis for spice production, administration and so on, but perhaps it is a small portion.

So perhaps 3 million Fremen available for offensive action off world, of which perhaps only a few hundred thousand can be moved at a time given the limited supply of frigates, charging out into a universe with perhaps something on the order of 15 to 30 million trained fighters. That offensive force will be depleted not only by casualties, but also by the demands of holding and administering captured territory and also that army needs to still exist when the fighting is done, both to deter what Great Houses remain and also to enable the continued existence of the Fremen as a people. If Paul conquers the universe but gets a majority of all military-aged Fremen men (over a decade, so more than one full generational cohort) killed, Atreides rule isn’t going to last very long.

Worse yet (it gets worse) the manpower pool the Great Houses operate from is absolutely vast – there are evidently tens if not hundreds of billions of people in the Faufreluches – so any Great House not entirely wiped out is going to be able to reconstitute fairly rapidly. If you do wipe out a Great House but leave the planet, there are no shortage of richece willing to take their place and then reconstitute a Great House army fairly rapidly. The Fremen are going to be playing whack-a-mole quite a bit, because their opponents have enormous demographic reserves to draw on, while by contrast the Fremen’s own are very limited. Of course the Fremen could start recruiting people out of the faufreluches, but that seems both unlikely (the Fremen do not bother to conceal their contempt for the people of the villages of Arrakis, whose conditions are already much harsher than the average worker in the faufeluches) and would also dull the all-important qualitative edge the Fremen need. So while the perhaps 5 million or so total Fremen military-aged-males is a exhaustible, set resource the 15-30 million Great House fighters is a resource which can be almost endlessly replenished.

It is easy to see the ways this could go wrong. First, the Fremen lack of industrial military power could cause the casualty ratio to turn the wrong way once they are off world. Sure, they have the superior close-combat fighters – we’ve stipulated that – but if you lose half of every attack group to lasguns, hunter-drones or other ranged weapons on the way in (because you haven’t enough shields), the Fremen are simply going to run out of Fremen before they subdue the Great Houses. The other path is one where the campaign sputters: the Fremen win initial (costly) victories due to numbers and mobility advantage but are then forced to dissipate much of their force in garrisons and administration. That in turn enforces something that happens to many great conquering peoples: they become like the regimes they replaced. Fremen leaders with their small military retinues settle down to control and exploit the worlds they garrison while being vassals of the Atreides – in short, they become Great Houses, likely losing whatever distinctiveness kept them militarily superior in the process. In either cause, because the numbers are so lopsided, the loss of momentum for the Fremen probably spells collapse as the balance tips back the other way and the Great Houses, with superior manpower and economic resources, begin whittling down what is left.

In short, Fremen victory against the Great Houses strikes me as possible but implausible, it is an unlikely outcome – one that probably would require a prescient warlord directing everything to perfection in order to win. Which as we’ve noted already, is a failure point for the narrative of the books, which require this war to be a thing that succeeds regardless of if Paul lives or dies.

Of course this assumes broadly that the ‘military resources’ – trained fighters, shields, supplies, frigates and so on – in the ‘system’ remains fairly static: that the Great Houses mostly fight as they have always done, with the weapons they’ve always had. One result of that is that the Fremen never get access to the quantity of weapons to fully modernize their own forces – the Great House armies are, ironically, too small to furnish them enough systems to capture.

Of course those limits might not hold. War is, after all, the land of in extremis. The Fremen assault might be enough to really break the static nature of the faufreluches and unlock a lot more economic potential, which might increase the military resources the Fremen could unlock from captured worlds.

That scenario, it turns out, is both likely and much worse.

Fremen: Total War

First, let us start with the part that this seems likely.

So far we’ve been discussing this as a war between the Fremen and the Great Houses, with the much larger mass of the population left out of it. We’ve done that because I think it is the only version of this war the Fremen could win. But it is also clearly, explicitly not the version of the war that happens.

Again, we’re told in Dune Messiah that the Jihad ends up killing 61 billion people, wipes out forty religions, and sterilized ninety planets.

In short, under Muad’Dib’s leadership the Fremen are not merely waging a war against the noble families of the Great Houses, but rather a war against the people of the Imperium. There is something of an irony that Frank Herbert seems to be clearly thinking in terms of something like the rapid expansion of the Rashidun Caliphate (632-661) here, but the Rashidun caliphs quite deliberately avoided this sort of thing, often offering religious protections to the underlying peoples beneath the empires (Roman and Sassanid) they were attacking to avoid a situation where they faced broad popular resistance. That said, this aspect of Islamic conquest was often not emphasized in the 1960s popular understanding, so Frank Herbert may not have been aware of the degree to which local religions and communities were largely and intentionally left in place during early Islamic expansion.

Either way, it seems almost certain that Paul’s Fremen attempting to extirpate entire religious traditions and sterilize entire worlds, are going to start facing broad popular resistance.

Now obviously the first problem here is that it makes their manpower problem much worse. When the Fremen were just facing the Great Houses, they were outnumbered perhaps 5-to-1, which is quite bad but in the fiction of the setting superior skills can overcome those disadvantages at least some of the time.³ But against a, say, Earth-like planet – of which there must be very many, given that killing 61 billion people did not even cause much of a social collapse in the Imperium – the Fremen might face mass-mobilized armies on just that planet in the high tens of millions. The USSR mobilized an astounding 34.5 million troops during WWII out of a population (pre-war) of about 200 million. Naturally it would be hard to mobilize a whole planet on that basis, but doing so on a modern-Earth-like world would net you around one billion soldiers.

So the idea that the Fremen might find themselves landing forces of, say, 300,000 Fremen warriors (representing basically the maximum carrying capacity of the Corrino and partial-Harkonnen fleets they captured) on a planet only to find themselves facing an opposing force five million or fifty million or five hundred million foes is not out of the question. One of the few ways to force that kind of mobilization from modern societies is to attempt to genocide a population or extirpate their long and sincerely held religion and the Fremen are trying to do both.

Now the Great Houses can control these populations because they maintain local legitimacy, because shield-based fighting gives them a huge advantage against populations that cannot afford shields and because they have demilitarized the lower classes. But the Fremen will have removed all of these factors. The Fremen do not have long-standing local legitimacy – they are a barbarian foreign force trying to take away your religion. They also do not have a shield-based fighting system and lack enough shields to fully equip their force in any case and so take to the field without a technological edge over a mass-mobilizated populace. And worse yet, the very threat they pose is going to push the lower classes to militarize.

Now in pre-industrial societies, this effect was somewhat limited because pre-industrial societies were not capable of fully militarizing their lower classes. But the societies of Dune are post-industrial societies. It may be impossible to provide the high tech instruments of warfare to an entire mass army – not enough shields, ‘thopters and frigates – but it would be trivially easy for these societies to equip the great masses of their population with spears, swords and simple guns.

Ironically, the Fremen would now find themselves immediately caught in the same trap as the Great Houses: trained in a fighting style that emphasizes close combat, they would try to have close-combat mass-battles with huge, unshielded armies of melee combatants, rather than being set up to use their shields to maximum advantage by conducting the fighting at long range.

Facing even relatively modest mass armies would require the Fremen to deploy a lot of their available manpower simply to be able to hold ground on the kind of scale these wars would be fought on, which would make the two-tier structure of their army even more of a liability because it would force them to field those second-tier troops in quantity. And while a Great House might be dumb enough to fight those second-tier unshielded troops in close combat – that being their habit – one imagines a mass army of resistance might approach it differently. After all a mass army is going to look for cheap ways to arm hundreds of thousands or millions of fighters and guns and artillery are relatively cheap compared to shields and ‘thopters. And we know that the basic technology of artillery is not lost, because Vladimir Harkonnen uses it as a surprise tactic against the Atreides.

Heaven help the Fremen if some planet somewhere stumbles on the same idea and expands it out to a fifty-million-soldier army against a largely unshielded, close-combat-based infantry Fremen force. Ask the survivors of the Battle of Omdurman (1898) what happens when the most skilled, motivated, desert-hardened and determined ‘hard men’ attempt to charge machine guns with contact weapons. While the ‘first tier’ Fremen troops with captured shields might still be effective, after their ‘second tier’ supporting units were obliterated they would be horribly outnumbered, easy enough to simply mob down with bayonets.

Even if the Fremen qualitative edge remained intact – perhaps because their opponents continued to operate in the contact-warfare frame rather than rediscovering projectile weapons – the attritional structure of the conflict would become unsustainable pretty quickly. Paul could easily lose half of his entire offensive force fighting a single partially mobilized world of this sort with a 15:1 casualty ratio in his favor.

But there’s an even worse outcome here for the Fremen, especially given the length of the conflict: total economic mobilization. So far we’ve considered worlds with perhaps days or weeks of warning doing panic mobilization while under attack, churning out as many rifles and swords as they can to put together mass armies, relying on the fact that planets are very big and so any conquest would take months if not years.

Paul’s Jihad lasts twelve years, canonically. For a sense of what twelve years is in ‘mobilization time,’ the United States went from producing almost no tanks in 1939, to just 400 in 1940, to 4,052 in 1941 to 24,997 in 1942, to 29,497 in 1943. In 1939, the United States built 5,856 aircraft; by 1944, it was building more than 8,000 aircraft a month.[efn_notes]Statistics via Overy, Why the Allies Won (1995), 331-2.[/efn_note] Again, as we’ve already noted, the only way the small armies of the Imperium make sense with its attested population (which must be more than the 61 billion Paul kills) is if this society is mostly demilitarized. We see plenty of industrial capability – aircraft, space-ships and so on – it is just that these noble houses with their limited administration cannot mobilize that capacity for war.⁴ The technology and population exists, what is lacking is the administrative capacity and political will to employ it. And while we might imagine that Dune‘s frigates and ornithopters are more complex machines than WWII-era aircraft, tanks and warships, it is equally the case that we’re thinking about the economies of entire planets rather than individual countries.

But for a planet that found itself not immediately under attack but very obviously in the path of Paul’s Jihad – perhaps with a well-entrenched local religion – that calculus is different. Information might spread slowly in the Imperium, but not infinitely slow – at least the elite do seem to have some sense of affairs in distant places. Those richece, perhaps with their nobles or without them, might well opt to do what those noble houses with their tiny, underdeveloped administrations could not: mass mobilize not just people but industry, unlocking the productive capacity of several billion people and turning much of the civilian economy over to a war-footing in a way that the Great Houses, with their small administrations and very limited legitimacy never could. Show the people film-strips of Paul Muad’Dib’s army murdering billions and sterilizing worlds and say, “that is coming here unless you line up to work in the factory churning out ninety thousand ornithopters a year.” Big posters that say, “to keep the Fremen Fedaykin murderers away from Our Holy Sites, we need YOU to hit our target of launching two thousand heavy weapons frigates this year!” Industrial societies engaged in something approach total economic mobilization can produce enormous amounts of destruction very rapidly.

The Fremen Jihad lasts more than long enough for the more populous worlds of the Imperium to adopt this kind of war economy in preparation and the tremendous violence that the Fremen inflict – again, sixty-one billion casualties – are more than enough to motivate a lot of these worlds to do exactly that.

Paul will, in that event, at least be lucky that the Spacing Guild might let him isolate such worlds, although if you are the Spacing Guild (or an anti-Fremen group of smugglers) you might just be willing to roll the dice to see how Paul’s base of power on Arrakis handles the arrival of thousands of frigates with tens of thousands of ‘thopters carrying millions of heavily equipped troops showing up in the skies above Arrakeen.

The Failed Jihad

Now of course the natural response to all of this is that Paul Muad’Dib Atreides can avoid all of these outcomes because he is the Kwisatz Haderach, able to see the present and the future and thus able to anticipate and avoid all of these outcomes, threading the needle of probability perfectly to guide the Jihad to its victorious conclusion.⁵ And of course we’ve already noted the flaw in this: Dune is explicit that by the time Paul fully grasps his prescience, it is too late to stop the Jihad, which would happen and succeed even if he was dead. Paul is merely the catalyst for what Herbert imagines as historical – nearly ecological – merely the manifestation of the ‘world-spirit’ of the age moving through history. The Jihad would happen without him. Only the catalyst is required; the rest is inevitable.

And it just clearly isn’t. There are, in fact, quite a lot of ways the Jihad could swiftly fail.

And fundamentally that goes to how Frank Herbert’s vision of military power – one shared by quite a lot of people – differs from how military power is actually generated. In Frank Herbert’s vision, military power is a product of the individual capabilities of fighters, which in turn is produced ecologically based on the harshness of the environment they come from. He imagines huge gulfs in capability, where two legions of Sardaukar can easily overpower ten legions of Harkonnen and Fremen in the desert can inflict even more lopsided casualties on Sardaukar.⁶ There is a direct correlation then between the harshness of a place and the military power it can produce.

And equally, there is a strongly gendered component of this view in Frank Herbert’s writing: militarily effective societies in Dune are masculine in key ways.⁷ Harsh conditions, for Herbert, produce intensely masculine societies (whereas the decadence of the Imperium is signaled in equally gendered terms: the gay sexual deviant Baron, the genetic eunuch Fenring, the emperor with his household of daughters and his failure of “father-head”-ship), which in turn produce militarily effective ones.

It is not hard to see how intense and pervasive a view of military power that is, how frequently in popular culture ‘manliness’ is presented as the primary source from which military effective flows. This isn’t the place to get into the modern manifestations of this sort of ideological framework, but it is not particularly hard to find recruiting and propaganda videos that attempt to communicate military effectiveness almost purely through gendered visual language of masculine fitness prowess, as if victory belongs to the army that can do the most push-ups. Herbert’s vision is somewhat more sophisticated than this, but only somewhat. It is water drawn from the same well.

And that simply isn’t how military power is actually generated in the real world. Training certainly matters and there are some kinds of fighting – like horseback archery – that almost have to be deeply socially rooted to be effectively trained. Cohesion also certainly matters, but it can be generated quite a few ways and strong cohesion is certainly possible to produce ‘synthetically’ through training and drill. But the strongest armies do not generally come from the harshest places – indeed, the opposite: for most of human history the military advantage has gone to resource-rich places with dense populations. This is obscured somewhat in popular culture because the exceptions to this rule are so striking but they’re striking because they are exceptions.

But especially after the industrial revolution – and Dune is a post-industrial (very post-industrial) universe – military power is largely generated by economies, a brute-force product of the ability of societies to deploy the most men (supported by their agriculture), the most metal, the most explosives and these days the most electronics. Weaker powers can still win by protracting conflicts and focusing on degrading the will of an enemy, but they do this because they are weaker powers who understand that they do not have much of any chance of winning in a direct confrontation. Indeed, the armies that have put the most emphasis on the ‘fighting spirit’ or individual physical superiority of their soldiers have tended to lose modern wars to armies of conscripted farm-boys and shop-keepers backed up by tremendous amounts of modern industrial firepower.

Of course, as Clausewitz reminds us (drink!) war is the realm of the “play of probability and chance” – a contest in which the stronger does not always win. Military strength may be, in modern times, almost entirely the product of industries, economies and demographics (and the first two more than the last one in most cases), but such raw strength is not the only thing that determines the outcome of wars, which equally depend on the strategic importance of the objective, the political will of the two parties and the vagaries of chance that are omnipresent in war (drink again if you got the reference).

None of this makes Dune a bad book or Frank Herbert a bad author – it is a fascinating book that raises these kinds of ideas and questions. But equally precisely because the book’s understanding of where military power comes from derives not from historical facts but from fictional events, it is worth thinking hard about how it imagines this works and if that actually corresponds to historical trends.

In this case, Frank Herbert imagines that ‘historical forces’ have created an effective inevitability that once roused the Fremen, on account of their harsher society, would storm the universe basically regardless of the balance of logistics, military equipment or numbers because the vague ‘hardness’ of their society makes them unbeatable. It makes for a fascinating narrative, but this is not how history works and indeed the wastelands of history are littered with the half-remembered names of a great many peoples who were ‘hard’ and ‘tough’ and ‘aggressive’ and utterly slaughtered or overrun because the ‘wealthy’ ‘decadent’ and ‘unmanly’ societies they fought also had greater numbers and superior weapons.

So to answer the original question: no, one way or another, the Fremen would fail, though they might fail in the most interesting way – failing not by replacing the faufreluches, but by galvanizing them into producing (or reproducing) a different kind of self-governing society that was far better able to mobilize itself and its resources – and capable of far more destructive, horrifying forms of war.

One wonders what the Dune universe’s version – after the collapse of both the faufreluches and the Fremen – of the First World War, a horror-show of industrial warfare on unprecedented scale – would look like.

Hey folks! I was traveling this week to give an invited talk at Western Michigan University, so I don’t have a blog post ready for you. That’ll also probably be the case for next week (where I will be at the annual meeting of the Society for Military History), though at least there I will have an abstract to let you see.

Now I am always reticent to post up the text of talks that are intended to be delivered live, because the genres are different, they rely on different kinds of delivery and they often aren’t footnoted and such for written publication. But in this case, I can do something a bit different, because the main parts of my talk for Western Michigan University were based around things that I’ve written (and in one case, something someone else has written) which you can read. So this is a chance to plumb the archives, in a sense and in so doing, basically ‘read along’ a version of the talk I gave which is rather ‘meatier’ than what I could have said in the 45-or-so minutes I had to speak.

The core of my talk was the concept of ‘historical verisimilitude‘ that I’ve riffed on here: the use of the appearance of historical accuracy, or a claim to historical accuracy in the absence of the real thing to market or promote something, be that something a film or show or game or what I have begun terming a ‘history influencer’ who makes history-themed social media content.

My initial example of this at work was the disconnect in Assassin’s Creed:Valhalla between the emphasis on visual accuracy and the catastrophic fumbling of other forms of historical accuracy, which you can read about in my “Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla and the Unfortunate Implications.” I then expanded on this example with a broader one from 2000’s film Gladiator and its initial battle scene, arguing that once again what was prioritized was visual accuracy because that gave the viewers the – incorrect! – assumption that ‘the research had been done’ on the rest, which you can read about in our series on “Nitpicking Gladiator‘s Iconic Opening Battle.”

I then jumped to example of this as a rhetorical strategy deployed by marketing, grounded in a critique of how George R. R. Martin (and the marketing team for Game of Thrones) has framed historical accuracy, using the Dothraki as an example of how this can go badly wrong and perpetuate quite nasty stereotypes about real peoples through the supposedly ‘realistic’ (in fact, deeply flawed) depiction of a fantasy stand-in for those people. You can read about that in our series on the Dothraki, “That Dothraki Horde.”

From there I transition into talking about this strategy used by the aforementioned ‘history influencers,’ with a contrast between how differences in platforms between YouTube and Twitter produced very different environments: where YouTube’s long-form video nature pushed a lot of content creators towards more carefully researched historical content which was often actually quite valuable (I particularly focused, and again this was very brief, on arms-and-armor and historical dress channels), Twitter’s emphasis on ultra-short micro-blogging produced a very different environment.

For the part focused on Twitter, I leaned quite heavily on T. Trezevant’s “The Antiquity to Alt-Right Pipeline” published in Working Classicists in 2024, which I think is one of the most revealing investigations of this particular space and the incentives that the post-Musk Twitter algorithm, which appears to openly and quite strongly prefer frankly bigoted or xenophobic content, created. From my own observations, while some of the accounts that push this particular, generally badly historically misinformed, version of the ancient past emerged in the pre-Musk period of Twitter, Classics Twitter largely held its own until the algorithm was slanted against them, making it all but impossible for a lot of good Classics accounts to compete for eyeballs.

And then I closed with a plea for greater engagement by historians in these online spaces, albeit with a caution that picking your platform is important. The fact that historical verisimilitude, the pretense of historical accuracy or knowledge, is so frequently used as a marketing tool speaks to the public’s desire for an accurate knowledge of the past. Folks want to know what the past was really like, but of course regular folks often do not have the tools to tell what is reliable, rigorous and careful history vs. what is not. So as historians, we need to be more present in these kinds of spaces (though we ought to pick our platforms; there is little point ‘competing’ on Twitter if the deck is stacked against you) to help folks find the accurate historical knowledge they are seeking.

And that, in an abbreviated form (or an enlarged form if you read all of the links as you went!) was the talk! Very grateful for WMU for inviting me out to give it. Until next week!

This post is a set of my observations on the current war in Iran and my thoughts on the broader strategic implications. I am not, of course, an expert on the region nor do I have access to any special information, so I am going to treat that all with a high degree of uncertainty. But I am a scholar of military history with a fair bit of training and experience in thinking about strategic problems, ancient and modern; it is this ‘guy that analyzes strategy’ focus that I want to bring to this.

I am doing this post outside of the normal Friday order because it is an unusual topic and I want to keep making it clear that even as world events continue to happen – as they must – I do not want this blog to turn into a politics newsletter. I simply haven’t had the time to polish and condense these thoughts for other publication – the hard work of much writing is turning 3,500 words (or 7,500, as it turns out) of thoughts into 1,500 words of a think piece – but I need to get them out of my head and on to the page before it burns out of the back of my head. That said, this post is going to be unavoidably ‘political,’ because as a citizen of the United States, commenting on the war means making a statement about the President who unilaterally and illegally launched it without much public debate and without consulting Congress.

And this war is dumb as hell.

I am going to spend the next however many words working through what I think are the strategic implications of where we are, but that is my broad thesis: for the United States this war was an unwise gamble on extremely long odds; the gamble (that the regime would collapse swiftly) has already failed and as a result locked in essentially nothing but negative outcomes. Even with the regime were to collapse in the coming weeks or suddenly sue for peace, every likely outcome leaves the United States in a meaningfully worse strategic position than when it started.

Now, before we go forward, I want to clarify a few things. First, none of this is a defense of the Iranian regime, which is odious. That said, there are many odious regimes in the world and we do not go to war with all of them. Second, this is a post fundamentally about American strategy or the lack thereof and thus not a post about Israeli strategy. For what it is worth, my view is that Benjamin Netanyahu has is playing an extremely short game because it benefits him politically and personally to do so and there is a significant (but by no means certain) chance that Israel will come to regret the decision to encourage this war. I’ll touch on some of that, but it isn’t my focus. Likewise, this is not a post about the strategy of the Gulf states, who – as is often the sad fate of small states – find their fate largely in the hands of larger powers. Finally, we should keep in mind that this isn’t an academic exercise: many, many people will suffer because of these decisions, both as victims of the violence in the region but also as a consequent of the economic ripples.

But that’s enough introduction. What I want to discuss here is first the extremely unwise gamble that the administration took and then the trap that it now finds itself in, from which there is no comfortable escape.

Post-Publication Edit: Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of the discussions in the comments got quite heated, while I was off at a conference and not able to do as moderation as I normally might. It is fine to have strong views, but one ought to present and defend those views, not engage in empty personal attacks. I have removed significant chunks of the discussion which I viewed as unproductive. If the personal attacks resume, bans will follow.
Doubtless in the process I have removed some comments which could have stayed or missed some comments that should have been removed, but at the end of a three day conference and a five hour drive home, this was all the patience I had.

The Situation

We need to start by establishing some basic facts about Iran, as a country.

First, Iran is a large country. It has a population just over 90 million (somewhat more than Germany, about the same as Turkey), and a land area over more than 600,000 square miles (more than four times the size of Germany). Put another way Iran is more than twice as large as Texas, with roughly three times the population.

More relevantly for us, Iran is 3.5 times larger than Iraq and roughly twice the population. That’s a handy comparison because we know what it took to invade and then hold Iraq: coalition forces peaked at half a million deployed personnel during the invasion. Iran is bigger in every way and so would demand a larger army and thus an absolutely enormous investment of troops, money and fundamentally lives in order to subdue.

In practice, given that Iran did not and never has posed an existential threat to the United States (Iran aspires to be the kind of nuclear threat North Korea is and can only vaguely dream of being the kind of conventional threat that Russia is), that meant that a ground invasion of Iran was functionally impossible. While the United States had the raw resources to do it, the political will simply wasn’t there and was unlikely to ever be there.

Equally important, Iran was not a major strategic priority. This is something that in a lot of American policy discourse – especially but not exclusively on the right – gets lost because Iran is an ‘enemy’ (and to be clear, the Iranian regime is an enemy; they attack American interests and Americans regularly) and everyone likes to posture against the enemy. But the Middle East is a region composed primarily of poor, strategically unimportant countries. Please understand me: the people in these countries are not unimportant, but as a matter of national strategy, some places are more important than others. Chad is not an area of vital security interest to the United States, whereas Taiwan (which makes our semiconductors) is and we all know it.

Neither is the Middle East. The entire region has exactly two strategic concerns of note: the Suez Canal (and connected Red Sea shipping system) and the oil production in the Persian Gulf and the shipping system used to export it. So long as these two arteries remained open the region does not matter very much to the United States. None of the region’s powers are more than regional powers (and mostly unimpressive ones at that), none of them can project power out of the region and none of them are the sort of dynamic, growing economies likely to do so in the future. The rich oil monarchies are too small in terms of population and the populous countries too poor.

In short then, Iran is very big and not very important, which means it would both be very expensive to do anything truly permanent about the Iranian regime and at the same time it would be impossible to sell that expense to the American people as being required or justified or necessary. So successive American presidents responded accordingly: they tried to keep a ‘lid’ on Iran at the lowest possible cost. The eventual triumph of this approach was the flawed but useful JCPOA (the ‘Iran deal’) in which Iran in exchange for sanctions relief swore off the pursuit of nuclear weapons (with inspections to verify), nuclear proliferation representing the main serious threat Iran could pose. So long as Iran remained non-nuclear, it could be contained and the threat to American interests, while not zero, could be kept minimal.

That deal was not perfect, I must stress: it essentially gave Iran carte blanche to reinforce its network of proxies across the region, which was robustly bad for Israel and mildly bad for the United States, but since the alternative was – as we’ll see – global economic disruption and the prospect of a large-scale war which would always be far more expensive than the alternatives, it was perhaps the best deal that could have been had. For what it is worth, my own view is that the Obama administration ‘overpaid’ for the concessions of the Iran deal, but the payment having been made, they were worth keeping. Trump scrapped them in 2017 in exchange for exactly nothing, which put us on the course for this outcome (as more than a few people pointed out at the time).

But that was the situation: Iran was big and hostile, but relatively unimportant. The United States is much stronger than Iran, but relatively uninterested in the region apart from the uninterrupted flow of natural gas, oil and other products from the Gulf (note: the one thing this war compromised – the war with Iran has cut off the only thing in this region of strategic importance, compromised the only thing that mattered at the outset), whereas Iran was wholly interested in the region because it lives there. The whole thing was the kind of uncomfortable frontier arrangement powerful states have always had to make because they have many security concerns, whereas regional powers have fewer, more intense focuses.

Which leads us to

The Gamble

The current war is best understood as the product of a fairly extreme gamble, although it is unclear to me if the current administration understood they were throwing the dice in June of 2025 rather than this year. As we’re going to see, this was not a super-well-planned-out affair.

The gamble was this: that the Iranian regime was weak enough that a solid blow, delivered primarily from the air, picking off key leaders, could cause it to collapse. For the United States, the hope seems to have been that a transition could then be managed to leaders perhaps associated with the regime but who would be significantly more pliant, along the lines of the regime change operation performed in Venezuela that put Delcy Rodriguez in power. By contrast, Israel seems to have been content to simply collapse the Iranian regime and replace it with nothing. That outcome would be – as we’ll see – robustly bad for a huge range of regional and global actors, including the United States, and it is not at all clear to me that the current administration understood how deeply their interests and Israel’s diverged here.

In any case, this gamble was never very likely to pay off for reasons we have actually already discussed. The Islamic Republic of Iran is not a personalist regime where the death of a single leader or even a group of leaders is likely to cause collapse: it is an institutional regime where the core centers of power (like the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps or IRGC) are ‘bought in’ from the bottom to the top because the regime allows them access to disproportionate resources and power. Consequently if you blow up the leader, they will simply pick another one – in this case they picked the previous leader’s son, so the net effect of the regime change effort was to replace Supreme Leader Khamenei with Supreme Leader Khamenei…Jr.

But power in the Iranian regime isn’t wielded by the Supreme Leader alone either: the guardian council has power, the council of experts that select the Supreme Leader have power, the IRGC has power, the regular military has some power (but less than the IRGC), the elected government has some power (but less than the IRGC or the guardian council) and on and on. These sorts of governments can collapse, but not often. It certainly did not help that the United States had stood idle while the regime slaughtered tens of thousands of its opponents, before making the attempt, but I honestly do not think the attempt would have worked before.

The gamble here was that because the regime would simply collapse on cue, the United States could remove Iran’s regional threat without having to commit to a major military operation that might span weeks, disrupt global energy supplies, expand over the region, cost $200 billion dollars and potentially require ground operations. Because everyone knew that result was worse than the status quo and it would thus be really foolish to do that.

As you can tell, I think this was a bad gamble: it was very unlikely to succeed but instead always very likely to result in a significantly worse strategic situation for the United States, but only after it killed thousands of people unnecessarily. If you do a war where thousands of people die and billions of dollars are spent only to end up back where you started that is losing; if you end up worse than where you started, well, that is worse.

The problem is that once the gamble was made, once the dice were cast, the Trump administration would be effectively giving up control over much of what followed.

And if administration statements are to be believed, that decision was made, without knowing it, in June of last year. Administration officials, most notably Marco Rubio, have claimed that the decision was made to attempt this regime change gamble in part because they were aware that Israel was about to launch a series of decapitation strikes and they assessed – correctly, I suspect – that the ‘blowback’ would hit American assets (and energy production) in the region even if the United States did nothing. Essentially, Iran would assume that the United States was ‘in’ on the attack.

That is notable because Iran did not assume that immediately during the Twelve-Day War in 2025. Indeed, Iran did not treat the United States as a real co-belligerent even as American aircraft were actively intercepting Iranian missiles aimed at Israel. And then the United States executed a ‘bolt from the blue’ surprise attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities on June 22, 2025, catching Iran (which had been attempting to negotiate with the United States) by surprise.

The problem with that strike is that attacking in that way, at that time, meant that Iran would have to read any future attacks by Israel as likely also involving attacks by the United States. Remember, the fellow getting bombed does not get to carefully inspect the flag painted on the bomber: stuff blows up and to some degree the party being attacked has to rapidly guess who is attacking them. We’ve seen this play out repeatedly over the last several weeks where things explode in Iran and there is initially confusion over if the United States or Israel bombed them. But in the confusion of an initial air attack, Iran’s own retaliatory capability could not sit idle, waiting to be destroyed by overwhelming US airpower: it is a ‘wasting’ use-it-or-lose-it asset.

So Iran would now have to assume that an Israeli air attack was also likely an American air attack. It was hardly an insane assumption – evidently according to the Secretary of State, American intelligence made the exact same assessment.

But the result was that by bombing the Iranian nuclear facilities in June of 2025, the Trump administration created a situation where merely by launching a renewed air campaign on Iran, Israel could force the United States into a war with Iran at any time.

It should go without saying that creating the conditions where the sometimes unpredictable junior partner in a security relationship can unilaterally bring the senior partner into a major conflict is an enormous strategic error, precisely because it means you end up in a war when it is in the junior partner’s interests to do so even if it is not in the senior partner’s interests to do so.

Which is the case here. Because…

The Trap

Once started, a major regional war with Iran was always likely to be something of a ‘trap,’ – not in the sense of an ambush laid by Iran – but in the sense of a situation that, once entered, cannot be easily left or reversed.

The trap, of course, is the Strait of Hormuz and the broader Persian Gulf. The issue is that an enormous proportion of the world’s shipping, particularly energy (oil, liquid natural gas) and fertilizer components (urea) passes through this body of water. The Gulf is narrow along its whole length, extremely narrow in the Strait and bordered by Iran on its northern shore along its entire length. Iran can thus threaten the whole thing and can do so with cheap, easy to conceal, easy to manufacture systems.

And the scale here is significant. 25% of the world’s oil (refined and crude), 20% of its liquid natural gas and around 20% of the world’s fertilizer passes through the Strait of Hormuz which links the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean. Any of those figures would be enough for a major disruption to trigger huge economic ripples. And even worse there are only very limited, very insufficient alternative transport options. Some Saudi oil (about half) can move via pipeline to the Red Sea and some Emirati oil can move via pipeline to Fujairah outside of the Strait, but well over half of the oil and effectively all of the natural gas and fertilizer ingredients are trapped if ships cannot navigate the strait safely.

And here we come back to what Clausewitz calls the political object (drink!). Even something like a 50% reduction in shipping in the Gulf, were it to persist long term, would create strong global economic headwinds which would in turn arrive in the United States in the form of high energy prices and a general ‘supply shock’ that has, historically at least, not been politically survivable for the party in power.

And so that is the trap. While the United States can exchange tit-for-tat strikes with Iran without triggering an escalation spiral, once you try to collapse the regime, the members of the regime (who are making the decisions, not, alas, the Iranian people) have no reason to back down and indeed must try to reestablish deterrence. These are men who are almost certainly dead or poor-in-exile if the regime collapses. Moreover the entire raison d’être of this regime is resistance to Israel and the United States: passively accepting a massive decapitation attack and not responding would fatally undermine the regime’s legitimacy with its own supporters, leading right back to the ‘dead-or-poor-and-exiled’ problem.

Iran would have to respond and thus would have to try to find a way to inflict ‘pain’ on the United States to force the United States to back off. But whereas Israel is in reach of some Iranian weapons, the United States is not. Iran would thus need a ‘lever’ closer to home which could inflict costs on the United States. For – and I must stress this – for forty years everyone has known this was the strait. This is not a new discovery, we did this before in the 1980s. “If the regime is threatened, Iran will try to close the strait to exert pressure” is perhaps one of the most established strategic considerations in the region. We all knew this.

But the trap here is two sided: once the strait was effectively closed, the United States could not back off out of the war without suffering its own costs. Doing so, for one, would be an admission of defeat, politically damaging at home. Strategically, it would affirm Iran’s control over the strait, which would be a significantly worse outcome than not having done the war in the first place. And simply backing off might not fully return shipping flows: why should Iran care if the Gulf states can export their oil? An Iran that fully controls the strait, that had demonstrated it could exclude the United States might intentionally throttle everyone else’s oil – even just a bit – to get higher prices for its own or to exert leverage.

So once the strait was closed, the United States could not leave until it was reopened, or at least there was some prospect of doing so.

The result is a fairly classic escalation trap: once the conflict starts, it is extremely costly for either side to ever back down, which ensures that the conflict continues long past it being in the interests of either party. Every day this war goes on make both the United States and Iran weaker, poorer and less secure but it is very hard for either side to back down because there are huge costs connected to being the party that backs down. So both sides ‘escalate to de-escalate’ (this phrase is generally as foolish as it sounds), intensifying the conflict in an effort to hit hard enough to force the other guy to blink first. But since neither party can back down unilaterally and survive politically, there’s practically no amount of pain that can force them to do so.

Under these conditions, both sides might seek a purely military solution: remove the ability of your opponent to do harm in order to create the space to declare victory and deescalate. Such solutions are elusive. Iran simply has no real way of meaningfully diminishing American offensive power: they cannot strike the airfields, sink the carriers or reliably shoot down the planes (they have, as of this writing, managed to damage just one aircraft).

For the United States, a purely military solution is notionally possible: you could invade. But as noted, Iran is very, very big and has a large population, so a full-scale invasion would be an enormous undertaking, larger than any US military operation since the Second World War. Needless to say, the political will for this does not exist. But a ‘targeted’ ground operation against Iran’s ability to interdict the strait is also hard to concieve. Since Iran could launch underwater drones or one-way aerial attack drones from anywhere along the northern shore the United States would have to occupy many thousands of square miles to prevent this and of course then the ground troops doing that occupying would simply become the target for drones, mortars, artillery, IEDs and so on instead.

One can never know how well prepared an enemy is for something, but assuming the Iranians are even a little bit prepared for ground operations, any American force deployed on Iranian soil would end up eating Shahed and FPV drones – the sort we’ve seen in Ukraine – all day, every day.

Meanwhile escort operations in the strait itself are also deeply unpromising. For one, it would require many more ships, because the normal traffic through the strait is so large and because escorts would be required throughout the entire Gulf (unlike the Red Sea crisis, where the ‘zone’ of Houthi attacks was contained to only the southern part of the Red Sea). But the other problem is that Iran possesses modern anti-ship missiles (AShMs) in significant quantity and American escort ships (almost certainly Arleigh Burke-class destroyers) would be vulnerable escorting slow tankers in the constrained waters of the strait.

It isn’t even hard to imagine what the attack would look like: essentially a larger, more complex version of the attack that sunk the Moskva, to account for the Arleigh Burke’s better air defense. Iran would pick their moment (probably not the first transit) and try to distract the Burke, perhaps with a volley of cheap Shahed-type drones against a natural gas tanker, before attempting to ambush the Burke with a volley of AShMs, probably from the opposite direction. The aim would be to create just enough confusion that one AShM slipped through, which is all it might take to leave a $2.2bn destroyer with three hundred American service members on board disabled and vulnerable in the strait. Throw in speed-boats, underwater drones, naval mines, fishing boats pretending to be threats and so on to maximize confusion and the odds that one of perhaps half a dozen AShMs slips through.

And if I can reason this out, Iran – which has been planning for this exact thing for forty years certainly can. Which is why the navy is not eager to run escort.

But without escorts or an end to the conflict, shipping in the Gulf is not going to return to normal. Container ships are big and hard to sink but easy to damage. But while crude oil tankers are hard to set fire to, tankers carrying refined petroleum products are quite easy to set fire to, as we’ve seen, while tankers of liquid natural gas (LNG carriers) are essentially floating bombs.

The result is that right now it seems that the only ships moving through the strait are those Iran permits and they appear to have a checkpoint system, turning away ships they do not approve of. A military solution this problem is concievable, but extremely difficult to implement practically, requiring either a massive invasion of Iran’s coastline or an enormous sea escort operation. It seems more likely in both cases that the stoppage will continue until Iran decides it should stop. The good news on that front is that Iran benefits from the export of oil from the Gulf too, but the bad news is that while they are permitting some traffic, precisely because high energy prices are their only lever to make the United States and Israel stop killing them, they are unlikely to approve the transit of the kinds of numbers of ships which would allow energy markets to stabilize.

Just as a measure here, as I write this apparently over the last three days or so Iran has let some twenty ships through their checkpoint, charging fees apparently to do so. That may sound like a lot, but it is a quantity that, compared to the normal operation of the strait, is indistinguishable from zero. The Strait of Hormuz normally sees around 120 transits per day (including both directions). That scale should both explain why five or six ships a day paying Iran to transit is not going to really impact this equation – that’s still something like a 95% reduction in traffic (and all of the Iran-approved transits are outbound, I think) – but also why a solution like ‘just do escorts’ is so hard. Whatever navies attempted an escort solution would need to escort a hundred ships a day, with every ship being vulnerable at every moment from when it entered the Strait to when it docked for loading or offloading to its entire departure route. All along the entire Gulf coastline. All the time.

Likewise, even extremely punishing bombings of Iranian land-based facilities are unlikely to wholly remove their ability to throw enough threat into the Strait that traffic remains massively reduced. Sure some ship owners will pay Iran and others will take the risk, but if traffic remains down 90% or just 50% that is still a massive, global energy disruption. And we’ve seen with the campaign against the Houthis just how hard it is with airstrikes to compromise these capabilities: the United States spent more than a year hammering the Houthis and was never able to fully remove their attack capabilities. Cargo ships are too vulnerable and the weapons with which to attack them too cheap and too easy to hide.

There is a very real risk that this conflict will end with Iran as the de facto master of the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, having demonstrated that no one can stop them from determining by force which ships pass and which ships cannot. That would, in fact, be a significant strategic victory for Iran and an enormous strategic defeat for the United States.

Peace Negotiations?

Which brings us to the question of strategic outcomes. As the above has made clear, I think the Trump administration erred spectacularly in starting this war. It appears as though, in part pressured by Israel, but mostly based on their own decisions (motivated, it sure seems, by the ease of the Venezuela regime-change) they decided to go ahead on the hopeful assumption the regime would collapse and as a result did not plan for the most likely outcome (large war, strait closure), despite this being the scenario that political leadership (Trump, Hegseth, Rubio) were warned was most likely.

The administration now appears to be trying to extricate itself from the problem has created, but as I write this, is currently still stuck in the ‘trap’ above. Now this is a fast moving topic, so by the time you actually read this the war well could have ended in a ceasefire (permanent or temporary) or intensified and expanded. Who knows! As I am writing the Trump administration claims that they are very near a negotiated ceasefire, while the Iranian regime claims they have rejected both of the United States’ interlocutors as unsuitable (‘backstabbing’ negotiators), while reporting suggests Israel may feel it in their interests to blow up any deal if the terms are too favorable to Iran.

That is a lot of uncertainty! But I think we can look at some outcomes here both in terms of what was militarily achieved, what the consequences of a ‘deal’ might be and what the consequences of not having a deal might be.

The Trump administration has offered a bewildering range of proposed objectives for this war, but I think it is fair to say the major strategic objectives have not been achieved. Initially, the stated objective was regime change or at least regime collapse; neither has occurred. The regime very much still survives and if the war ends soon it seems very plausible that the regime – able to say that it fought the United States and made the American president sue for peace – will emerge stronger, domestically (albeit with a lot of damage to fix and many political problems that are currently ‘on pause’ coming ‘un-paused’). The other core American strategic interest here is Iran’s nuclear program, the core of which is Iran’s supply of roughly 500kg of highly enriched uranium; no effort appears to have been made to recover or destroy this material and it remains in Iranian hands. Actually destroying (dispersing, really) or seizing this material by military force would be an extremely difficult operation with a very high risk of failure, since the HEU is underground buried in facilities (mostly Isfahan) in the center of the country. Any sort of special forces operation would thus run the risk of being surrounded and outnumbered very fast, even with ample air support, while trying to extract half a ton of uranium stored in gas form in heavy storage cylinders.

When the United States did this in Kazakhstan, removing about 600kg (so roughly the same amount) it required the team to spend 12 hours a day every day for a month to remove it, using multiple heavy cargo planes. And that facility was neither defended, nor buried under rubble.

Subsequently, administration aims seem to have retreated mostly to ‘fixing the mess we made:’ getting Iran to stop shooting and getting the Strait of Hormuz reopened and the ships moving again. They do seem to be asking for quite a bit more at the peace table, but the record of countries winning big concessions at the peace table which they not only haven’t secured militarily but do not appear able to do so is pretty slim.

Now it is possible that Iran blinks and takes a deal sooner rather than later. But I don’t think it is likely. And the simple reason is that Iran probably feels like it needs to reestablish deterrence. This is the second sudden bombing campaign the country has suffered in as many years – they do not want there to be a third next year and a fourth the year after that. But promises not to bomb them don’t mean a whole lot: establishing deterrence here means inflicting quite a lot of pain. In practice, if Iran wants future presidents not to repeat this war, the precedent they want to set is “attacking Iran is a presidency-ending mistake.” And to do that, well, they need to end a presidency or at least make clear they could have done.

Iran is thus going to very much want a deal that says ‘America blinked’ on the tin, which probably means at least some remaining nuclear program, a de facto Iranian veto on traffic in the strait and significant sanctions relief, along with formal paper promises of no more air strikes. That’s going to be a hard negotiating position to bridge, especially because Iran can ‘tough it out’ through quite a lot of bombing.

And I do want to stress that. There is a frequent mistake, often from folks who deal in economics, to assume that countries will give up on wars when the economics turn bad. But countries are often very willing to throw good money after bad even on distant wars of choice. For wars close to home that are viewed as existential? Well, the ‘turnip winter‘ where Germans started eating food previous thought fit only for animals (a result of the British blockade) began in 1916. The war did not end in 1916. It did not end in 1917. It did not end until November, 1918. Food deprivation and starvation in Germany was real and significant and painful for years before the country considered surrender. Just because the war is painful for Iran does not mean the regime will cave quickly: so long as they believe the survival of the regime is at stake, they will fight on.

There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.

Strategic Implications

So my conclusion here is that the United States has not yet achieved very much in this war on a strategic level. Oh, tactically, the United States has blown up an awful lot of stuff and done so with very minimal casualties of its own. But countries do not go to war simply to have a war – well, stupid fascist countries do, which is part of why they tend to be quite bad at war – they go to war to achieve specific goals and end-states.

None of the major goals here – regime change, an end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions – have been achieved. If the war ends tomorrow in a ‘white peace,’ Iran will reconstitute its military and proxies and continue its nuclear program. It is in fact possible to display astounding military skill and yet, due to strategic incoherence, not accomplish anything.

So the true, strategic gains here for all of the tactical effectiveness displayed, are functionally nil. Well what did it cost?

Well, first and foremost, to date the lives of 13 American soldiers (290 more WIA), 24 Israelis (thousands more injured), at least a thousand civilian deaths across ‘neutral’ countries (Lebanon mostly, but deaths in Kuwait, Iraq, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, etc) and probably at least a thousand if not more Iranian civilians (plus Iranian military losses). The cost of operations for the United States is reportedly one to two billion dollars a day, which adds up pretty quickly to a decent chunk of change.

All of the military resources spent in this war are in turn not available for other, more important theaters, most obviously the Asia-Pacific (INDOPACOM), but of course equally a lot of these munitions could have been doing work in Ukraine as well. As wars tend to do, this one continues to suck in assets as it rumbles on, so the American commitment is growing, not shrinking. And on top of spent things like munitions and fuel, the strain on ships, air frames and service personnel is also a substantial cost: it turns out keeping a carrier almost constantly running from one self-inflicted crisis to the next for ten months is a bad idea.

You could argue these costs would be worthwhile it they resulted in the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program – again, the key element here is the HEU, which has not been destroyed – or of the Iranian regime. But neither of those things have been achieved on the battlefield, so this is a long ledger of costs set against…no gains. Again, it is not a ‘gain’ in war simply to bloody your enemy: you are supposed to achieve something in doing so.

The next side of this are the economic consequences. Oil and natural gas have risen in price dramatically, but if you are just watching the commodity ticker on the Wall Street Journal, you may be missing some things. When folks talk about oil prices, they generally do so via either $/bbl (West Texas Intermediate – WTI – one-month front-month futures) or BRN00 (Brent Crude Oil Continuous Contracts). These are futures contracts, meaning the price being set is not for a barrel of oil right now but for a barrel of oil in the future; we can elide the sticky differences between these two price sets and just note that generally the figure you see is for delivery in more-or-less one month’s time. Those prices have risen dramatically (close to doubled), but may not reflect the full economic impact here: as the ‘air bubble’ created by the sudden stop of oil shipments expands, physical here-right-now prices for oil are much higher in many parts of the world and still rising.

Essentially, the futures markets are still hedging on the idea that this war might end and normal trade might resume pretty soon, a position encouraged by the current administration, which claims it has been negotiating with Iran (Iran denied the claim). The tricky thing here is that this is a war between two governments – the Trump administration and the Iranian regime – which both have a clear record of lying a lot. The Trump administration has, for instance, repeatedly claimed a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia was imminent, and that war remains ongoing. The markets are thus forced to try and guess everyone’s actions and intentions from statements that are unreliable. Cards on the table, I think the markets are underestimating the likelihood that this conflict continues for some time. Notably, the United States is moving assets into theater – an MEU, elements of the 82 Airborne – which will take some time to arrive (two weeks for the MEU which is still about a week out as I write this) and set up for operations.

In either case, while I am not an expert on oil extraction or shipping, what I have seen folks who are experts on those things say is that the return of normal operations after this war will be very slow, often on the order of ‘every extra week of conflict adds a month to recovery’ (which was Sal Mercogliano’s rule of thumb in a recent video). If the war ends instantly, right now, ship owners will first have to determine that the strait is safe, then ships will have to arrive and begin loading to create space in storage to start up refineries to create space in storage to start up oil wells that have been ‘shut in,’ some of which may require quite a bit of doing to restart. Those ships in turn have to spend weeks sailing to the places that need these products, where some of the oil and LNG is likely to be used to refill stockpiles rather than immediately going out to consumers. For many products, refineries and production at the point of sale – fertilizer plants, for instance – will also need to be restarted. Factory restarts can be pretty involved tasks.

This recovery period doesn’t just get pushed out by 24 hours each day it gets longer as more production is forced to shut down or is damaged in the fighting. As I write this, futures markets for the WTI seem to be expecting oil prices to remain elevated (above $70 or so) well into 2028.

Meanwhile, disruption of fertilizer production, which relies heavily on natural gas products, has the potential to raise food prices globally. Higher global food prices – and food prices have already been elevated by the impact of the War in Ukraine – are pretty strongly associated with political instability in less developed countries. After all, a 25% increase in the price of food in a rich country is annoying – you have to eat more cheaper foods (buy more ramen, etc.). But in a poor country it means people go hungry because they cannot afford food and hungry, desperate people do hungry, desperate things. A spike in food prices was one of the core causes of the 2010 Arab Spring which led in turn to the Syrian Civil War, the refugee crisis of which significantly altered the political landscape of Europe.

I am not saying this will happen – the equally big spike in food prices from the Ukraine War has not touched off a wave of revolutions – but that it increases the likelihood of chaotic, dynamic, unsettled political events.

But it does seem very clear that this war has created a set of global economic headwinds which will have negative repercussions for many countries, including the United States. The war has not, as of yet, made Americans any safer – but it has made them poorer.

Then there are the political implications. I think most folks understand that this war was a misfire for the United States, but I suspect it may end up being a terrible misfire for Israel as well. Israeli security and economic prosperity both depend to a significant degree on the US-Israeli security partnership and this war seems to be one more step in a process that very evidently imperils that partnership. Suspicion of Israel – which, let us be honest, often descends into rank, bigoted antisemitism, but it is also possible to critique Israel, a country with policies, without being antisemitic – is now openly discussed in both parties. More concerning is polling suggesting that not only is Israel underwater with the American public, but more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than Israelis for the first time in American history.

Again, predictions are hard, especially about the future, but it certainly seems like there is an open door to a future where this war is the final nail in the coffin of the American-Israeli security partnership, as it becomes impossible to sustain in the wake of curdling American public opinion. That would be a strategic catastrophe for Israel if it happened. On the security side, with Israel has an independent nuclear deterrent and some impressive domestic military-industrial production the country is not capable of designing and manufacturing the full range of high-end hardware that it relies on to remain militarily competitive despite its size. There’s a reason Israel flies F-35s. But a future president might well cut off spare parts and maintainers for those F-35s, refuse to sell new ones, refuse to sell armaments for them, and otherwise make it very difficult for Israel to acquire superior weapons compared to its regional rivals.

Economic coercion is equally dangerous: Israel is a small, substantially trade dependent country and its largest trading partner is the United States, followed by the European Union. But this trade dependency is not symmetrical: the USA and EU are hugely important players in Israel’s economy but Israel is a trivial player in the US and EU economies. Absent American diplomatic support then, the threat of economic sanctions is quite dire: Israel is meaningfully exposed and the sanctions would be very low cost for the ‘Status Quo Coalition’ (assuming the United States remains a member) to inflict under a future president.

A war in which Israel cripples Iran in 2026 but finds itself wholly diplomatically isolated in 2029 is a truly pyrrhic victory. As Thucydides might put it, an outcome like that would be an “example for the world to meditate upon.” That outcome is by no means guaranteed, but every day the war grinds on and becomes less popular in the United States, it becomes more likely.

But the United States is likewise going to bear diplomatic costs here. Right now the Gulf States have to shelter against Iranian attack but when the dust settles they – and many other countries – will remember that the United States unilaterally initiated by surprise a war of choice which set off severe global economic headwinds and uncertainty. Coming hot on the heels of the continuing drama around tariffs, the takeaway in many places may well be ‘Uncle Sam wants you to be poor,’ which is quite a damaging thing for diplomacy. And as President Trump was finding out when he called for help in the Strait of Hormuz and got told ‘no’ by all of our traditional allies, it is in fact no fun at all to be diplomatically isolated, no matter how powerful you are.

Of course the war, while quickly becoming an expensive, self-inflicted wound for the United States has also been disastrous for Iran. I said this at the top but I’ll say it again: the Iranian regime is odious. You will note also I have not called this war ‘unprovoked’ – the Iranian regime has been provoking the United States and Israel via its proxies almost non-stop for decades. That said, it is the Iranian people who will suffer the most from this war and they had no choice in the matter. They tried to reject this regime earlier this year and many were killed for it. But I think it is fair to say this war has been a tragedy for the Iranian people and a catastrophe for the Iranian regime.

And you may then ask, here at the end: if I am saying that Iran is being hammered, that they are suffering huge costs, how can I also be suggesting that the United States is on some level losing?

And the answer is simple: it is not possible for two sides to both win a war. But it is absolutely possible for both sides to lose; mutual ruin is an option. Every actor involved in this war – the United States, Iran, arguably Israel, the Gulf states, the rest of the energy-using world – is on net poorer, more vulnerable, more resource-precarious as a result.

In short, please understand this entire 7,000+ word post as one primal scream issued into the avoid at the careless, unnecessary folly of the decision to launch an ill-considered war without considering the obvious, nearly inevitable negative outcomes which would occur unless the initial strikes somehow managed to pull the inside straight-flush. They did not and now we are all living trapped in the consequences.

Maybe the war will be over tomorrow. The consequences will last a lot longer.

Hey folks! Another gap week because, as mentioned last week, I am at the annual meeting for the Society for Military History happening in Arlington. That said, we actually did have a major post this week, my 7,500 word primal cry concerning the current war in Iran. I know that won’t be for everyone – some of you read this to get away from current events – which is why I dropped it ‘off schedule’ midweek rather than having it replace this post.

That said, as I often do with weeks where I am at a conference, let me share the abstract of the paper I am delivering, “Unlearning the Marian Reforms:”

The transformation of the Roman army from the conscription-based citizen militia organized by maniples of the middle republic to the long-service professional army organized by cohorts in the early imperial period remains a topic of intense interest for specialists and non-specialists alike.  In recent years, however, the specialist understanding of this transformation has increasingly diverged from a non-specialist generalist vision which remains wedded to the notion of the ‘Marian Reforms.’  The idea of a set of reforms, occurring in the late second or early first century BC, which can be tied particularly or generally to the career of Gaius Marius (cos. 107, 104-100, 86) remains common in popular history and even academic textbooks and so permeates the non-specialist understanding of the Roman army’s transformation.  However, as this paper demonstrates, functionally every part of this narrative has come under attack and nearly all parts of it must now be discarded: there were no ‘Marian Reforms,’ ‘so-called’ or otherwise.

Instead, what has emerged from the scholarship is a prolonged process of change beginning far earlier in the second century and not entirely complete until at least the reign of Tiberius (r. 14-37 AD), in which Gaius Marius’ career forms only a single episode and not necessarily a particularly important one.  This new understanding of change in the Roman army now dominates the specialist scholarship but has not filtered through to general discussions of either Roman or military history.  This paper addresses this gap in understanding, outlining the key elements of the ‘Marian Reforms’ have been undermined and demonstrating that the notion of the ‘Marian Reforms’ as an event in the history of the Roman army is to be abandoned in generalist and textbook treatments, at it has already been in specialist ones.

Now normally this is a case where I have to hem and haw about how conference presentation papers aren’t really ready for publication even on a blog, but this conference paper is in fact a more-or-less direct translation of a blog post we have already had, “The Marian Reforms Weren’t a Thing.” Indeed, whereas my speaking time here (around 20 minutes) limits me to just around 2,800 words, the original post is about three times longer, with significantly more detail than I can fit into a conference paper. So you can in essence, read a longer, even more decompressed form of this argument! So feel free to go and read that if you missed it and to read my Iran War take if you want and didn’t catch it midweek and we’ll be back next week with something different (maybe Carthage themed?).