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This is the second part (I, II) of our somewhat silly look about the plausibility of warfare in Frank Herbert’s Dune. Last week, we looked at the system of warfare that is dominant in the setting when the first book opens: warfare among the Great Houses. While I noted some worldbuilding issues I see – some of the physics doesn’t quite work out, I don’t think lasers are satisfactorily dealt with and the implied social system doesn’t seem even remotely stable– we’re going to accept for this part that the system works more or less as Herbert describes it.

The various Houses (Major and Minor) maintain relatively small militaries of trained close-combat fighters who fight using shields. Because shields reduce the effectiveness of ranged combat nearly to zero, this system of warfare dominates among the Great Houses and because untrained, unshielded fighters are so profoundly vulnerable to trained, shielded ones, outside military challenges to this system are generally unsuccessful, enabling the small, closed and mostly hereditary elite with their retinue-armies of shielded fighters to maintain a stranglehold on political and military power. They use that power to run relatively inefficient patrimonial ‘household’ governments over entire planets, siphoning off what little economic production they can – because their administration is so limited – to fund their small armies.

What keeps the armies small is both that the resources of the Great Houses are limited – again, small administrations – but also that the core components of industrial military power in this setting (trained fighters, shields, ornithopters, frigates) are clearly very expensive, both to build and to maintain. And as an aside, because it will be relevant below, it is clear even in the books that wear and tear on shields is a major cost: “The Harkonnens certainly used plenty of shields here, “Hawat said. “They had repair depots in every garrison village, and their accounts show heavy expenditures for shield replacement parts.” (Dune, 88, emphasis mine). In short, these elements of military power represent ongoing expenditures, requiring maintenance and logistics which is going to matter a bit below.

This week we’re going to look at how the Fremen disrupt this system and ask if the Fremen success in doing so seems plausible. We’ll do so generally accepting Herbert’s clear description of the Fremen as superlative warriors, even though long-time readers will know that I find the idea of the Fremen being such superior warriors broadly unlikely. But as we’ll see, even if the Fremen are remarkably skilled warriors, they are unlikely to succeed in their jihad against the society of the Known Universe.

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.

https://acoup.blog/2026/03/13/collections-warfare-in-dune-part-ii-the-fremen-jihad/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=collections-warfare-in-dune-part-ii-the-fremen-jihad

https://acoup.blog/?p=34111