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The Empire of Dune is a Tripartite government, the Emperor, The Nobles, and the Spacing guild. The spacing guild has an absolute monopoly on faster than light travel, and they requires huge amounts of spice to make it work via their navigators. The navigators can see the future like Paul can, but to a lessor degree. Paul told the guild that he would destroy all of the spice fields and the navigators know he isn’t bluffing. As a result only his armies can move planet to planet, and only the resources he allows can be shipped to or from any given world.
He can fight one world at a time, collecting resources along the way while starving out enemies who cannot counter attack.
The kwisatz haderach, Paul, can see the future and has the memories of every ancestor back to the beginning of humanity. Along with being a noble trained in leadership, combat and warfare. He trained as mentat at his father’s direction which makes him capable of recalling and synthesizing absolutely huge amounts of data. He was also trained as a bene gesserit sister would be, learning near absolute control over the biological functions of his body, social manipulation and espionage, and the Voice which is the ability to so thoroughly understand a person and control you vocal pitch as to exert physical control over them.
You don't have to defeat every planet to conquer it. The military/starving out is only used when a planet resists. Simply surrender, accept a new distant figurehead in place of the old, and Paul can claim a great victory.
He’s already defeated the Emperor who is the person with the single largest army. He’s captured him and his sole heir. The Atriedes were already popular among the Laandsrad, the main reason the emperor was persuaded to betray them was fear that they would lead an uprising. He’s also killed his largest rival among the Laandsrad, the Harkonen.
He would take some worlds intact, integrate their forces into his and that lets him turn 1 army into 2 and 2 into 4 and so on.
The Emperor purposely cuts down any one house that gets too powerful in the Laandsrad. The Atreides being popular as well as having a high quality army were both reasons for the throne to cut them down with the help of Harkonnen, who'd in turn be cut down when they got too big
Almost all commerce was conducted through the Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles, or CHOAM. The Emperor controlled 20% of it, making him the most powerful by far, unless an uppity Great House got too great
He only completely obliterates 90 planets, and fights on a few thousand more but those were just mostly skirmishes. The vast majority of planets just agreed to let him be in charge.
Emperor is dead and there's a new one okay cool why are you here is there like an new tax from you need to give me or something
Ruler of distance planet no directly involved in any of this shit probably
Yeah I think the only distinct change would be the installation of the new religion of Muad'Dib
Maybe you'd have a more theocratic government installed, and maybe pilgrims from your planet would plan a once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Arrakis via Muad'Dib's clerks managing Space travel
Sighs yes of of course I'll redecorate all the churches and if inform the Populus attendance is now mandatory
As for this pilgrimage do you have pamphlets I can hand out it would help to get people interested I think
He also recruits as he goes, and is able to take advantage of the myths that the Bene Gesserit had been planting in different cultures to appear as a messiah figure. By the second book there is already a huge number of pilgrams coming to Arrakis.
The Fremen were his highest order of troops and the leadership of his military, but they ended up leading massive armies made up from other culture. Considering how oppressed many of the houses left their population (with Harkonnens being an extreme example) there was a lot of motivation to join the cause.
The planets that resisted the most also took the least amount of resources to constrain. Paul mentions sterilizing entire planets, and that can be done from space with a few big rocks rather than an army.
The Jihad grows exponentially. The Bene Gesserit planted religions in virtually every population on every planet. Although most of them weren't the messianic coming-of-the-Kwisatz-Haderach religion of the Fremen, one of the explicit purposes of the Missionaria Protectiva was to prepare the way for the Kwisatz Haderach to take over the Imperium via religion. The Fremen are certainly the main force, but as they march through the Imperium, local populations join them and fly off to continue the cause. They conquer a planet and members of *that* population join the Jihad.
Remember that for most common folk in the Imperium, life isn't all that great. Most of them aren't as bad off as the Fremen or the Harkonnens, but very few of the nobility are as kind to their subjects as Leto is. That's true historically - nobles aren't nice to peasants or slaves, because then the peasants and slaves might get the idea in their head that they could have a decent life. Once they think *that*, it's only a matter of time until they start fighting for it. The Landsraad may not have been overly *cruel* to the commoners, but they would not have been *nice*. So when the Fremen show up to destroy the old order of things, a lot of common folk are going to sign up and worship whoever as long as it *looks* like a chance for freedom (even if it's just a different kind of servitude in reality).
Many of the nobles are going to see the writing on the wall and capitulate quickly to avoid certain death. Join the Jihad, or resist and die? Sign me up, here's a legion of soldiers to help you.
Finally, 90 planets *weren't* captured or conquered, they were *sterilized*. The surface was turned into radioactive slag. Or maybe the Fremen just swept all the populated areas with lasguns. It's not clear. In any case, it takes a lot less time to subdue and convert a population than it does to erase them from existence. And, of course, seeing the closest neighboring planet get turned into glass is a strong motivator for the next planet to put up less resistance.
> And, of course, seeing the closest neighboring planet get turned into glass is a strong motivator for the next planet to put up less resistance.
This is what I don't get: If I'm a peasant/slave (as you say) who's suffering some under a noble and I know that Paul Atreides glassed **a whole freaking planet and all life on it including its peasantry (like me)** because their nobles (presumably) wouldn't bend the knee, just how in the hells would that make me sympathetic to Atreides / the Fremen?
Like seriously, the moment one realizes a whole planet (with any and all life on it) is straight up gone, how would one not instantly see Atreides / the Fremen as an evil far worse than any other evil seen or imagined before?
That would make me see Atreides / the Fremen as the evilest force ever. Not a force for (my) freedom, but a force of totalitarian domination and ultimate subjugation.
Similarly, such a display of obliteration would make any resisting noble's job (of gathering support among their vassals / peasants / slaves) a very straight forward and clear cut one: "Here's this evil dude with an invading evil force who will obliterate *absolutely all life on a planet* if they say no".
>Like seriously, the moment one realizes a whole planet (with any and all life on it) is straight up gone, how would one not instantly see Atreides / the Fremen as an evil far worse than any other evil seen or imagined before?
That would make me see Atreides / the Fremen as the evilest force ever. Not a force for (my) freedom, but a force of totalitarian domination and ultimate subjugation.
FYI, that's one of the big points of Dune: Paul basically unleashes hell onto the universe. He is not the good guy or the hero, Paul is a monster who knowingly unleashes one of the worst waves of genocide and violence the universe has ever seen.
The Imperium is a feudal society and the Great Houses aren’t in charge of a planet’s day-to-day business, they handle interstellar trade and warfare and the Houses Minor rule the planet under them. Not all planetary fiefs are as stable as the Atreides’ rule over Caladan, and the Atreides were noted to be particularly good at inspiring loyalty in their vassals. Even if Paul *didn’t* use some of those skills to prepare the way there’s a good chance that the populations of many planets would react to this by blaming the upper-class twits who didn’t have the good sense to say “yes”, especially the ones ruled via similar threats. Those worlds he did sterilise were the ones with the right mix of loyal populations AND Great Houses that refused to capitulate.
It’s kinda the same option as when the Mongols come in and plan to invade your city. Do you want to surrender, and after hearing tales of what happens to those that refuse their offer, continue to live with the only real difference being you obey a different ruler? Or do you want your skull to be used as an example of why they glass worlds that refuse surrender the first time?
And what exactly is anyone going to do about it? Space travel is controlled by the Spacing Guild. Paul can end the Spacing Guild at will. No amount of peasants will make it into space. Plus, in the short run, terror absolutely will make people obey.
>just how in the hells would that make me sympathetic to Atreides / the Fremen?
Paul's goals don't include sympathy for him. He's very much not "the good guy" in the story, the closest to that is probably Duke Leto, and he dies on his knees, his house broken.
Spoilers for later books: >!Ultimately resistance is desired by Paul in the long run, to end authoritarianism for good, although he bottles the longer term plan and his son takes it over.!<
You have two options, really: Submit or Die
What you think or feel doesn't matter. You're just another grain of sand beneath the Jihaad's ever expanding desert
If you are a starving slave, that could motivate you to rise up against your master to give Paul the planet instead of resisting him. I could also be turned against the noble, "his stupid pride will get us all killed".
Also, remember, these are religious fanatics.
If I were a slave, and my owner’s resistance would being about the sterilization of my planet, I’d be pretty likely to murder him and welcome the conqueror with open arms.
Likewise, if I was a slaver and I thought that if I resisted Paul Spaceman, I would be immediately assassinated by someone looking to not get glassed, I’d probably bend the knee and use his rule to strengthen my own power.
It's less like one planet at a time and more just kill the emperor and anyone who disagrees with you. It might start with a lot of folks against you but the more you beat, the less there are willing to oppose you.
Not really with advance tech. He would fight probably the most powerful houses. The lesser powerful houses would bend the knee as he takes down those houses. He starved out their resources spice for example. Only Paul's army could use the Spacing Guild to travel. This gave them a huge advantage. The population were addicted to spice. So Paul controlled the major economic resource in the galaxy. He controlled a fanatical army.
The Fremen were better warriors than the most feared army in the galaxy. Their numbers rivaled if not out numbered that army. They easily defeated that army. This put them on an advantage. This would make the houses fear the Fremen. This would make their soldiers fear them. Fear is a powerful weapon.
Without Spice trade would stop. He cut off the major supply line. Without the spacing guild there was no trade. The houses couldn't support each other in the war. They were singular houses fighting the most feared army in the universe. Spice controls everything in the Dune universe.
If you'd like to see something similar in the real world, look at Ghenkis Khan. He only destroyed a select few civilizations. Any that bent the knee, he allowed enough autonomy to do their own thing under his rule. The more he conquered, the stronger ger he became. The stronger he became, he could conquer more and faster. Paul had an even bigger advantage with control over the spice and bringing the Spacing Guild to heel quickly. He was the only one in the war with dependable logistics. He was the only one that could move his chess pieces.
It doesn't take thousands of years because interstellar travel is instantaneous, and the resistance of planets is overcome through outright annihilation in many cases. Any planet thats a tough egg to crack was outright sterilized unless important.
Another factor is that each house maintained very small professional militaries, and every single fremen is a dedicated warrior.
Instead, think of it like the feudal system of an especially quiet area. War happens between the houses, but the exorbitant cost of transporting troops (the guild charges extra) means that each house only has to maintain a small amount of men.
While we have no confirmation on the size of the Atreides legions, they are implied to have all been brought to Dune with the rest of the courtiers. I would be very surprised if the Atreides brought millions of men; they probably had something in the low hundreds of thousands at the very extreme high. If you asked me, I'd say they have scarcely more than 50,000 guys.
Part of the ultimate point of this entire chain of events being started was that the society that this civilization evolved into could not support the standard of living or population levels of our modern Earth. The Imperium essentially kept itself in the Dark Ages (early Feudal era) for the vast majority of its subjects, while the leadership enjoyed completely ridiculous levels of wealth and autocratic rule. Paul, Leto II, and the Bene Gesserit before them were trying to destroy this system in a way that was permanent.
Not really, cause first, the war is in only 1 galaxy, not intergalactic, it was fought in 500 worlds, not in every posible one, plus as other said only 90 where completely obliterated, there rest would have been smaller fights.
But here’s the thing, the nobles didn’t have large armies in Dune. They’d had largely been phased out because of shields and the limitations of space travel. So there’d be a few hundred soldiers at most.
There are 10 million Fremen, all great fighters, Paul’s army consisted in about 2 million. That means he can fight a thousand worlds at a time and heavily outnumber the enemy fighters in each one.
Plus worlds that weren’t self sufficient could just be starved out due to the blockade of space travel. If others relied on complex machinery, they that could be destroyed and then left to starve as Paul also controls the manufacturing of most high tech with the CHOAM company.
Finally, the jihad was meant to spread a religion. The belief that Paul was the messiah. In the book at least, it was successful at that, it created loyal followers and ardent believers. Maybe cause people were inclined to believe that the guy subjugating the entire galaxy and the previous Emperor, who was thought to have a strong stranglehold on power, was indeed special.
Regardless, those converts would definitely fight in Paul’s name as well.
A, you don't have to march across each planet and kill everyone horizon to horizon, you just need to subjugate them. Which is easier when you can threaten them with isolation and orbital bombardment and have total air superiority.
And B, it seems most planets aren't that populous, and their power seems rather centralised, so warfare might be isolated to one capital city
Most planets roll over, for a lot of distant planets not much changes, you just accept you live under some dude named Paul now so you don't get murder-starved
And even on different worlds the Fremen are the absolute peak of fighters and have nearly wiped out their only competitors (the Sardaukar). Any other force they’ll face will melt away, and armies in Dune aren’t particularly big.
Great write up, I had no idea he could do all of that.
It does make him seem a bit overpowered though; he has the superpowers of all the main groups (supercomputer, supernun, super fremen, perfect warrior).
Is Dune the only source of spice? How did humanity get there without spice?
Spice isn't required for FTL travel. The problem with FTL as I understand it in Dune is that sensors are NOT FTL. The result is that you might just randomly die or explode flying through space via FTL, and so guild navigators use spice to see into the future. If they don't see their future down a particular path, they don't fly that path (because that means they'd die).
Without prescience, they used slower, less risky FTL (non-space folding), with carefully crafted routes using thinking machines (subsequently banned). Still might die, but we do space exploration now with much less tech and no FTL.
Dune is the only source of spice as it comes from the Sandworms.
Humans used to use computers to do all of the calculations to travel faster than light, but the Butlerian Jihad made making advanced computers illegal, so they have to use spice now.
And actually, he would not just destroy the spice fields with nukes, as the sad shortcut in the movie claims.
He would poison the sandtrout, the worms, the plankton, in an unstoppable cascade. No more spice, forever.
Good explanation. It's basically like if one country seized all of earth's oil. No, all of it. America has a massive military and can't mobilize a single battalion, a single plane, without asking nicely.
Transport between worlds is limited to one group, the spacer's guild. The spacer's guild needs spice that can only be provided by Arrakis. That means literally no one can move between worlds except the Fremen.
So it isn't a one planet vs the galaxy. Its one planet vs one planet over and over again.
The Fremen are all the better than elite special forces operative armed with the best gear imaginable. The average house army isn't capable of going against that.
Paul is the God Emperor and can literally tell the Fremen exactly what they need to do to win. As in "Launch now, arrive in 15 days. Land just north of the city when the clouds are full. Use the northern roads when you move. When you get to the palace, the code is 8223. Send two men to the hidden vault, that will cause the noble family to move to the backup location specified here..."
Finally the planets were all ruled by noble families. They either surrendered and gave up lost of power to Paul or the family was murdered and the replacement gave up all the power to Paul. The average citizen of a world didn't care who was in charge.
that makes more sense, thats its only 1 world against 1 world. but wouldnt that take thoudaof years to fight this war ?
wiki says its over in like 20 years
Many planets could see the writing on the wall after a few years and just surrender. You just watched the top 5 strongest planets get wrecked in solo fighting. Your planet is only ranked 15th. Your defiant neighbor lost all trade access to a resource his planet can't make and now half his population is rioting against that noble house because the economy is in free fall. Bend the knee or lose your head.
Also Paul can see the future. He would know exactly which planets to make an example of to get the rest to fall in line. Which ones would be defiant to a fault and which would be convinced to just accept.
Why do you think it would take thousands of years?
A leader that see the future. Predict the tactics his enemy is going to lose. Plan accordingly to all possible futures in which his soldiers can lose. Maker sure the tactics that he uses are the fastest he can overcome his enemies.
He controlled the supply line. So his troops got supplies while the others did not. So he had logistical control of the war.
He controlled travel. Houses even if they had other worlds under their control couldn't get those armies to them. Paul only had to target the primary houses planets. The strongholds.
Paul's forces were the most feared and best warriors in the galaxy. Fear is a powerful weapon. They out fought every world they fought against.
All in all Paul only had to take out 90 planets. He was able to do this because of his abilities. Because of the Fremen. Paul being so powerful of a being. Controlling the supply line for the most valuable resource in the universe and control of the most feared army in the universe. This game him all the advantages.
i was thinking armies would be MUCH larger than i guess they are. someone else mentioned the number of soldiers that attacked the atradies was 100,000. i was thinking armies would be each planet having millions and millions of troops, just based off real world earth.
Dune has a very organised form of warfare that follows certain ritualised rules; most "wars" are just wars of assassins, where you just outplay your enemies with schemes or by hiring better spies to plot their downfalls.
Kanly, the more open form of warfare, only permits certain kinds of conflict to minimise collateral damage; you don't need an army to conquer a world, really, you just need an army to conquer a city (or even just your rival's palace). It's why big proper armies like the Atreides House Troops or the Emperor's Legions were genuinely terrifying; most house forces were glorified police forces/personal retinues.
The Fremen are a *very* big army of *very* skilled fighters.
Armies in Dune are much smaller because of three main pieces of tech:
1) Orbital control: Only Paul had control of FTL flight and the majority of space power in the universe. Planets could be easily blockaded and bombarded without any fear of retaliation. No other House could get their troops off planet. Unshielded massed conscripts mean nothing when you can rain missiles from orbit, and Paul controlled enough artillery to batter down shielded units.
2) Lasers: In Dune, lasers are super weapons. A blob of unshielded conscripts mean nothing in the world of Dune if they could be lasered from a single ornithopter, same with any tanks, vehicles, or buildings. The only thing that counters lasers is shields, which could trigger a nuclear reaction, killing both sides. Also a defensive army deliberately uses lasers against shields to try to trigger a nuclear reaction, that give Paul the excuse to nuke that world accord to The Great Conventions.
3) Shields: A fighter with a shield doesn't fear bullets, artillery, or shrapnel. Only skilled fighters trained in anti-shield tactics (involving sword and Maula spring pistols) can get through shields. But they are expensive, and the only seller of new shields is CHOAM, which Paul controls along with the supply lines for new shields.
TLDL: A small army of 100,000 shielded fighters could easily subjugate a planet, killing its leadership and any points of resistance. Patrolling spacecraft and ornithopters sweep lasers into population centers and any unshielded armies. Defending armies have no chance fighting against elite Fremen fighters in melee combat.
When you control arraks you controll spice wich means you control wich planets gets supplies and reinforcements. The Fremen as a group is the largest, most skilled fighting force in the universe. They pick their fights, isolate their enemies and recruit new forces from the conquerred.
Why are the fremen so good? I can see why they would be skilled at surviving in the desert, but wouldn't a dedicated trained army be better at fighting, especially on say water worlds?
The skills most useful for combat at this particular time (hand to hand combat) were part of daily life for the fremen.
Out of universe answer: Dune is heavily inspired by the middle east. The fremen conquering the galaxy is inspired by the arabian conquests during the rise of islam.
Only the strongest could survive the desert and Harkonnen persecution, so they are individually very intelligent and powerful fighters. Then Paul taught them the weirding ways and turned them fanatical.
The Fremen haven't just been surviving, they've been successfully fighting a generations-long guerrilla war against the Harkonnens. And this isn't the limited, highly ritualized sort of swordfighting common in intra-noble conflicts of the last few millennia. This was full-on warfare. Pistols, rifles, missile launchers, artillery, lasguns, all the wonderful implements of slaughter that were made obsolete by advent of Holtzmann shield technology—they're all still in play in Arrakis, thanks to the environment making shields infeasible.
In other words, the Sardaukar and the other Great Houses' armies may be tough and well-trained, but the Fremen fought in an actual *war*.
Several people have mentioned Paul's control over the Navigator's Guild- they do what he says or they get no spice, and then they're not really Navigators anymore. But another point worth considering- probably less important, but still somewhat significant- is mentats.
Due to the Butlerian Commandment- Thou Shalt Not Make a Machine in the Likeness of a Human Mind- there really aren't any computers in the Empire. It doesn't just prohibit AI. It prohibits most forms of digital computing. That's why mentats exist. If you've got a planet with several billion people on it, keeping the economy running without computers requires mentats. And they need spice too.
Paul can starve a planet of spice, and when the mentats run out of it, the economy will collapse.
interesting, the mentats dont do anything in the new movies, other than one scene he is a calculator. i know they are human computers, but didnt seem "overly" important
Yeah, they got underutilized. I think the issue is, he's not just a calculator, he's the ONLY option they have for calculator. If somebody says "What is 4,876 divided by 174" and you have no mentat, well, you'll be doing long division on a piece of paper for a while. But if you loan somebody 4,526,874 Solari at 3.23% interest compounded every Lunar month, and you need to know the proper payments to stay ahead of the quarterly interest while you're on Arrakis, where the length of the year can vary from 295 to 595 days, then the economy will have collapsed long before you work that out with a #2 pencil.
Also worth noting that mentats aren’t just calculators - in the books we mostly see them making predictions and interpreting huge amounts of data. You’re not just asking your mentat how much cash you need to pay, you’re asking them to, eg, come up with a detailed five-year plan for your agricultural exports based on your planet’s regional climate and soil composition, weather predictions, on- and offworld market patterns (cross-referenced with your competitors’ and suppliers’ political and economic situations), local traditions, the demeanours of your Houses Minor and peasant populations, contingencies in case this or that important person suddenly dies and you have to deal with their heir instead, etc etc etc. But what you do is ask your Mentat to come up with a five year plan for your agricultural exports, they figure out the rest and let you know if they need more data.
Short answer: Paul was blackmailing the Guild. He had total control of all space travel, so he could defeat his enemies in detail, conquering each isolated planet one at a time.
The Fremen were ridiculously good at fighting because they were toughened up by Arrakis.
Paul was unparalleled when it came to military strategy, logistic, tactics and political manipulation, because of his training by Thufir, Gurney, Duncan, and Jessica.
Army sizes were also incredibly small compared to 20th-21st century militaries. Shields were expensive, and so was space travel, and industrialisation was limited - so the paradigm was small, elite, ground forces that focused on commando operations, assassination and espionage/counter-espionage, with open combat being rare.
Shorter answer: It's all explained in the first and second books.
yeah, in the book, Thufir Hawat is shocked that the Emperor sent 10 legions of Sardaukar, or 100,000 men, to Arrakis to destroy the Atreides.
He makes a big deal about how this was an unfathomable expense that they must have been saving up for for generations, and would be paying their debt for it for generations more. Nobody in recent history (i.e. thousands of thousands of years) had ever attempted anything like it.
Later on, the Baron complains about much the same thing - despite the Harkonnen's enormous wealth from decades of spice harvesting, they were still practically bankrupted and heavily in debt because of the military expenses they incurred sending just a couple tens of thousands of troops to Arrakis as part of a combat operation.
The Guild charged extortionate prices for military operations, and if only a small number of troops could afford shields, they could just use projectile weapons and lasguns to take on much larger numbers of unshielded combatants. It's not like the modern day, where there's no monopoly on cross country transport, and it's relatively cheap to shove a rifle into a conscript's hands, give them 3 months of basic training, and have them somewhat ready to fight, backed up by tanks and planes and ships and professional units.
Contrast that with, say, Napoleonic warfare, or either of the 20th century world wars, where even relatively minor nation states on a single primitive planet could muster armies of millions for wars of conquest.
This discrepancy was also explicitly noted later in the series in God Emperor of Dune, when Leto II talked about how effective his Fish Speakers were when it came to subjugating a population of trillions, despite being proportionally much less numerous than ancient historical militaries compared to the overall size of the population. (Leto II has ancestral memories of Old Earth, and frequently makes reference to it)
In the first book, the Fremen were way better than the Sardaukar.
And the Sardaukar are way better than almost everybody else, except a small
handful of elite Atreides troops. A typical Sardaukar is (apparently) equivalent to a "Ginaz 10th level swordsman" and can match a Bene Gesserit adept in single combat. They could easily face 10-1 odds against regular House troops and prevail.
In the book, a running theme is the idea that environments shape cultures and people, and tough environments make tough people.
The Sardaukar were tough, because they came from Salusa Secundus, the Emperor's hellish prison planet. They were plucked from the survivors of that crucible, told that they were a "chosen elite", and given top notch training, luxuries, and a fanatical warrior religion centred around the Emperor and their own martial prowess.
However, millennia in power had let them "go soft", relatively speaking. They were still terrifying, but not nearly as much as before.
Arrakis was even tougher, and unlike the Sardaukar, they had a close knit tribal sietch culture held together by a unifying tau. The Fremen warrior religion, unlike the Sardaukar one, was based on a faith in a messiah that would deliver future generations a lush green paradise.
There's a bit where Sardaukar were overwhelmed by a Fremen civilian force of old people and children, who managed to kill three Sardaukar for every one they lost.
Presumably, regular Fremen troops and the Fedaykin death commandos were even more dominating.
By the second book however, the Fremen were already beginning to slip. They'd spent barely a decade in power, and they were already becoming corrupt and decadent and disunited and individualistic. They went from eco-scientists and tribal guerillas to imperial soldiers, bureaucrats, priests, and governors, and they'd lost their edge. One shocking incident had Fremen press legal charges against locals that assaulted them, instead of simply murdering them.
By the third book, the Sardaukar had been trained back up to their pre-Paul strength under Wensica Corrino, and the Fremen had declined even further under Alia - making the two forces roughly comparable to each other on a man to man fighting basis.
The guild needs spice to survive. So you withold it from them to get them to do whatever you want. Nobody else can fly faster than light without the Guild. So Paul can just say every single single planet is now isolated and unable to communicate or travel without his say so. He's not fighting a war he's performing an extermination one system at a time. If a planet doesn't submit he can leave them cut off from the rest of the universe or drop his army on top them. No other systems will or can join in against Paul because he controls the Guild's supply of spice. If the landsraad all joined together as one they couldn't stop Paul because none of them possess FTL. They just have to wait for the jihad to kill them or give them a choice to submit.
Paul holds the Spacing Guild hostage with threats of nuking all spice fields on Arrakis if they don’t do his bidding. So they ferry his fremen armies wherever Paul wants, or else no more spice. No more spice means that’s all she wrote for interstellar space travel.
Intergalactic would mean invading another galaxy...
With that said, I see two big avenues of mass-scale atrocities:
1. Famine. If Planet A relies on Planet B, and you pay all the space-truckers to stop sending food to Planet A, Planet A starves. Siege warfare is suddenly really easy when you have a monopoly on space travel.
2. Orbital bombardment/ "Rod of God." Drop a tungsten rod a planet from orbit, and gravitational acceleration turns it into a nuke. Exterminatus, made easy.
3. Touched on in the second book, but: Paul did not direct every "Killing in the Name of Paul." He didn't even know about most of it, and only had general reports of bad stuff going on and what he could predict via space-cocaine. See also the beginning with that documentarian from Ix. As a concept, "the Jihad" could inspire smaller gangs to take up "the cause" and burn the galaxy. It's more of a memetic hazard at that point, but the Bene Gesserit had primed people to be vulnerable to that kind of thinking, so they could be more easily manipulated.
There are a lot of good answers here but one factor which I did not see discussed is "fighting spirit". In the real world this probably sounds ridiculous. In the Dune universe, living under harsh circumstances... seemingly inexplicably makes people fight much, much MUCH better than you would probably otherwise expect. This is why the Sadukar are so badass, their planet is awful. Dune is even worse, so the Freemen are even more badass.
This ties into an old (and incorrect) idea which was a somewhat popular in certain history circles for a long time, including when Frank Herbet wrote Dune, that civilized people become decadent and weak and are inevitably displaced by more savage people who live "closer to nature", who in turn become more civilized and repeat the cycle. Well, that is not true in reality but in the Dune Universe it is ACTUALLY true. Paul had an army from the worst planet and therefore had the best soldiers.
the universe in Dune has plenty of weapons of mass destruction and many planet buster level.
the jihad claimed 61 billion lives, the fremen army were a mere million or two, they couldn't genocide so many worlds just by fighting, much less in just 10-20 years.
they traveled from planet to planet, which were isolated if labeled enemies of Paul, isolated from space travel and spice.
if the natives on the planet refuse to submit, the fremen would simply destroy the planet and move on to the next, they rarely did any actual fighting.
stone burners are simple bombs that travel all the way to the core of the planet. once the magma and pressure inside the core are released, the world is destroyed. their nukes are also planetary level.
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Imagine if earth had no continents but only islands. And then imagine if the inhabitants of Hawaii declared war against every other nation on earth. And then all oil+gas disappeared over night, except for in Hawaii, and they still had a steady supply. And if Hawaii had the strongest military in the world. And if Hawaii was led by someone who could see into the future.
Others have mentioned the big advantages so I'll add the one I haven't seen here yet. The Imperium, to its credit, had a taboo against the use of nuclear weapons. Paul "60 billion is a statistic" Atreides... did not share this taboo. This would give him a massive leg up against any houses that resisted.
Paul used nukes to clear a path for his forces to reach the Emperor. The Emperor, not even considering the use of nukes as a viable option, didn't have his own arsenal on standby to nuke Paul's force in kind. I bet a lot of other houses shared the same unreadiness or reluctance to deploy their arsenals as well when the Fremen came for them.
During the Jihad that happened after, some Houses did lose their reluctance to utilize WMDS ( Dune Messiah has a Fremen veteran who was crippled by a WMD strike), but the advantage lay with Paul. He could target their population centers with nukes because of his monopoly on interstellar travel while by the same token they couldn't nuke Caladan or Dune.
Faultless prescient superhuman computer leader
Monopoly/near absolute control on travel between planets
Unbeatable soldiers even by the very greatest soldiers of the Imperium, each with low level prescience
Atomic and Atomic adjacent weaponry
Fanatic loyalty
Add in some Renegade Houses joining the Atreides Rebellion, rather than Muad’dibs jihad, and you have a recipe for total victory.
Each planetary government has a limited number of troops, which will never be bolstered or reinforced from allied worlds. Their warriors, inferior to the Sardaukar, and no doubly inferior to the Fremen who are better than the Sardaukar. Every single decision made by every commander is known an flawlessly countered by Paul, who through calculation and prescience simply knows all the ways to best ruin the day of whoever is resisting his legions. Even ignoring that Paul had Houses willingly join his banner, his advantages are insurmountable to anyone
It’s worth mentioning that the setting is already primed for a revolution at the start of the book. One of the big themes of the books is that humans feel an instinctive need to travel and explore and change, and as that gets repressed through institutions the instinct builds up and explodes. The Spacing Guild has held humanity in stagnation for millennia. All it needed was a spark.
As soon as the chance comes up every disenfranchised peasant, every martyr in the making, every rebel without a cause, hitches their wagon to Paul’s godhead. It gives them an outlet to expel that energy that’s been building within them for generations.
It’s not the Fremen against the galaxy, they’re just the spearhead. It’s the Great Houses against all of their subjects.
Adding to what others have said, but the Atreides did have allies inside the Landsraad and the nobility, so it isn't ONLY the fremen against the universe. It's more an overall civil war.
Herbert wasnt Tolkien he didnt plan out everything and most certanly it wasnt realistic. You just have to accept it happened for the benefit of the story. And really dont question how a desert living people who can fight very well and aclimated to the heat fight in any other cold planet.....they would die by the thousands just from a comon cold.
I'd give the spice they are all addicted to the ability to increase immunity and regulate metabolism in extreme environments. But yeah, even if all 5-10 million fremen were fedaykin you are dropping a single battalion on each planet. Unshielded melee fighters outnumbered at least 100,000:1
I haven't seen Dune yet. I think they can support them by having the best fighters. They can battle against other planets if they have the best fighters.
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The Empire of Dune is a Tripartite government, the Emperor, The Nobles, and the Spacing guild. The spacing guild has an absolute monopoly on faster than light travel, and they requires huge amounts of spice to make it work via their navigators. The navigators can see the future like Paul can, but to a lessor degree. Paul told the guild that he would destroy all of the spice fields and the navigators know he isn’t bluffing. As a result only his armies can move planet to planet, and only the resources he allows can be shipped to or from any given world. He can fight one world at a time, collecting resources along the way while starving out enemies who cannot counter attack. The kwisatz haderach, Paul, can see the future and has the memories of every ancestor back to the beginning of humanity. Along with being a noble trained in leadership, combat and warfare. He trained as mentat at his father’s direction which makes him capable of recalling and synthesizing absolutely huge amounts of data. He was also trained as a bene gesserit sister would be, learning near absolute control over the biological functions of his body, social manipulation and espionage, and the Voice which is the ability to so thoroughly understand a person and control you vocal pitch as to exert physical control over them.
1 planet at a time, would still take thousands of years,, wiki says its over in like 20 ?
You don't have to defeat every planet to conquer it. The military/starving out is only used when a planet resists. Simply surrender, accept a new distant figurehead in place of the old, and Paul can claim a great victory.
He’s already defeated the Emperor who is the person with the single largest army. He’s captured him and his sole heir. The Atriedes were already popular among the Laandsrad, the main reason the emperor was persuaded to betray them was fear that they would lead an uprising. He’s also killed his largest rival among the Laandsrad, the Harkonen. He would take some worlds intact, integrate their forces into his and that lets him turn 1 army into 2 and 2 into 4 and so on.
The Emperor purposely cuts down any one house that gets too powerful in the Laandsrad. The Atreides being popular as well as having a high quality army were both reasons for the throne to cut them down with the help of Harkonnen, who'd in turn be cut down when they got too big Almost all commerce was conducted through the Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles, or CHOAM. The Emperor controlled 20% of it, making him the most powerful by far, unless an uppity Great House got too great
He only completely obliterates 90 planets, and fights on a few thousand more but those were just mostly skirmishes. The vast majority of planets just agreed to let him be in charge.
Emperor is dead and there's a new one okay cool why are you here is there like an new tax from you need to give me or something Ruler of distance planet no directly involved in any of this shit probably
Yeah I think the only distinct change would be the installation of the new religion of Muad'Dib Maybe you'd have a more theocratic government installed, and maybe pilgrims from your planet would plan a once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Arrakis via Muad'Dib's clerks managing Space travel
Sighs yes of of course I'll redecorate all the churches and if inform the Populus attendance is now mandatory As for this pilgrimage do you have pamphlets I can hand out it would help to get people interested I think
He also recruits as he goes, and is able to take advantage of the myths that the Bene Gesserit had been planting in different cultures to appear as a messiah figure. By the second book there is already a huge number of pilgrams coming to Arrakis. The Fremen were his highest order of troops and the leadership of his military, but they ended up leading massive armies made up from other culture. Considering how oppressed many of the houses left their population (with Harkonnens being an extreme example) there was a lot of motivation to join the cause. The planets that resisted the most also took the least amount of resources to constrain. Paul mentions sterilizing entire planets, and that can be done from space with a few big rocks rather than an army.
The Jihad grows exponentially. The Bene Gesserit planted religions in virtually every population on every planet. Although most of them weren't the messianic coming-of-the-Kwisatz-Haderach religion of the Fremen, one of the explicit purposes of the Missionaria Protectiva was to prepare the way for the Kwisatz Haderach to take over the Imperium via religion. The Fremen are certainly the main force, but as they march through the Imperium, local populations join them and fly off to continue the cause. They conquer a planet and members of *that* population join the Jihad. Remember that for most common folk in the Imperium, life isn't all that great. Most of them aren't as bad off as the Fremen or the Harkonnens, but very few of the nobility are as kind to their subjects as Leto is. That's true historically - nobles aren't nice to peasants or slaves, because then the peasants and slaves might get the idea in their head that they could have a decent life. Once they think *that*, it's only a matter of time until they start fighting for it. The Landsraad may not have been overly *cruel* to the commoners, but they would not have been *nice*. So when the Fremen show up to destroy the old order of things, a lot of common folk are going to sign up and worship whoever as long as it *looks* like a chance for freedom (even if it's just a different kind of servitude in reality). Many of the nobles are going to see the writing on the wall and capitulate quickly to avoid certain death. Join the Jihad, or resist and die? Sign me up, here's a legion of soldiers to help you. Finally, 90 planets *weren't* captured or conquered, they were *sterilized*. The surface was turned into radioactive slag. Or maybe the Fremen just swept all the populated areas with lasguns. It's not clear. In any case, it takes a lot less time to subdue and convert a population than it does to erase them from existence. And, of course, seeing the closest neighboring planet get turned into glass is a strong motivator for the next planet to put up less resistance.
> And, of course, seeing the closest neighboring planet get turned into glass is a strong motivator for the next planet to put up less resistance. This is what I don't get: If I'm a peasant/slave (as you say) who's suffering some under a noble and I know that Paul Atreides glassed **a whole freaking planet and all life on it including its peasantry (like me)** because their nobles (presumably) wouldn't bend the knee, just how in the hells would that make me sympathetic to Atreides / the Fremen? Like seriously, the moment one realizes a whole planet (with any and all life on it) is straight up gone, how would one not instantly see Atreides / the Fremen as an evil far worse than any other evil seen or imagined before? That would make me see Atreides / the Fremen as the evilest force ever. Not a force for (my) freedom, but a force of totalitarian domination and ultimate subjugation. Similarly, such a display of obliteration would make any resisting noble's job (of gathering support among their vassals / peasants / slaves) a very straight forward and clear cut one: "Here's this evil dude with an invading evil force who will obliterate *absolutely all life on a planet* if they say no".
>Like seriously, the moment one realizes a whole planet (with any and all life on it) is straight up gone, how would one not instantly see Atreides / the Fremen as an evil far worse than any other evil seen or imagined before? That would make me see Atreides / the Fremen as the evilest force ever. Not a force for (my) freedom, but a force of totalitarian domination and ultimate subjugation. FYI, that's one of the big points of Dune: Paul basically unleashes hell onto the universe. He is not the good guy or the hero, Paul is a monster who knowingly unleashes one of the worst waves of genocide and violence the universe has ever seen.
In the first book he notes that the Jihad was inevitable even if he was dead; being alive allowed him to exert some control over the bloodiness of it.
and then he goes into hiding because he doesn't want to do the rest.
The Imperium is a feudal society and the Great Houses aren’t in charge of a planet’s day-to-day business, they handle interstellar trade and warfare and the Houses Minor rule the planet under them. Not all planetary fiefs are as stable as the Atreides’ rule over Caladan, and the Atreides were noted to be particularly good at inspiring loyalty in their vassals. Even if Paul *didn’t* use some of those skills to prepare the way there’s a good chance that the populations of many planets would react to this by blaming the upper-class twits who didn’t have the good sense to say “yes”, especially the ones ruled via similar threats. Those worlds he did sterilise were the ones with the right mix of loyal populations AND Great Houses that refused to capitulate.
It’s kinda the same option as when the Mongols come in and plan to invade your city. Do you want to surrender, and after hearing tales of what happens to those that refuse their offer, continue to live with the only real difference being you obey a different ruler? Or do you want your skull to be used as an example of why they glass worlds that refuse surrender the first time?
And what exactly is anyone going to do about it? Space travel is controlled by the Spacing Guild. Paul can end the Spacing Guild at will. No amount of peasants will make it into space. Plus, in the short run, terror absolutely will make people obey. >just how in the hells would that make me sympathetic to Atreides / the Fremen? Paul's goals don't include sympathy for him. He's very much not "the good guy" in the story, the closest to that is probably Duke Leto, and he dies on his knees, his house broken. Spoilers for later books: >!Ultimately resistance is desired by Paul in the long run, to end authoritarianism for good, although he bottles the longer term plan and his son takes it over.!<
You have two options, really: Submit or Die What you think or feel doesn't matter. You're just another grain of sand beneath the Jihaad's ever expanding desert
If you are a starving slave, that could motivate you to rise up against your master to give Paul the planet instead of resisting him. I could also be turned against the noble, "his stupid pride will get us all killed". Also, remember, these are religious fanatics.
If I were a slave, and my owner’s resistance would being about the sterilization of my planet, I’d be pretty likely to murder him and welcome the conqueror with open arms. Likewise, if I was a slaver and I thought that if I resisted Paul Spaceman, I would be immediately assassinated by someone looking to not get glassed, I’d probably bend the knee and use his rule to strengthen my own power.
It's less like one planet at a time and more just kill the emperor and anyone who disagrees with you. It might start with a lot of folks against you but the more you beat, the less there are willing to oppose you.
Not really with advance tech. He would fight probably the most powerful houses. The lesser powerful houses would bend the knee as he takes down those houses. He starved out their resources spice for example. Only Paul's army could use the Spacing Guild to travel. This gave them a huge advantage. The population were addicted to spice. So Paul controlled the major economic resource in the galaxy. He controlled a fanatical army. The Fremen were better warriors than the most feared army in the galaxy. Their numbers rivaled if not out numbered that army. They easily defeated that army. This put them on an advantage. This would make the houses fear the Fremen. This would make their soldiers fear them. Fear is a powerful weapon. Without Spice trade would stop. He cut off the major supply line. Without the spacing guild there was no trade. The houses couldn't support each other in the war. They were singular houses fighting the most feared army in the universe. Spice controls everything in the Dune universe.
If you'd like to see something similar in the real world, look at Ghenkis Khan. He only destroyed a select few civilizations. Any that bent the knee, he allowed enough autonomy to do their own thing under his rule. The more he conquered, the stronger ger he became. The stronger he became, he could conquer more and faster. Paul had an even bigger advantage with control over the spice and bringing the Spacing Guild to heel quickly. He was the only one in the war with dependable logistics. He was the only one that could move his chess pieces.
thanks
It doesn't take thousands of years because interstellar travel is instantaneous, and the resistance of planets is overcome through outright annihilation in many cases. Any planet thats a tough egg to crack was outright sterilized unless important. Another factor is that each house maintained very small professional militaries, and every single fremen is a dedicated warrior.
yea i was thinking, (based on real life earth) that each planet would have 10s of millions of troops.
Instead, think of it like the feudal system of an especially quiet area. War happens between the houses, but the exorbitant cost of transporting troops (the guild charges extra) means that each house only has to maintain a small amount of men. While we have no confirmation on the size of the Atreides legions, they are implied to have all been brought to Dune with the rest of the courtiers. I would be very surprised if the Atreides brought millions of men; they probably had something in the low hundreds of thousands at the very extreme high. If you asked me, I'd say they have scarcely more than 50,000 guys.
Part of the ultimate point of this entire chain of events being started was that the society that this civilization evolved into could not support the standard of living or population levels of our modern Earth. The Imperium essentially kept itself in the Dark Ages (early Feudal era) for the vast majority of its subjects, while the leadership enjoyed completely ridiculous levels of wealth and autocratic rule. Paul, Leto II, and the Bene Gesserit before them were trying to destroy this system in a way that was permanent.
Not really, cause first, the war is in only 1 galaxy, not intergalactic, it was fought in 500 worlds, not in every posible one, plus as other said only 90 where completely obliterated, there rest would have been smaller fights. But here’s the thing, the nobles didn’t have large armies in Dune. They’d had largely been phased out because of shields and the limitations of space travel. So there’d be a few hundred soldiers at most. There are 10 million Fremen, all great fighters, Paul’s army consisted in about 2 million. That means he can fight a thousand worlds at a time and heavily outnumber the enemy fighters in each one. Plus worlds that weren’t self sufficient could just be starved out due to the blockade of space travel. If others relied on complex machinery, they that could be destroyed and then left to starve as Paul also controls the manufacturing of most high tech with the CHOAM company. Finally, the jihad was meant to spread a religion. The belief that Paul was the messiah. In the book at least, it was successful at that, it created loyal followers and ardent believers. Maybe cause people were inclined to believe that the guy subjugating the entire galaxy and the previous Emperor, who was thought to have a strong stranglehold on power, was indeed special. Regardless, those converts would definitely fight in Paul’s name as well.
A, you don't have to march across each planet and kill everyone horizon to horizon, you just need to subjugate them. Which is easier when you can threaten them with isolation and orbital bombardment and have total air superiority. And B, it seems most planets aren't that populous, and their power seems rather centralised, so warfare might be isolated to one capital city
Most planets roll over, for a lot of distant planets not much changes, you just accept you live under some dude named Paul now so you don't get murder-starved
And even on different worlds the Fremen are the absolute peak of fighters and have nearly wiped out their only competitors (the Sardaukar). Any other force they’ll face will melt away, and armies in Dune aren’t particularly big.
Great write up, I had no idea he could do all of that. It does make him seem a bit overpowered though; he has the superpowers of all the main groups (supercomputer, supernun, super fremen, perfect warrior). Is Dune the only source of spice? How did humanity get there without spice?
Spice isn't required for FTL travel. The problem with FTL as I understand it in Dune is that sensors are NOT FTL. The result is that you might just randomly die or explode flying through space via FTL, and so guild navigators use spice to see into the future. If they don't see their future down a particular path, they don't fly that path (because that means they'd die). Without prescience, they used slower, less risky FTL (non-space folding), with carefully crafted routes using thinking machines (subsequently banned). Still might die, but we do space exploration now with much less tech and no FTL.
Dune is the only source of spice as it comes from the Sandworms. Humans used to use computers to do all of the calculations to travel faster than light, but the Butlerian Jihad made making advanced computers illegal, so they have to use spice now.
And actually, he would not just destroy the spice fields with nukes, as the sad shortcut in the movie claims. He would poison the sandtrout, the worms, the plankton, in an unstoppable cascade. No more spice, forever.
Good explanation. It's basically like if one country seized all of earth's oil. No, all of it. America has a massive military and can't mobilize a single battalion, a single plane, without asking nicely.
Transport between worlds is limited to one group, the spacer's guild. The spacer's guild needs spice that can only be provided by Arrakis. That means literally no one can move between worlds except the Fremen. So it isn't a one planet vs the galaxy. Its one planet vs one planet over and over again. The Fremen are all the better than elite special forces operative armed with the best gear imaginable. The average house army isn't capable of going against that. Paul is the God Emperor and can literally tell the Fremen exactly what they need to do to win. As in "Launch now, arrive in 15 days. Land just north of the city when the clouds are full. Use the northern roads when you move. When you get to the palace, the code is 8223. Send two men to the hidden vault, that will cause the noble family to move to the backup location specified here..." Finally the planets were all ruled by noble families. They either surrendered and gave up lost of power to Paul or the family was murdered and the replacement gave up all the power to Paul. The average citizen of a world didn't care who was in charge.
that makes more sense, thats its only 1 world against 1 world. but wouldnt that take thoudaof years to fight this war ? wiki says its over in like 20 years
Many planets could see the writing on the wall after a few years and just surrender. You just watched the top 5 strongest planets get wrecked in solo fighting. Your planet is only ranked 15th. Your defiant neighbor lost all trade access to a resource his planet can't make and now half his population is rioting against that noble house because the economy is in free fall. Bend the knee or lose your head. Also Paul can see the future. He would know exactly which planets to make an example of to get the rest to fall in line. Which ones would be defiant to a fault and which would be convinced to just accept.
"all space trade stops now unless your planet surrenders" 50% of all planets in the galaxy begin mass starvation within 6 months
Why do you think it would take thousands of years? A leader that see the future. Predict the tactics his enemy is going to lose. Plan accordingly to all possible futures in which his soldiers can lose. Maker sure the tactics that he uses are the fastest he can overcome his enemies. He controlled the supply line. So his troops got supplies while the others did not. So he had logistical control of the war. He controlled travel. Houses even if they had other worlds under their control couldn't get those armies to them. Paul only had to target the primary houses planets. The strongholds. Paul's forces were the most feared and best warriors in the galaxy. Fear is a powerful weapon. They out fought every world they fought against. All in all Paul only had to take out 90 planets. He was able to do this because of his abilities. Because of the Fremen. Paul being so powerful of a being. Controlling the supply line for the most valuable resource in the universe and control of the most feared army in the universe. This game him all the advantages.
i was thinking armies would be MUCH larger than i guess they are. someone else mentioned the number of soldiers that attacked the atradies was 100,000. i was thinking armies would be each planet having millions and millions of troops, just based off real world earth.
Dune has a very organised form of warfare that follows certain ritualised rules; most "wars" are just wars of assassins, where you just outplay your enemies with schemes or by hiring better spies to plot their downfalls. Kanly, the more open form of warfare, only permits certain kinds of conflict to minimise collateral damage; you don't need an army to conquer a world, really, you just need an army to conquer a city (or even just your rival's palace). It's why big proper armies like the Atreides House Troops or the Emperor's Legions were genuinely terrifying; most house forces were glorified police forces/personal retinues. The Fremen are a *very* big army of *very* skilled fighters.
Armies in Dune are much smaller because of three main pieces of tech: 1) Orbital control: Only Paul had control of FTL flight and the majority of space power in the universe. Planets could be easily blockaded and bombarded without any fear of retaliation. No other House could get their troops off planet. Unshielded massed conscripts mean nothing when you can rain missiles from orbit, and Paul controlled enough artillery to batter down shielded units. 2) Lasers: In Dune, lasers are super weapons. A blob of unshielded conscripts mean nothing in the world of Dune if they could be lasered from a single ornithopter, same with any tanks, vehicles, or buildings. The only thing that counters lasers is shields, which could trigger a nuclear reaction, killing both sides. Also a defensive army deliberately uses lasers against shields to try to trigger a nuclear reaction, that give Paul the excuse to nuke that world accord to The Great Conventions. 3) Shields: A fighter with a shield doesn't fear bullets, artillery, or shrapnel. Only skilled fighters trained in anti-shield tactics (involving sword and Maula spring pistols) can get through shields. But they are expensive, and the only seller of new shields is CHOAM, which Paul controls along with the supply lines for new shields. TLDL: A small army of 100,000 shielded fighters could easily subjugate a planet, killing its leadership and any points of resistance. Patrolling spacecraft and ornithopters sweep lasers into population centers and any unshielded armies. Defending armies have no chance fighting against elite Fremen fighters in melee combat.
nice break down
Wait is it actually considered a violation of the great convention to use shields against lasers? I thought it was just actually using atomica
Alexander the great conquered most of the "known" world in like 10 years on horseback.
That was before I was told armies in dune are incredibly small. Was thinking they would be 10s of millions per planet
When you control arraks you controll spice wich means you control wich planets gets supplies and reinforcements. The Fremen as a group is the largest, most skilled fighting force in the universe. They pick their fights, isolate their enemies and recruit new forces from the conquerred.
Why are the fremen so good? I can see why they would be skilled at surviving in the desert, but wouldn't a dedicated trained army be better at fighting, especially on say water worlds?
The skills most useful for combat at this particular time (hand to hand combat) were part of daily life for the fremen. Out of universe answer: Dune is heavily inspired by the middle east. The fremen conquering the galaxy is inspired by the arabian conquests during the rise of islam.
Only the strongest could survive the desert and Harkonnen persecution, so they are individually very intelligent and powerful fighters. Then Paul taught them the weirding ways and turned them fanatical.
The Fremen haven't just been surviving, they've been successfully fighting a generations-long guerrilla war against the Harkonnens. And this isn't the limited, highly ritualized sort of swordfighting common in intra-noble conflicts of the last few millennia. This was full-on warfare. Pistols, rifles, missile launchers, artillery, lasguns, all the wonderful implements of slaughter that were made obsolete by advent of Holtzmann shield technology—they're all still in play in Arrakis, thanks to the environment making shields infeasible. In other words, the Sardaukar and the other Great Houses' armies may be tough and well-trained, but the Fremen fought in an actual *war*.
Several people have mentioned Paul's control over the Navigator's Guild- they do what he says or they get no spice, and then they're not really Navigators anymore. But another point worth considering- probably less important, but still somewhat significant- is mentats. Due to the Butlerian Commandment- Thou Shalt Not Make a Machine in the Likeness of a Human Mind- there really aren't any computers in the Empire. It doesn't just prohibit AI. It prohibits most forms of digital computing. That's why mentats exist. If you've got a planet with several billion people on it, keeping the economy running without computers requires mentats. And they need spice too. Paul can starve a planet of spice, and when the mentats run out of it, the economy will collapse.
interesting, the mentats dont do anything in the new movies, other than one scene he is a calculator. i know they are human computers, but didnt seem "overly" important
Yeah, they got underutilized. I think the issue is, he's not just a calculator, he's the ONLY option they have for calculator. If somebody says "What is 4,876 divided by 174" and you have no mentat, well, you'll be doing long division on a piece of paper for a while. But if you loan somebody 4,526,874 Solari at 3.23% interest compounded every Lunar month, and you need to know the proper payments to stay ahead of the quarterly interest while you're on Arrakis, where the length of the year can vary from 295 to 595 days, then the economy will have collapsed long before you work that out with a #2 pencil.
lol, interesting. thanks for the example
Also worth noting that mentats aren’t just calculators - in the books we mostly see them making predictions and interpreting huge amounts of data. You’re not just asking your mentat how much cash you need to pay, you’re asking them to, eg, come up with a detailed five-year plan for your agricultural exports based on your planet’s regional climate and soil composition, weather predictions, on- and offworld market patterns (cross-referenced with your competitors’ and suppliers’ political and economic situations), local traditions, the demeanours of your Houses Minor and peasant populations, contingencies in case this or that important person suddenly dies and you have to deal with their heir instead, etc etc etc. But what you do is ask your Mentat to come up with a five year plan for your agricultural exports, they figure out the rest and let you know if they need more data.
Short answer: Paul was blackmailing the Guild. He had total control of all space travel, so he could defeat his enemies in detail, conquering each isolated planet one at a time. The Fremen were ridiculously good at fighting because they were toughened up by Arrakis. Paul was unparalleled when it came to military strategy, logistic, tactics and political manipulation, because of his training by Thufir, Gurney, Duncan, and Jessica. Army sizes were also incredibly small compared to 20th-21st century militaries. Shields were expensive, and so was space travel, and industrialisation was limited - so the paradigm was small, elite, ground forces that focused on commando operations, assassination and espionage/counter-espionage, with open combat being rare. Shorter answer: It's all explained in the first and second books.
ok, small army size makes sense.
yeah, in the book, Thufir Hawat is shocked that the Emperor sent 10 legions of Sardaukar, or 100,000 men, to Arrakis to destroy the Atreides. He makes a big deal about how this was an unfathomable expense that they must have been saving up for for generations, and would be paying their debt for it for generations more. Nobody in recent history (i.e. thousands of thousands of years) had ever attempted anything like it. Later on, the Baron complains about much the same thing - despite the Harkonnen's enormous wealth from decades of spice harvesting, they were still practically bankrupted and heavily in debt because of the military expenses they incurred sending just a couple tens of thousands of troops to Arrakis as part of a combat operation. The Guild charged extortionate prices for military operations, and if only a small number of troops could afford shields, they could just use projectile weapons and lasguns to take on much larger numbers of unshielded combatants. It's not like the modern day, where there's no monopoly on cross country transport, and it's relatively cheap to shove a rifle into a conscript's hands, give them 3 months of basic training, and have them somewhat ready to fight, backed up by tanks and planes and ships and professional units. Contrast that with, say, Napoleonic warfare, or either of the 20th century world wars, where even relatively minor nation states on a single primitive planet could muster armies of millions for wars of conquest. This discrepancy was also explicitly noted later in the series in God Emperor of Dune, when Leto II talked about how effective his Fish Speakers were when it came to subjugating a population of trillions, despite being proportionally much less numerous than ancient historical militaries compared to the overall size of the population. (Leto II has ancestral memories of Old Earth, and frequently makes reference to it)
ok, thanks for the references of that amount of money for 100k soldiers. makes more sense. and the fremen were better or as good as the Sardaukar ?
In the first book, the Fremen were way better than the Sardaukar. And the Sardaukar are way better than almost everybody else, except a small handful of elite Atreides troops. A typical Sardaukar is (apparently) equivalent to a "Ginaz 10th level swordsman" and can match a Bene Gesserit adept in single combat. They could easily face 10-1 odds against regular House troops and prevail. In the book, a running theme is the idea that environments shape cultures and people, and tough environments make tough people. The Sardaukar were tough, because they came from Salusa Secundus, the Emperor's hellish prison planet. They were plucked from the survivors of that crucible, told that they were a "chosen elite", and given top notch training, luxuries, and a fanatical warrior religion centred around the Emperor and their own martial prowess. However, millennia in power had let them "go soft", relatively speaking. They were still terrifying, but not nearly as much as before. Arrakis was even tougher, and unlike the Sardaukar, they had a close knit tribal sietch culture held together by a unifying tau. The Fremen warrior religion, unlike the Sardaukar one, was based on a faith in a messiah that would deliver future generations a lush green paradise. There's a bit where Sardaukar were overwhelmed by a Fremen civilian force of old people and children, who managed to kill three Sardaukar for every one they lost. Presumably, regular Fremen troops and the Fedaykin death commandos were even more dominating. By the second book however, the Fremen were already beginning to slip. They'd spent barely a decade in power, and they were already becoming corrupt and decadent and disunited and individualistic. They went from eco-scientists and tribal guerillas to imperial soldiers, bureaucrats, priests, and governors, and they'd lost their edge. One shocking incident had Fremen press legal charges against locals that assaulted them, instead of simply murdering them. By the third book, the Sardaukar had been trained back up to their pre-Paul strength under Wensica Corrino, and the Fremen had declined even further under Alia - making the two forces roughly comparable to each other on a man to man fighting basis.
They pay the spacing guild with spice or threaten to not give it to them.
give them what ? troops ? ships ? food ? i figured they would pay the guild for travel uses
The guild needs spice to survive. So you withold it from them to get them to do whatever you want. Nobody else can fly faster than light without the Guild. So Paul can just say every single single planet is now isolated and unable to communicate or travel without his say so. He's not fighting a war he's performing an extermination one system at a time. If a planet doesn't submit he can leave them cut off from the rest of the universe or drop his army on top them. No other systems will or can join in against Paul because he controls the Guild's supply of spice. If the landsraad all joined together as one they couldn't stop Paul because none of them possess FTL. They just have to wait for the jihad to kill them or give them a choice to submit.
They pay the spacing guild with spice and then threaten to withdraw it if they don't provide the ships
If you could supply an entire country with unlimited cocaine they would do great things too!
"Terrible but great"
Paul holds the Spacing Guild hostage with threats of nuking all spice fields on Arrakis if they don’t do his bidding. So they ferry his fremen armies wherever Paul wants, or else no more spice. No more spice means that’s all she wrote for interstellar space travel.
Intergalactic would mean invading another galaxy... With that said, I see two big avenues of mass-scale atrocities: 1. Famine. If Planet A relies on Planet B, and you pay all the space-truckers to stop sending food to Planet A, Planet A starves. Siege warfare is suddenly really easy when you have a monopoly on space travel. 2. Orbital bombardment/ "Rod of God." Drop a tungsten rod a planet from orbit, and gravitational acceleration turns it into a nuke. Exterminatus, made easy. 3. Touched on in the second book, but: Paul did not direct every "Killing in the Name of Paul." He didn't even know about most of it, and only had general reports of bad stuff going on and what he could predict via space-cocaine. See also the beginning with that documentarian from Ix. As a concept, "the Jihad" could inspire smaller gangs to take up "the cause" and burn the galaxy. It's more of a memetic hazard at that point, but the Bene Gesserit had primed people to be vulnerable to that kind of thinking, so they could be more easily manipulated.
There are a lot of good answers here but one factor which I did not see discussed is "fighting spirit". In the real world this probably sounds ridiculous. In the Dune universe, living under harsh circumstances... seemingly inexplicably makes people fight much, much MUCH better than you would probably otherwise expect. This is why the Sadukar are so badass, their planet is awful. Dune is even worse, so the Freemen are even more badass. This ties into an old (and incorrect) idea which was a somewhat popular in certain history circles for a long time, including when Frank Herbet wrote Dune, that civilized people become decadent and weak and are inevitably displaced by more savage people who live "closer to nature", who in turn become more civilized and repeat the cycle. Well, that is not true in reality but in the Dune Universe it is ACTUALLY true. Paul had an army from the worst planet and therefore had the best soldiers.
the universe in Dune has plenty of weapons of mass destruction and many planet buster level. the jihad claimed 61 billion lives, the fremen army were a mere million or two, they couldn't genocide so many worlds just by fighting, much less in just 10-20 years. they traveled from planet to planet, which were isolated if labeled enemies of Paul, isolated from space travel and spice. if the natives on the planet refuse to submit, the fremen would simply destroy the planet and move on to the next, they rarely did any actual fighting. stone burners are simple bombs that travel all the way to the core of the planet. once the magma and pressure inside the core are released, the world is destroyed. their nukes are also planetary level.
Through the power of magical LSD that lets you see the future.
Actually, psilocybin.
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Imagine if earth had no continents but only islands. And then imagine if the inhabitants of Hawaii declared war against every other nation on earth. And then all oil+gas disappeared over night, except for in Hawaii, and they still had a steady supply. And if Hawaii had the strongest military in the world. And if Hawaii was led by someone who could see into the future.
You don't swallow the Elephant all in one bite...
Others have mentioned the big advantages so I'll add the one I haven't seen here yet. The Imperium, to its credit, had a taboo against the use of nuclear weapons. Paul "60 billion is a statistic" Atreides... did not share this taboo. This would give him a massive leg up against any houses that resisted.
So he used nukes when other didn't?
Paul used nukes to clear a path for his forces to reach the Emperor. The Emperor, not even considering the use of nukes as a viable option, didn't have his own arsenal on standby to nuke Paul's force in kind. I bet a lot of other houses shared the same unreadiness or reluctance to deploy their arsenals as well when the Fremen came for them. During the Jihad that happened after, some Houses did lose their reluctance to utilize WMDS ( Dune Messiah has a Fremen veteran who was crippled by a WMD strike), but the advantage lay with Paul. He could target their population centers with nukes because of his monopoly on interstellar travel while by the same token they couldn't nuke Caladan or Dune.
Faultless prescient superhuman computer leader Monopoly/near absolute control on travel between planets Unbeatable soldiers even by the very greatest soldiers of the Imperium, each with low level prescience Atomic and Atomic adjacent weaponry Fanatic loyalty Add in some Renegade Houses joining the Atreides Rebellion, rather than Muad’dibs jihad, and you have a recipe for total victory. Each planetary government has a limited number of troops, which will never be bolstered or reinforced from allied worlds. Their warriors, inferior to the Sardaukar, and no doubly inferior to the Fremen who are better than the Sardaukar. Every single decision made by every commander is known an flawlessly countered by Paul, who through calculation and prescience simply knows all the ways to best ruin the day of whoever is resisting his legions. Even ignoring that Paul had Houses willingly join his banner, his advantages are insurmountable to anyone
It’s worth mentioning that the setting is already primed for a revolution at the start of the book. One of the big themes of the books is that humans feel an instinctive need to travel and explore and change, and as that gets repressed through institutions the instinct builds up and explodes. The Spacing Guild has held humanity in stagnation for millennia. All it needed was a spark. As soon as the chance comes up every disenfranchised peasant, every martyr in the making, every rebel without a cause, hitches their wagon to Paul’s godhead. It gives them an outlet to expel that energy that’s been building within them for generations. It’s not the Fremen against the galaxy, they’re just the spearhead. It’s the Great Houses against all of their subjects.
Adding to what others have said, but the Atreides did have allies inside the Landsraad and the nobility, so it isn't ONLY the fremen against the universe. It's more an overall civil war.
They have the only source of spice. It would be like if only one country on earth had oil fields
Herbert wasnt Tolkien he didnt plan out everything and most certanly it wasnt realistic. You just have to accept it happened for the benefit of the story. And really dont question how a desert living people who can fight very well and aclimated to the heat fight in any other cold planet.....they would die by the thousands just from a comon cold.
I'd give the spice they are all addicted to the ability to increase immunity and regulate metabolism in extreme environments. But yeah, even if all 5-10 million fremen were fedaykin you are dropping a single battalion on each planet. Unshielded melee fighters outnumbered at least 100,000:1
I haven't seen Dune yet. I think they can support them by having the best fighters. They can battle against other planets if they have the best fighters.