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Guerilla warfare also depends on something else Game of Thrones has that not many points in the medieval period had- a really strong national identity. Any guerrilla warfare movement needs to be supported by the populace. If an army rolls through, kills a few dozen folks in the village who fought back, kills the lord, and leaves a new one behind who helps rebuild... very few farmers are going to be against him just because he's French. You won't turn in any English deserters passing through of course, and if you find one of the French alone in a dark alley... you might weigh your chances. But you're not going to starve your family to support an army or band of fighters. You care about your family, your town, your lord, and maybe your king, in that order. As long as whoever's over you lets you take care of your family, and doesn't annihilate the town, you're probably happy trying to fix everything up. Heck, you've probably got a fair bit of French blood in you anyways, and the town's traded hands a couple of times in your lifetime. Revolution requires egregiously oppressive or incompetent governments, and insurgencies require nationalism or atrocities- preferably both.

 Gitzbitah wrote:
You care about your family, your town, your lord, and maybe your king, in that order. A

I think there's a big caveat with that. If you're a peasant and your local lord is a "prince john" instead of a "robin hood", you likely won't care for him, and if you believe that the war situation is being made worse by "prince john", that may sway sentiments.


Furthermore, when we look at the power structures of knighthood in France and England, there are some major differences. Sometimes we do see these differences carried out in fantasy settings, but IMO, most typically we see fantasy medieval settings where basically everyone follows the English knighthood setup. . . . To explain the differences very briefly, in England when a man was knighted, his knightly oath was god, king/country, liege/local lord. In that order. In France the oath was god, liege/local lord, king. In that order. . . And we see on numerous occasions in actual history where battles and campaigns are swayed because the king's army is not resupplied/reinforced by an army controlled by a powerful enough rival (weaker French kings had to deal with a LOT of subversive activities, and so while a town lord may not act out on his own, a powerful enough baron would, as they knew they could get away with it factionally).


But, where a lot of fantasy settings outside of GoT mess up, is what happens to the civilian populace during a major war. It's fairly common knowledge that in the medieval period, armies supplied themselves in some part by looting or asking (demanding) food/supply from local villages. Sometimes, as happened a lot in the 30 Years' War, that looting/scrounging for supplies by the common soldier got out of hand. As such, most farmers who merely want to keep their family/village well, is going to be swayed heavily by the actions of armies passing through their area. Whether that treatment leads to action or not, is up to individual authors and how ridiculous they want to be.

The issue with the 30 years war is less of the supplying out of the Land and more with the fact that the duration that happened and the ammount of men involved within literally bled the Land dry to the point that armies couldn't even move through certain regions due to risk of severe Attrition.


Take certain regions which lost half their population.
That is disgusting production and therefore procurement and therefore the supplying got even more out of hand.

A good example of a Fabian strategy was the 'asymmetric warfare' proposed and executed by the Arab revolt in 1916 dialed up to 11 by the campaigns and exploits of T.E. Lawrence. the traditional Arab means of fighting did not allow for an advanced strategy, however certain civil servants saw the capability for one and wanted to trigger the existing Arab Revolt into something more useful.

You can achieve much if you have superior mobility and obfuscation. This makes the Arab revolt an excellent if unusual case study. It allowed enough modern infrastructure to be vulnerable and to allow the attacker mobility and ease of communications without allowing the defender a technological capacity to resist. Turkish air power was limited and they had modernised beyond the use of cavalry, which was a mistake for this theatre.

The Arab Revolt was a military rather than guerilla campaign because the combatants did not hide amongst the civilian populace, it was not their way, nor was this recommended from the British point of view as such tactics would destabilise and work against themselves. The mix of different cultures philosophies and technologies along with the environment allowed a purist Fabian strategy that is not likely to be repeated.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Totalwar1402 wrote:
I was arguing this point on another forum about why Dorne from the Ice and Fire series could be conquered and they basically came back with “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken” and it kept revolving around the idea that its simply impossible to gain victory over an opponent that refuses to give battle or that uses guerilla tactics. So it doesn’t matter how many cities get burnt or armies destroyed; so long as they keep to this strategy then Dorne can’t lose?

Ask the Taliban. There is a saying amongst them, 'the Americans have the wrist watches, we have the time'.
If you look at it you will notice two statements, Taliban victory is inevitable and they will lose until otherwise.

If an occupation force is willing to burn cities then a resistance can be annihilated, however this is a matter of resolve. Will a faction throw away its own populace for political ends. In this the Dornish are not quite the same as the Taliban. Also you have to account for the attackers will. Stalin would have no problems rising to the challenge of total depopulation as a means of gaining territory, the US less so, the UN not at all and the Targaryens are a wild card. Targaryens are capable of large scale atrocity, but they cannot outsource this, they have to do so themselves. Now if Stalin was a dragon rider and that was the source of his power would he want to stay in Afghanistan for twenty years burning locals? Probably not, he has better things to do.

The Dornish have the time and the Targaryens lack wrist watches, they had an awesome trump card which needs to be played day in day out while the bored royal dragon rider wants to be elsewhere. The Dornish meanwhile hide in caves like the Taliban do. Targaryens could burn their cities or occupy them, but sooner or later they would have to cross desert to supply them, and the Dornish would be angry. A peace settlement with an invitation for Dorne to join the Targaryen empire with guarantees of limited sovereignty was a realistic outcome. There was a similar resolution which had Black Marsh join the empire of Tamriel. The Cyrodiils knew they did not rule Black Marsh in anything but name and only then at specific Imperial settlements. However a peaceful unified empire is what they wanted, just as with the Targaryens. Neither Targaryen King or Cyrodiilic Emperor needs to be able to enforce will on semi-habitable territories. They want to have the map painted one colour, maintain genuine core control and need nothing more.

Guerilla warfare also needs things a certain way operate. Namely the ability to strike at key positions and the ability to cripple forces with surgical strikes. Both which are very hard to do in medieval warfare.
Not to mention, you need to be able to recruit from the populace easily and train them to be fighters, which is also difficult because that takes years.
But give the guy a gun and some *guerilla 101* classes and you got a resistance fighter.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:

Not to mention, you need to be able to recruit from the populace easily and train them to be fighters, which is also difficult because that takes years.
But give the guy a gun and some *guerilla 101* classes and you got a resistance fighter.

The overwhelming majority of fighters in medieval and prior armies were untrained. Or at least, not trained in any official capacity. You don't need a highly trained force to fight a guerilla warfare. Vikings were extraordinarly successful at this type of warfare. They had no formal training and no standard equipment.Ironically, guerilla fighter today have more formal training then those of the past.

epronovost wrote:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:

Not to mention, you need to be able to recruit from the populace easily and train them to be fighters, which is also difficult because that takes years.
But give the guy a gun and some *guerilla 101* classes and you got a resistance fighter.

The overwhelming majority of fighters in medieval and prior armies were untrained. Or at least, not trained in any official capacity. You don't need a highly trained force to fight a guerilla warfare. Vikings were extraordinarly successful at this type of warfare. They had no formal training and no standard equipment.Ironically, guerilla fighter today have more formal training then those of the past.

This. The core group of cuban revolutionaries under Fidel trained extensively in Mexico before travelling to Cuba, for example. Most of them were killed in an ambush after landing and so they needed to recruit from the local population in the Sierra Maestra immediately. They trained extensively with those recruits before launching their first attacks against the Batista government. This is also compounded by ammunition issues. Training recruits to shoot a gun uses up your limited ammunition. Training peasants to use a spear or bow, less so.

Nowadays anyone can find manuals on guerrilla warfare online or in a bookstore, such as Che's own book on the subject and his diaries from the Cuban revolution, the Congo and Bolivia which can be studied to identify the reasons for success and failure in those campaigns. A peasant revolt in the middle ages? You'd be lucky if a single one of them could even read.

epronovost wrote:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:

Not to mention, you need to be able to recruit from the populace easily and train them to be fighters, which is also difficult because that takes years.
But give the guy a gun and some *guerilla 101* classes and you got a resistance fighter.

The overwhelming majority of fighters in medieval and prior armies were untrained. Or at least, not trained in any official capacity. You don't need a highly trained force to fight a guerilla warfare. Vikings were extraordinarly successful at this type of warfare. They had no formal training and no standard equipment.Ironically, guerilla fighter today have more formal training then those of the past.

Aye. Though its important to clarify that "untrained" in this situation doesn't mean they had no experience with weapons or fighting. It means they weren't part of a disciplined army that drilled its soldiers.

The most common weapons of any fighters going back for thousands of years were spears, axes, and bows. Weapons which even the lowliest peasant could afford and had secondary uses as tools and for hunting. While a peasant levy might be an undisciplined group, they would at the very least be reasonably competent with their gear.

 Grey Templar wrote:

epronovost wrote:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:

Not to mention, you need to be able to recruit from the populace easily and train them to be fighters, which is also difficult because that takes years.
But give the guy a gun and some *guerilla 101* classes and you got a resistance fighter.

The overwhelming majority of fighters in medieval and prior armies were untrained. Or at least, not trained in any official capacity. You don't need a highly trained force to fight a guerilla warfare. Vikings were extraordinarly successful at this type of warfare. They had no formal training and no standard equipment.Ironically, guerilla fighter today have more formal training then those of the past.

Aye. Though its important to clarify that "untrained" in this situation doesn't mean they had no experience with weapons or fighting. It means they weren't part of a disciplined army that drilled its soldiers.

The most common weapons of any fighters going back for thousands of years were spears, axes, and bows. Weapons which even the lowliest peasant could afford and had secondary uses as tools and for hunting. While a peasant levy might be an undisciplined group, they would at the very least be reasonably competent with their gear.

Even that is only partially the case, some feudal states created specific soldier peasants classes or border peasants like cosaks, Which were better trained.
Other states would use mercenaries as income, notably switzerland (sold- patriziat or mercenary patricians which were driving political figures of the old order ) which a lot of the medieval to modern period state building was only possible through mercenary work contracts.

 Orlanth wrote:
A good example of a Fabian strategy was the 'asymmetric warfare' proposed and executed by the Arab revolt in 1916 dialed up to 11 by the campaigns and exploits of T.E. Lawrence. the traditional Arab means of fighting did not allow for an advanced strategy, however certain civil servants saw the capability for one and wanted to trigger the existing Arab Revolt into something more useful.

You can achieve much if you have superior mobility and obfuscation. This makes the Arab revolt an excellent if unusual case study. It allowed enough modern infrastructure to be vulnerable and to allow the attacker mobility and ease of communications without allowing the defender a technological capacity to resist. Turkish air power was limited and they had modernised beyond the use of cavalry, which was a mistake for this theatre.

The Arab Revolt was a military rather than guerilla campaign because the combatants did not hide amongst the civilian populace, it was not their way, nor was this recommended from the British point of view as such tactics would destabilise and work against themselves. The mix of different cultures philosophies and technologies along with the environment allowed a purist Fabian strategy that is not likely to be repeated.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Totalwar1402 wrote:
I was arguing this point on another forum about why Dorne from the Ice and Fire series could be conquered and they basically came back with “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken” and it kept revolving around the idea that its simply impossible to gain victory over an opponent that refuses to give battle or that uses guerilla tactics. So it doesn’t matter how many cities get burnt or armies destroyed; so long as they keep to this strategy then Dorne can’t lose?

Ask the Taliban. There is a saying amongst them, 'the Americans have the wrist watches, we have the time'.
If you look at it you will notice two statements, Taliban victory is inevitable and they will lose until otherwise.

If an occupation force is willing to burn cities then a resistance can be annihilated, however this is a matter of resolve. Will a faction throw away its own populace for political ends. In this the Dornish are not quite the same as the Taliban. Also you have to account for the attackers will. Stalin would have no problems rising to the challenge of total depopulation as a means of gaining territory, the US less so, the UN not at all and the Targaryens are a wild card. Targaryens are capable of large scale atrocity, but they cannot outsource this, they have to do so themselves. Now if Stalin was a dragon rider and that was the source of his power would he want to stay in Afghanistan for twenty years burning locals? Probably not, he has better things to do.

The Dornish have the time and the Targaryens lack wrist watches, they had an awesome trump card which needs to be played day in day out while the bored royal dragon rider wants to be elsewhere. The Dornish meanwhile hide in caves like the Taliban do. Targaryens could burn their cities or occupy them, but sooner or later they would have to cross desert to supply them, and the Dornish would be angry. A peace settlement with an invitation for Dorne to join the Targaryen empire with guarantees of limited sovereignty was a realistic outcome. There was a similar resolution which had Black Marsh join the empire of Tamriel. The Cyrodiils knew they did not rule Black Marsh in anything but name and only then at specific Imperial settlements. However a peaceful unified empire is what they wanted, just as with the Targaryens. Neither Targaryen King or Cyrodiilic Emperor needs to be able to enforce will on semi-habitable territories. They want to have the map painted one colour, maintain genuine core control and need nothing more.

That’s the thing, after his Queen is killed by the Dornish Aegon takes the gloves off. He drops any notion of mercy and is out to punish the Dornish and use fire and blood to win.

I don’t really want to discuss Afghanistan as that’s an ongoing conflict and we’re talking about a fantasy series. But Aegon is using every weapon at his disposal to create terror and compel this medieval state to submit. The United States is in a very different situation and has a host of other factors (most of them moral/legal) that affect its decisions in that conflict.

But yeah. George is making an anti Machiavellian argument. Even absolute power and destruction doesn’t mean success and the peaceful way can work. It’s a nice sentiment. But the story should make sense. If the Dornish ran into the desert and all their cities were burnt they should have faced millions of deaths from famine, thirst and exposure. There is no mention of this and I think that’s kind of silly.

Plus the context on the other forum discussion I mentioned was that if Dany brought her dragons and the Dothraki/Freed Slaves she could conquer Dorne because she/they wouldn’t have the same restraint. It would be too easy for the Dothraki/Freed Slaves to displace the local population once they flee the urban and agricultural regions. At that point the Dornish are in the same situation as the Native Americans. Remember Dany wants to do right by all the people she freed and they were (Moses?) following her en masse. It’s a reasonable inference that she’s going to bring these people to Westeros. Which as an aside, I firmly think will be a major reason why the Westerosi oppose her. It’s a genuine conflict. She wants to do well by the people who have served her loyally so far but risks alienating those she intends to conquer. The way the show tells it is that every one in Westeros is all Blazing Saddles racist.

 Totalwar1402 wrote:

I don’t really want to discuss Afghanistan as that’s an ongoing conflict and we’re talking about a fantasy series. But Aegon is using every weapon at his disposal to create terror and compel this medieval state to submit. The United States is in a very different situation and has a host of other factors (most of them moral/legal) that affect its decisions in that conflict.

There is another conflict in Afghanistan which was carried out by a major superpower we could examine as well, one which was much less restrained when it came to civilian casualties and the destruction of entire villages and the means of sustaining the population.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 Totalwar1402 wrote:

I don’t really want to discuss Afghanistan as that’s an ongoing conflict and we’re talking about a fantasy series. But Aegon is using every weapon at his disposal to create terror and compel this medieval state to submit. The United States is in a very different situation and has a host of other factors (most of them moral/legal) that affect its decisions in that conflict.

There is another conflict in Afghanistan which was carried out by a major superpower we could examine as well, one which was much less restrained when it came to civilian casualties and the destruction of entire villages and the means of sustaining the population.

The Soviets didn’t drop nuclear weapons of Afghanistan and weren’t pursuing a policy of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Whereas Aegon and Dany hypothetically invading Dorne didn’t really have any restraint. The goal isn’t regime change or propping up a government.

Basically I think that’s issue with conceding control of the territory and people. There’s then very little preventing an enemy from wiping out the population systematically. They can take all the food. They can take all the people. I think people look at Vietnam and assume that because it was so violent and how much ordinance was employed that it couldn’t possibly have been a limited war. I think George is making a Vietnam analogy with Dorne and it doesn’t really work.

 Totalwar1402 wrote:

The Soviets didn’t drop nuclear weapons of Afghanistan and weren’t pursuing a policy of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Citation needed. When populations in some villages went from 100k pre-war to 25k post-war, an argument for genocide is certainly there.

As for nukes, they didn't need nukes to completely destroy villages. Conventional artillery and bulldozers do the job just fine. And they used chemical weapons, as well. Then they also destroyed irrigation infrastructure, making growing crops impossible.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 Totalwar1402 wrote:

The Soviets didn’t drop nuclear weapons of Afghanistan and weren’t pursuing a policy of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Citation needed. When populations in some villages went from 100k pre-war to 25k post-war, an argument for genocide is certainly there.

As for nukes, they didn't need nukes to completely destroy villages. Conventional artillery and bulldozers do the job just fine. And they used chemical weapons, as well. Then they also destroyed irrigation infrastructure, making growing crops impossible.

An argument, yes, but I am not a lawyer and you could write a dissertation on such a distinction. My point is that using dragons is analogous in George’s world to using nuclear weapons and genocide. It’s the ultimate form of violence rather than just a dangerous animal that soldiers ride into battle. I am mostly talking about how guerilla warfare/Fabian strategy is presented as invincible in literature regardless of context. I can’t actually think of any examples where a film or book has a guerilla movement lose or doesn’t reward refusing to give battle.

They didn’t employ their most powerful weapons. Which would have rendered the country uninhabitable due to radiation and killed most of the population. George is making the moral point that in all circumstances brute force doesn’t work as long as your opponent so much as breathes the word guerilla warfare. Which is easier said than done.

However Dorne is simply not modern Afghanistan. Most of the country is open desert and river valleys comparable to Egypt. It’s an urban civilisation. Whereas Afghanistan is all high mountains and difficult to move around in. Plus, we’re talking about medieval armies fighting mostly with swords and spears as opposed to long range rockets and machine guns which can kill people a mile away. That terrain favours the weapons of today. Plus, the Targaryens has no issue conquering more mountainous regions like the Vale and the Westerlands. Plus a medieval country without preserved or tinned food or relief camps in other countries is more susceptible to any attack on the food supply. It’s why millions of people running into the desert is stupid in this context. The Dornish didn’t have the ability to go into Pakistan to escape the fighting and conduct their raids. I don’t think this analogous if that was George’s intent.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 Totalwar1402 wrote:

The Soviets didn’t drop nuclear weapons of Afghanistan and weren’t pursuing a policy of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Citation needed. When populations in some villages went from 100k pre-war to 25k post-war, an argument for genocide is certainly there.

As for nukes, they didn't need nukes to completely destroy villages. Conventional artillery and bulldozers do the job just fine. And they used chemical weapons, as well. Then they also destroyed irrigation infrastructure, making growing crops impossible.

Pashtun sponsored via Pakistan sponsored by the US against an alliance of multiple peoples and the soviet.

It certainly had an ethnic component.
It also still has one.

Hold up. Villages with a populaton of 100k? What?

 Totalwar1402 wrote:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 Totalwar1402 wrote:

The Soviets didn’t drop nuclear weapons of Afghanistan and weren’t pursuing a policy of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Citation needed. When populations in some villages went from 100k pre-war to 25k post-war, an argument for genocide is certainly there.

As for nukes, they didn't need nukes to completely destroy villages. Conventional artillery and bulldozers do the job just fine. And they used chemical weapons, as well. Then they also destroyed irrigation infrastructure, making growing crops impossible.

An argument, yes, but I am not a lawyer and you could write a dissertation on such a distinction. My point is that using dragons is analogous in George’s world to using nuclear weapons and genocide. It’s the ultimate form of violence rather than just a dangerous animal that soldiers ride into battle. I am mostly talking about how guerilla warfare/Fabian strategy is presented as invincible in literature regardless of context. I can’t actually think of any examples where a film or book has a guerilla movement lose or doesn’t reward refusing to give battle.

They didn’t employ their most powerful weapons. Which would have rendered the country uninhabitable due to radiation and killed most of the population. George is making the moral point that in all circumstances brute force doesn’t work as long as your opponent so much as breathes the word guerilla warfare. Which is easier said than done.

However Dorne is simply not modern Afghanistan. Most of the country is open desert and river valleys comparable to Egypt. It’s an urban civilisation. Whereas Afghanistan is all high mountains and difficult to move around in. Plus, we’re talking about medieval armies fighting mostly with swords and spears as opposed to long range rockets and machine guns which can kill people a mile away. That terrain favours the weapons of today. Plus, the Targaryens has no issue conquering more mountainous regions like the Vale and the Westerlands. Plus a medieval country without preserved or tinned food or relief camps in other countries is more susceptible to any attack on the food supply. It’s why millions of people running into the desert is stupid in this context. The Dornish didn’t have the ability to go into Pakistan to escape the fighting and conduct their raids. I don’t think this analogous if that was George’s intent.

Aye. The Dornish should have basically gone extinct if Aegon took over all of the arable land. Which in a desert climate will be trivially easy to do. Egypt has been conquered countless times in history, namely because if an attacker can beat the Egyptian armies in the field the civilians have nowhere the flee. You had to stay within a few miles of the Nile or you might as well be on the surface of Mars. An invader or occupying army just needs to sail up and down the river. You own the Nile, you own Egypt.

You can't do that in Afghanistan. It's relatively more mild and more spread out, plus its physically more difficult to control the area.

If anything, Dorne should have fallen instantly while the North held out. The North is a much better place to conduct guerilla warfare. The population doesn't congregate in large urban centers, the landmass is as large as the rest of Westeross put together, they are more capable of surviving in the wilderness so they could abandon the few cities and castles they had more readily, and the climate would also be hostile to anybody who wasn't used to cold weather. Which the Targarian's conveniently would not have been, they came from tropical climates and would have been more used to desert than the snow.

It would have been much more realistic for Aegon to have lost his army to the bitter cold of a timely winter in the North. Dragons clearly had some issues with the cold, and feeding them would be a challenge, so they would be more limited use. Especially if the population abandoned most of their fortresses to go hide in the woods and mountains. And even with 3 Dragon's Aegon would have an impossible task to personally search the entire North.

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
Hold up. Villages with a populaton of 100k? What?

Sorry, got that wrong. The population of the second largest city in Afghanistan, Kandahar, dropped from 200,000 pre-war to 25,000 post-war.

While there was most definitely a fair amount of that number killed, the bulk was probably due to people leaving the city and fleeing into the countryside. I don't think the Soviets were going block by block exterminating the populace.

As for a Fabian strategy, traditionally it is a hard way to actually win a war. Not impossible, just hard.

If you look at the original usage of the term the Romans did not beat Hannibal because of a Fabian strategy. They simply pro-longer the conflict until they could build their own strength. The Romans eventually won because they gathered enough strength to go on the offensive in North Africa.

I do always find it humorous in movies when guerrilla fighters are beating the standing army and are then morally outraged when that army takes civilian hostages and no longer "fights fair".

 Totalwar1402 wrote:

However Dorne is simply not modern Afghanistan. Most of the country is open desert and river valleys comparable to Egypt. It’s an urban civilisation. Whereas Afghanistan is all high mountains and difficult to move around in. Plus, we’re talking about medieval armies fighting mostly with swords and spears as opposed to long range rockets and machine guns which can kill people a mile away. That terrain favours the weapons of today. Plus, the Targaryens has no issue conquering more mountainous regions like the Vale and the Westerlands. Plus a medieval country without preserved or tinned food or relief camps in other countries is more susceptible to any attack on the food supply. It’s why millions of people running into the desert is stupid in this context. The Dornish didn’t have the ability to go into Pakistan to escape the fighting and conduct their raids. I don’t think this analogous if that was George’s intent.

Dorne is a medieval country, it wont have large urban populations and those populations that do exist are authorised to cooperate with the invader but pass intel to Dornish resistance in the desert and the hills.
We don't know exactly how Dorne resisted the dragons but we know they did, I think this is how. dragons are rare, easy to spot and cant be everywhere, angry Dornish raiders are the opposite, plentiful, hard to spot and commonplace. They are also angry, well versed in spear and bow combat and able to cut off Targaryen troops from supply in harsh terrain. The Vale and Westerlands were not remotely comperable, though even so there are a lot of holdout savage tribes in the mountains of central Westeros, and they are hard to root out. we see from the tribes Tyrion hired that they have established if base cultures, and a population base to draw on, which mean mountain settlements somewhere.

Medieval country or not, the population density of Dorne would be dictated by the climate. Medieval Europe has a universally mild climate and abundant sources of food just about everywhere, even in the more remote regions. Which is why Europe had a more decentralized population.

Dorne is a desert, like Egypt. Egypt has had the vast bulk of its population live within a few miles of the Nile for thousands of years because you simply cannot have that many people survive out in the desert. And indeed this is true with all civilizations that existed in the middle east going back to the earliest known civilizations. The area forces the populations to stay near the rivers, which resulted in very large urban settlements on par with modern urbanization in terms of rural vs urban population densities. Only very small groups can survive in the general wilderness, and groups of that size would not be capable of a resistance that forces the Targarians to accept a truce. They'd be reduced to simple banditry. Bandits with a cause, but nothing more than that.

Furthermore, in the desert it is basically impossible to hide from the air. This was proven during the North African campaign in WW2. Neither the British nor the Germans could hide from each other's observation planes. The British did successfully deceive the German spotters into misidentifying what they were seeing. However, such tactics would not really be usable by a medieval army, certainly not when the thing spotting you is something you can't counter, nor would the Dornish really have any way of coming up with something that was a convincing visual fake without being able to fly themselves. In order to do the tactics the British used, you would have had to be able to fly and see if the fake is convincing. They couldn't even conceive of such an idea, let alone actually put it into practice.

 Grey Templar wrote:

Dorne is a desert, like Egypt. Egypt has had the vast bulk of its population live within a few miles of the Nile for thousands of years because you simply cannot have that many people survive out in the desert. And indeed this is true with all civilizations that existed in the middle east going back to the earliest known civilizations. The area forces the populations to stay near the rivers, which resulted in very large urban settlements on par with modern urbanization in terms of rural vs urban population densities.

The Levant and Anatolia don't follow this trend- the climate in the region has changed to be more arid, but even today large swathes of these regions are green and productive away from major rivers in a way Egypt and Mesopotamia are not (although Mesopotamia did have a large wetland area caused by the changing and connecting channels of two major rivers). Go back to medieval and ancient times, and these regions were the known breadbaskets of empires controlling them.

 Easy E wrote:
As for a Fabian strategy, traditionally it is a hard way to actually win a war. Not impossible, just hard.

If you look at the original usage of the term the Romans did not beat Hannibal because of a Fabian strategy. They simply pro-longer the conflict until they could build their own strength. The Romans eventually won because they gathered enough strength to go on the offensive in North Africa.

to add further, the circumstances in the punic war allowed the romans who had a citizen army (who they could get away with not paying for a while) vs a carthaginian army mostly comprised of mercenaries (who had to be paid regularly), refusing battle and not allowing for plunder meant that while rome would grow in strength, the carthaginians would deplete.

 Easy E wrote:
As for a Fabian strategy, traditionally it is a hard way to actually win a war. Not impossible, just hard.

If you look at the original usage of the term the Romans did not beat Hannibal because of a Fabian strategy. They simply pro-longer the conflict until they could build their own strength. The Romans eventually won because they gathered enough strength to go on the offensive in North Africa.

Ah, you beat me to it. I've been watching a history or Rome on Youtube https://youtu.be/ItwGz43a_ak recently and this event was fresh in my memory. Hannibal got recalled to defend Carthage from Scipio's roman army. The Fabian strategy kept Rome from losing their army, however, as engaging Hannibal was generally disastrous in Italy.

What's funny is that in 40K there's an enemy which is genetically coded to be defeated by an enemy utilising a Fabian strategy, the Orks.

If you refuse to engage Orks, just keep falling back/evading them, then they will inevitably fall upon themselves and fracture. Also, as Orks are drawn to fighting, refusing to fight them and letting them get bored and turn on themselves also prevents more Orks from turning up to join in as there isn't any big scrap going on for them to hear about and come pile in on.

The Tau did the same to that one Tyranid Swarm that ended up in their territory. They avoided pitched battles, starved the nids, and pushed them toward developing faster forms that Tau weapons easily defeated.