For the military officers and intelligence analysts who still read and reread Dune today, it presents an uncanny reflection of the state of geopolitical competition in 2021-from the pitfalls of regime change to the terra incognita of cyberwar.
Written even before the advent of America’s war in Vietnam, Dune captures a world in which war is inherently asymmetric, where head-on, conventional military conflict has largely been replaced with all the subtler ways that humans seek to dominate one another: insurgency and counterinsurgency, sabotage and assassination, diplomacy, espionage and treachery, proxy wars and resource control. “I don’t roll my eyes about that anymore.”) (“At the time, when people said ‘This is a war for oil,’ I would kind of roll my eyes at them,” he notes regarding the Iraq War. It told the story of a young man who leaves a lush green world and arrives on the far more dangerous and arid planet of Arrakis, which holds beneath its sands a critical resource for all of the universe’s competing great powers. Kort read the book during moments of downtime over the next weeks, as he led his platoon of 15 soldiers and four tanks through the Kuwaiti desert, and later when they took up residence in a powerless, abandoned building in Baghdad. So he bought it and carried it with him to the Gulf, the only novel he packed in his rucksack along with his Army manuals and field guides. Despite its 800-plus pages, its small print made it a relatively compact cubic object. The 23-year-old second lieutenant was intrigued by the book’s black cover, with an inset image of a desert landscape next to the title and the silhouettes of two robed figures walking across the sand. Just before his deployment to Iraq in 2003, Ryan Kort spotted a paperback copy of Dune in a bookstore near Fort Riley, Kansas.
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