Mick Cook
The use of strategic strike capabilities—in particular, joint fires from the air, land, or sea—should create opportunities for the achievement of campaign objectives. Often, commanders will need to integrate strategic strikes by joint-fires units with action taken by maneuver forces to exploit these opportunities. In Game of Thrones nobody was more adept at creating and exploiting these opportunities at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels of war than Daenerys Targaryen. Her enemies, by contrast, were not.
Before exploring these greatly divergent capabilities of Daenerys and her adversaries, it’s worth noting that “joint fires,” “maneuver,” and “campaign objectives” are not nearly as conceptually complex as their dry, doctrinal labels suggest. “Joint fires” refers to the capability to bring firepower to bear from multiple forces operating in multiple domains (and often aimed at targets in a different domain)—airplanes dropping bombs on ships, ships launching missiles at soldiers on land, and soldiers firing antiaircraft weaponry at airplanes, for example. “Maneuver” is simpler yet; it’s just moving forces around on the battlefield. Combine the two—fire and maneuver—more effectively than your enemy, and you have a formula for battlefield victory. Those battles combine to form a campaign. Win enough and you achieve your goals—your campaign objectives.
Back to Daenerys. During the Second Siege of Meereen, the fleet of the Wise Masters, the nobility who rule the slave cities of Yunkai and Astapor, bombarded the besieged city of Meereen from the sea. The destruction caused by these sea-based fire units is impressive but ineffective. The reason it is ineffective is that it fails to apply some of the most basic targeting principles in the application of fires. These principles include focusing the fires on achieving the most advantageous results, understanding the effects needed to achieve campaign objectives, and approaching the targeting of the enemy in a systematic manner to ensure that the highest-priority targets are effectively dealt with.1 Unfortunately for the sailors on the fire ships and their slave-trading overlords, Daenerys did not fail to apply these principles when she unleashed her three dragons on the besieging ships.
The purpose of the Second Siege of Meereen, from the perspective of the besiegers, was to reclaim the city and humiliate Daenerys, undermining her model of a slave-free city. It is important to remember these objectives when analyzing the use of their military forces, particularly the sea-based joint-fire support. Understanding the objective of an operation or campaign is key to formulating a strategy to achieve those objectives. The Wise Masters decided to besiege the city of Meereen most likely because it would achieve their objectives with the least amount of risk and cost to their forces. This was a step toward adhering to a principle of joint operations, the economy of force.2 They achieve this economy by primarily using their sea-based fire support to maintain the tactical pressure on Daenerys’s forces within the city. They are, therefore, reliant on the destructive and psychological effects of such tactics as the main avenues to achieve their objectives. However, the employment of fires at an operational or campaign level needs to be coordinated to ensure that it meets the commander’s objectives. Such coordination is achieved by adhering to principles and processes designed to maximize the effect of each engagement. The targeting of the city of Meereen by the fleet of the Wise Masters lacked coordination and failed to maximize those effects that would support the achievement of the campaign objectives.
The bombardment of the city of Meereen by the sea-based fire support of the fleet of the Wise Masters was undoubtedly destructive. It also appeared to create a significant amount of psychological stress on the citizens of the city, including those in charge. Tyrion Lannister was visibly rattled with each explosion of a projectile bursting on the walls of the Great Pyramid. In fact, Daenerys signals that she intends the break the siege immediately after one such explosion interrupts a discussion between herself and the droll dwarf. From all appearances, the use of sea-based fire support to bombard the city worked to achieve the objectives of the Wise Masters. Their campaign plan seems to have fit; however, Daenerys’s failure to surrender during the agreed parlay and her subsequent counterattack with air-based fire units revealed the flaws in how the Wise Masters employed their fires. The failure to ensure that the tactics were suitable to meet the operational campaign objectives was a failure of strategy at all levels.
The Wise Masters were clear in their objectives: retake Meereen and humiliate the Mother of Dragons. They had, in strategy terms, defined their “ends.” They were also clear in deciding which tactics to employ with which forces; sea-based fires were to create destruction, apply psychological pressure, and blockade the port, while the Sons of the Harpy prevented land access to the city. Again, in strategy terms, they had decided which “ways” they would employ their “means” to achieve the previously mentioned “ends.” This strategy employed standard forces using predictable tactics in siege warfare (i.e., block entry and exit points and bombard the enemy until they surrender). But in the case of the Second Siege of Meereen, this basic strategy was not good enough. The Wise Masters failed to adapt their tactics (their “ways”) to meet the situation and achieve their objectives (their “ends”). The most significant failure in this strategy was their poor target selection and lack of coordination for their sea-based fires, without question their most potent weapon.
Target selection is quite critical in achieving the objectives of the campaign or operation. It determines which targets should be attacked in which way to achieve a specific effect that supports the achievement of the campaign objective. Simply put, good target selection will create the opportunities that can be exploited to achieve the campaign objectives. The target selection for the fire units within the fleet of the Wise Masters appeared to be entirely random. There is no apparent link between the targets selected and the effects needed to achieve the campaign objectives. In targeting terms, they did not conduct a target appreciation to determine whether the targets they were engaging would contribute to the achievement of their objectives and support the strategy to oust Stormborn from Meereen.
It is clear from the arcs of fire that most of the catapults on the fire ships were engaging different targets. Many of these appeared to be soft targets of opportunity, such as markets and residential areas. It is true that some of the fire was focused on the defensive towers and other such fortifications of the besieged city; however, there does not appear to have been a concentration of firepower sufficient to destroy the fortifications and provide further tactical opportunities. The failure to provide further tactical opportunities indicates that the commanders of the Wise Masters’ campaign did not clearly understand the role that their fire units could play in enabling the forces to achieve the campaign objectives.
The purpose of fires at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels of war is to create opportunities to achieve the campaign objectives.3 These opportunities could be an opening for maneuver forces to take decisive action or create leverage for diplomatic negotiations. It is clear from the expectations of the Wise Masters during the parlay that they believed their tactics had created such diplomatic leverage. They failed, and in this failure, they gave their enemy a chance to demonstrate what good target selection and fires integration with maneuver can achieve.
Daenerys Stormborn, her dragons, and her maneuver forces could quickly and decisively achieve her campaign objectives, defeat the Wise Masters, and lift the siege because she understood how to employ her fires. During the surrender negotiations, the ones where the Wise Masters incorrectly believed they had achieved a military advantage that translated into political leverage, Daenerys Stormborn mounts one of her dragons and attacks the sea-based fire units in the enemy fleet. At the same moment, the Dothraki warriors and other mercenaries attack the besieging land forces of the Sons of the Harpy at the gates of Meereen. This coordinated assault by fire and maneuver created a dilemma for the Wise Masters, who were soon to be summarily executed and did not live long enough to dwell on their folly.
The destruction of the sea-based fire units by the dragons demonstrates a sound target appreciation by Daenerys and her generals. The main threat to the city was the fire ships. They were the only military force that could significantly damage the fortifications and create an access point for the besieging forces. By destroying the sea-based fire units, Daenerys was targeting the primary offensive capability of her enemy. She could have used the dragons to destroy the dismounted Sons of the Harpy troops that were besieging the land approaches to Meereen. She could have also used the dragons to target the command and control by destroying the flagships of the fleet. She could have done either of these but didn’t. She had accurately assessed that the Sons of the Harpy would be little match for her mounted Dothraki and mercenary forces. The plan to execute the leaders of the Wise Masters at the parlay made the need to destroy the flagships redundant. The destruction of the enemy’s main fires unit was the best use of Daenerys’s most potent strategic strike capability, her air-based fire units.
The dragons offered Daenerys more than shock and awe when launched into a battle. Their use as a strategic strike capability by her ancestor Aegon the Conqueror was well known. Each time such a reliable, flexible, and destructive capability was used by Aegon during his conquest of Westeros, a message was sent to those who would stand against him. This message wasn’t simply that he had dragons. It was that he could strike his enemies from the air at will, regardless of their own forces’ dispositions. A dragon’s fire burns those defending the walls of a castle as easily as it does foot soldiers on the field of battle. These lessons learned by Aegon were applied by Daenerys three hundred years later at the Second Siege of Meereen. She understood that her dragons were an air-based strategic strike capability. That is why she used them against the sea-based fires units, her enemy’s main offensive capability. Once the sea-based fires units were destroyed, the Wise Masters would not have had anything within their arsenal to create the opportunities needed to achieve their campaign objectives. Daenerys, on the other hand, had learned a valuable lesson in how her strategic strike capability could be used to create opportunities for her maneuver forces to achieve her objectives. She also learned that a good target appreciation and selection can reduce the risk and cost of the achievement of those objectives. Both are lessons she would apply when she took the field against the Lannister army in Westeros.
When Daenerys’s Dothraki horde charged the disciplined Lannister army and their bannermen, they did it with aerial fire support. Learning from her experience in Meereen, Daenerys unleashed her dragon on the front lines of the Lannister forces moments before her assaulting force crashed through their lines. The firestorm created by the close air support reduced the ad hoc defenses of the Lannister forces and sowed panic among the soldiers who were not prepared for such a strike. The following route by Daenerys’s ground forces, even after their aerial support was neutralized by an antiair weapon, demonstrates the importance of coordinating fires and maneuver forces to create opportunities to achieve the campaign objectives.
The strategy and tactics employed by Daenerys, particularly her target selection, appreciation, and prioritization, highlighted the benefits of integrating fires and maneuver to achieve campaign objectives. Daenerys and her generals adapted their tactics to maximize the impact of their forces. Land-based fires such as catapults and trebuchets would not have effectively supported the lightning charge of the Dothraki against the hastily defended Lannister army train. Likewise, mounting similar fire support on the walls of Meereen and attempting to target the mobile fire ships of the Wise Masters would also have yielded limited results. The air-based joint fires provided by the dragons shaped the tactics available to Daenerys to achieve her objectives. If Daenerys had not adapted her tactics to meet the capabilities at her disposal, she would likely have been unable to achieve victory in the two battles as quickly as she did.
The experience of Stormborn and her foes in the use of successful and unsuccessful application of joint fires to achieve their campaign objectives is often mirrored in modern conflict. The invasion of Iraq was enabled through joint-fires strikes at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels as the fight advanced to Baghdad.4 This included the engagement of strategic-level targets, such as command-and-control nodes, as well as targeting the field force of Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard in the close fight. The campaign in the Libyan civil war that toppled Muammar Qaddafi’s regime is another example of joint fires, particularly air-based fires, engaging key targets to provide ground forces, the rebels, conditions to achieve their campaign objectives.5 The counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are also good examples of joint fires being used to support forces defending patrol bases against mortar and rocket attacks by insurgents. In each of the modern examples above, the use of joint fires was linked to providing opportunities for ground forces or to creating political leverage. Not all of them, like the Wise Masters, were successful.
Both Daenerys and her enemies throughout Slaver’s Bay and Westeros had joint-fires capabilities, whether they were land, sea, or air based. However, Daenerys was the one to utilize her joint-fires capabilities in a manner that created the opportunities to achieve her campaign objectives. She could adapt her tactics to meet both the situation and the capabilities at her disposal. She, in strategic terms, was able to employ her “means” in “ways” that achieved her “ends.” In her case, her means were mobile land forces and air-based fire support. Some may argue that her success was due to the exclusivity of her access to air-based fires; however, during her battle with the Lannister forces, it was clear that her dragons were not invulnerable to antiair weapons. In fact, her enemies did not see the dragons as enough of a threat to deter them from engaging her forces; therefore, one must conclude that it was not the fact that she had dragons that ensured her victory but rather her integration of their offensive capabilities into her forces.
1. Joint Targeting School, Joint Targeting School Student Guide (Dam Neck VA: U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, March 2017), 26–28, http://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/Doctrine/training/jts/jts_studentguide.pdf?ver=2017-12-29-171316-067.
2. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Operations, joint publication 3-0 (Arlington County VA: U.S. Department of Defense, January 17, 2017), A-2, https://www.hsdl.org/?abstract&did=798700.
3. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Planning, joint publication 5-0 (Arlington County VA: U.S. Department of Defense, June 16, 2017), III-9, http://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/Doctrine/pubs/jp5_0_20171606.pdf.
4. J. Jacobs et al., Enhancing Fires and Maneuver Capability through Greater Air-Ground Joint Interdependence (Santa Monica CA: Rand, 2009), 21.
5. Karl P. Mueller, ed., Precision and Purpose: Airpower in the Libyan Civil War (Santa Monica CA: Rand, 2015), 376.