War-making features heavily in Avatar, both on Pandora and on Earth. Quaritch and Jake as serving soldiers saw action in theatres such as Nigeria and Venezuela. This is all too plausible. In Chapter 2 we saw that war doesn’t seem likely to vanish from our world any time soon, thanks to pressures from resource depletion and climate change.
And, in Avatar’s future, we have proudly exported war-making to the stars.
RDA needed weaponry on Pandora long before their dispute with the Na’vi started. As Quaritch warned his newbies, the animal life on the moon, from charging hammerheads to pack-hunting viperwolves to plunging mountain banshees, is ferocious enough. But the focus of the movie is the battle with the Na’vi.
The military strategy RDA and SecOps play out on Pandora has some parallels to the recent conflicts in the Gulf and the occupation of Iraq. These contemporary parallels are deliberate on the part of the movie-makers, as signalled for example by Max Patel’s use of the resonant phrase “shock and awe” to describe the assault on Hometree. We see a mixture of the constant threat of aggressive force with efforts to win over the “hearts and minds” of the local people using the avatars.
And, just as in Iraq, privately employed soldiers, like Miles Quaritch of SecOps, a military contractor working under RDA, are a significant part of the Pandoran landscape.
Today, private soldiering is an industry worth globally a hundred billion dollars. Don’t call them “mercenaries,” however. Nowadays they are known by terms like “private military contractors” (PMCs). Many of them are ex-regular service, like Quaritch; indeed the recruiting pool was boosted by the discharging of military personnel in the 1990s following the end of the Cold War.
Around two dozen PMC firms currently supply services to the Pentagon. They are employed to provide supplementary services to regular forces in theatres of operation around the world. In Afghanistan they have been used as guards to the Afghan president. In many parts of the world they are used to support peacekeeping operations in the absence of regular western troops, or to provide training for local forces.
PMCs are also used by private corporations and international and non-governmental organisations. For instance the Irish company Integrated Risk Management Services provides security protection for Shell Oil operations in Bolivia. Thus the use of SecOps by RDA in Avatar to secure mining operations on Pandora is quite realistic.
There are issues around the use of PMCs, including the fact that under some regulatory systems the soldiers could be considered “unlawful combatants,” without the right to prisoner-of-war status, if they use offensive force in a war zone. The position of the Geneva Convention on this seems unclear to me, if only because in 1977 a revising protocol was not ratified by the United States. Still, an officer going rogue like Miles Quaritch—and indeed the PMC firm which tries to mount a coup against the U.S. government in the seventh season of the TV show 24—are surely, hopefully, never going to be typical.
If the use of PMCs to guard the RDA mining operation on Pandora is realistic, the military technology we see deployed there is thoroughly realistic too.
The scenes of war fighting in Avatar, especially the assault on Hometree and the cataclysmic final battle over the Tree of Souls, are memorable and disturbing. And the depiction of the use of flying vehicles is visually very striking.
Quaritch’s warriors ride into action in a variety of specialised aircraft. The craft shown are all capable of VTOL flight (vertical take-off and landing, including the ability to hover). VTOL would work better in Pandora’s lower gravity and thick air than on Earth, in fact. And the use of VTOL was a realistic choice by the designers in tactical terms; VTOL craft would be highly useful for operations in an environment of dense jungle without landing strips.
Some of the aircraft are “rotorcraft,” analogous to modern helicopters, though using ducted fans rather than conventional rotors. The rotorcraft have two contra-rotating rotors in each rotor pod. This stops the craft as a whole spinning in response to a rotor’s turning; single-rotor craft need tail rotors to keep them stable. Meanwhile the Valkyrie space shuttle hovers by swivelling its turbo engines, rather like a Harrier “jumpjet.”
The use of rotorcraft in warfare has developed since the Second World War. Helicopters were used in that war for some medical evacuations, but it was the Korean War that saw their application on a major scale. The rough terrain in Korea made ground evacuations difficult, and the use of helicopters like the Sikorsky H-19, together with mobile army surgical hospitals—the “M.A.S.H.” made famous in the TV show—dramatically reduced fatal casualties on the battlefield. Later, in Vietnam, craft like the AH-1 Cobra attack helicopter, the UH-1 “Huey,” made possible a new kind of warfare in which troops became a kind of “aerial cavalry,” no longer tied to a fixed position but able to be deployed rapidly across the country. The Hueys became an icon of that war, and were involved in fire support for ground troops and were used in aerial rocket artillery battalions.
In Avatar’s design, Cameron wanted the warcraft to be visually striking, but also to reflect real-world technology. As a result many of the craft have analogues in the inventory of U.S. fighting forces today. The Samson is a general-purpose utility aircraft comparable in size and function to the modern UH-60 Blackhawk, which is used for general air support functions such as medical evacuation, transport, command and control, and support for special operations. The Scorpion gunship, heavily armed, is comparable to modern attack helicopters like the AH-64 Apache, used for precision strikes and armed reconnaissance missions—Apaches are seeing a good deal of action in the Libyan conflict at the time of writing. The Dragon gunship is a heavily armed transport, combat and command and control aircraft which is a hybrid of several current types of craft. It is a transport like the C-130 Hercules, but with its heavy armament it is perhaps most similar to the AC-130 Spectre airborne gunship, a variant of the Hercules developed as a weapons platform for ground attack during the Vietnam War.
The Valkyrie space shuttle is pressed into service as a bomber during the Tree of Souls attack. In combat the Valkyrie serves a role like the Boeing C-17 Globemaster III, a large military transport in operation since the 1990s for the USAF and other air forces. The C-17’s purpose is the airlifting of troops and cargo to operating bases; it combines a very heavy lift capacity with an ability to land on short airfields.
Other weaponry in use on Pandora is also thoroughly recognisable from modern parallels. You could surely fire a modern gun in Pandora’s moist, toxic air, as long as its moving parts weren’t corroded or jammed—as indeed you could fire a gun in space. A bullet carries its own oxidising agent in the explosive of the sealed cartridge, so guns aren’t dependent on the oxygen content of the air, if any. As for corrosion, armies have been dealing with the problems caused by warm, soggy environments like Pandora’s for a century or more, through the use of proper lubricants and frequent cleaning. But on Pandora you would always have to watch out for the jamming of components by the intense magnetic fields.
For the assault on the Tree of Souls the engineers put together pallets of mine explosives, to be dropped out the back of the Valkyrie shuttles. It is pilot Trudy Chacon who describes these improvised weapons as “daisycutters.” This is a Vietnam-era nickname for the BLU-82 weapon system, a fifteen-thousand-pound conventional bomb to be dropped from an aircraft like a C-130. It was one of the largest conventional weapons ever used, and was retired in 2008 to be replaced by the even more powerful GBU-43/B MOAB—Massive Ordnance Air Blast. The daisycutter’s original purpose was to flatten an area of Vietnam forest into a helicopter landing zone. Later, in Afghanistan, it was used as an anti-personnel weapon and for intimidation purposes; it has a very large lethal radius, a hundred metres or more, as well as creating an explosion that’s visible and audible over very long distances.
By its charter, RDA is not allowed to deploy any weapons of mass destruction on Pandora, or indeed to use excessive military force. We see ethical dilemmas on these lines played out in the course of the movie, as Jake, Grace and others oppose Quaritch and Selfridge. But fine ethical distinctions might not have been clear to the Na’vi on the receiving end of the RDA’s improvised daisycutter. Still, an organisation with space travel capabilities could easily do a lot more damage if it tried; a small asteroid prodded towards an impact on the Tree of Souls would unleash energies equivalent to a nuclear weapon.
You might ask if the makers of Avatar have been conservative in their depiction of war-making, with vehicles and weapons with such close parallels to modern gear. The assault on Pandora is some hundred and forty years into the future. A hundred and forty years ago, it was the era of the Civil War in the U.S. and the Franco-Prussian War in Europe; war fighting tactics and technologies have evolved hugely since then. In 2154, would armed forces still be using craft and weapons so similar to those in use now?
Well, specific military technology designs can endure a long time if they work well enough (as indeed they can in the civilian world). The Hercules, or variants of it, has been flying for over fifty years already, and the B-52 bomber, first flown in 1952, has a projected out-of-service date of 2050, by which time it will be a century old! And in Avatar the Samson, for example, is a century-old design.
Then there’s the challenge of the environment. The aircraft shown in the film were primarily designed to operate in Earth’s atmosphere, and have now been adapted for Pandora, with its toxic gases and volcanic products in the air (see Chapter 17), and powerful magnetic fields. You would need to retune turbine and rotor systems, remodel intake ducts, recalculate fuel mixes, harden systems against electromagnetic fields. To face the challenge of such a difficult environment you would want to be able to rely on a robust, proven, veteran workhorse. The Samson is just such a workhorse, tested over decades in a variety of environments on Earth, from the Antarctic to the Honduras—including operations where hardening against electromagnetic fields was necessary, which is why on Pandora it responds relatively well over a “fluxcon,” an area of strong magnetic flux.
And recall that all the aircraft we see onscreen, save for their more complex components like missile tracking and guidance electronics, have had to be manufactured in the stereolithography plants on Pandora. It has been necessary to choose designs, however elderly, that did not need the most modern exotic materials technology, such as (in 2154) exotic ceramics and nanomaterials, beyond the reach of the matter printers. Again, the Samson is one such veteran design. A lack of ground support on Pandora for more advanced systems is another factor.
But this is an instance where we also have to allow for some creative licence. Avatar is about a clash of cultures, the heavy-handed technological human civilisation versus the graceful Na’vi, living lightly in their world. The heavier the human tech, and the grungier it looks, the more striking that contrast is going to be, in every shot when we see the two sides in opposition. And the echoes of Vietnam are deliberate, including references to Apocalypse Now (1979), with its famous scenes of helicopter gunships flapping over the jungle.
The depiction of much of the military hardware in the movie, and the way it is used, is thus thoroughly realistic, at least in terms of today’s technology. One item you won’t see walking around modern battlefields, however, is an AMP suit.
Standing four metres tall on two legs and with its two grasping hands, the Mk-6 Amplified Mobility Platform has a sealed cabin within which its operator (wearer?) rides. The suit’s motions are slaved to the operator’s through servo armatures moved by the operator’s arms, as we see when Quaritch “boxes” inside a suit, with the machine’s huge arms aping the colonel’s jabs. Foot-pedals actuate the legs. The suits come heavily armoured, with weapons ranging from automatic cannon to an ugly-looking slasher knife. The suits have a good deal of built-in smartness, such as an autonomous ability to keep their balance, and even a “walk-back” facility if the operator is disabled. But the amplification of strength and range of motion between the operator’s movements and the suit’s response takes a lot of training to master.
The AMP suit is an outcome of modern-day experiments in developing powered “exoskeletons” for military purposes. An exoskeleton would be like a wearable robot, a mobile machine like a suit of armour with limb movement at least partially supported by the power supply. The aims would be to provide greater strength and speed, as well as armour protection and sensory enhancements, with none of the loss of the fine control the wearer would have over her own body movements. Other applications, perhaps of partial exoskeletons rather than complete ones, might include prosthetics and medical care—an aid to nurses in lifting heavy patients delicately, for example.
The first experimental exoskeleton was co-developed by General Electric and the U.S. military in the 1960s. This programme was said to have been inspired by the powered armour featured in the 1959 Robert Heinlein science-fiction novel Starship Troopers, a classic case of the interaction of science fiction and science. Later fictional examples include Marvel’s Iron Man, and of course the “power loader” machines of James Cameron’s own Aliens (1986).
That first GE suit was too heavy, its motions too violent and uncontrolled. A light and capacious power unit has always been a nagging design issue. But developments continue on various fronts. Lockheed Martin’s appropriately named HULC (Human Universal Load Carrier) is a pair of battery-powered hydraulic legs that reinforce a soldier’s limbs, and give her the ability to carry heavy weights at around fifteen kilometres per hour. Exoskeletons are also being studied as part of the U.S. military’s “Future Force Warrior” advanced technology demonstration project—a lightweight, wearable infantry combat system designed to address the needs of the “Army After Next” in the future. There’s even a civilian-grade exoskeleton, the HAL-5 (Hybrid Assisted Limb), a full-body machine made by the company Cyberdyne; this is already on sale in Japan, and is in use as a support by elderly and infirm people.
You might alternatively regard the AMP suit not as an exoskeleton but rather as an example of a “mecha,” a name given to ambulatory manned fighting robots in some genre fiction. The distinction between mecha and exoskeletons is vague, but roughly speaking a mecha is piloted, while an exoskeleton is worn. The tripodal fighting machines of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds are early examples of mecha, as are the “Walkers” of the Star Wars films. Unlike exoskeletons, little military investment seems to have been made in mecha—but a subsidiary of John Deere did produce an experimental six-legged walking harvester! I’ve yet to spot any of those in my local forests.
In the Avatar timeline AMP suits were derived from earlier exoskeleton designs deployed in various war theatres on Earth, and developed for off-world use on the moon and Mars. The suits are formidable weapons in the right circumstances, as we see in the movie during the climactic fight at the remote link shack, when Quaritch in his suit is able to defeat a thanator—and then is able to use his suit’s precision of movement to reach inside the shack to interfere with the equipment there. The suit’s bipedal locomotion could be useful in situations such as Pandora’s dense forests, where the mobility of wheeled vehicles would be impaired. But an AMP suit would always be vulnerable to simple trip-wires, and bolas: thrown weighted ropes, like the one the Na’vi warriors use to bring down Jake. The mighty Star Wars Walkers were similarly vulnerable to bolas.
The ability to wage war on the planet of another star is a quite remarkable accomplishment by those interstellar master traders RDA. But ultimately it is not just the Na’vi RDA finds itself fighting, but Pandora itself: a living world.