Stupidity at WinterFell

Do Not Read if you haven’t seen episode 3, The Long Night, from season 8 of Game of Thrones.

The big battle for Winterfell between the living and the dead is over and all I can say is that on both side the commanders had no clue how to deploy and utilize their forces and the results are purely the invention of writers with no appreciation for military science. The episode had lots and lots of lovely actions, character scenes, and moments meant to inspire but the grad shape of things were horrid and damaging to any conception of our heroes as capable leaders.

The Dothraki are light cavalry and not the sort o force you send headlong into an enemy formation. (That would be heavy cavalry, you know knight in shinning armor and so on.) Their slaughter was wasteful and could only be ordered by a leader who cared nothing for the lives under their command. Positioning a massive infantry force *outside* of the castles walls to meet a much larger force is foolish, almost but not quite, as stupid as sending your light cavalry in a frontal assault. The whole point of the fortification is that you stay behind the high walls and rain death down on those poor bastards who have to climb them to get to you, particularly if you are outnumbered. If you have something in your possession that the enemy needs to claim victory, a crown, a location, a young man who speaks in mysterious phrases, you do not place your most powerful forces distant from the enemy’s objective. At night. With no method of communication between the prize and those forces.

So how should have the defenders of WinterFell have set out their battle plans?

One: The trenches of fire was a great idea, more of those so you can create ‘kill boxes’ to trap enemy forces that can be burned down by dragons or catapult fire. Concentric rings surrounding Winterfell that would break up the enemy forces. All infantry should be inside the castle defending it from the walls keeping the dead out. It helps that the dead do no have siege engines and towers. The Dothraki out on the wings of the battlefield, armed with dragon-glass arrows. Not to attack the main body of the enemy forces, but to exploit with their fast movement any opportunity to take enemy sub-commanders, the white walkers, and neutralize much larger factions of the dead that way. The two dragons stay close to Winterfell and victory conditions, Bran. They supply close air support burning the army of the dead as the fire trenches trap them. They stay together so that if countered by the enemy dragon they have a 2 to 1 advantage.

So how would all this go wrong for the heroes creating a mood that they are going to lose?

First off the fire trenches have a more limited utility, as the dead are willing to create those corpse bridges allowing more of the enemy to reach the walls. Next, the Night King uses his air power to strafe the battlements, forcing the two dragons riders near Bran to abandon their positions, opening Bran for assault by white walkers. Once the Night King has drawn off the dragon riders and sent the best warrior scrambling for the Gods Wood to defend Bran he circles back and uses his air power to lift and drop troops behind the wall. They’re dead can be deployed in a manner no living person can use. Just drop from as you swoop over the interior court. The white walkers ‘retreat’ from Bran, drawing out fighters armed with the magic steel that can kill them leaving bran with only a token defending force. Air combat can give you the same results of separating the dragon riders as the episode did. Now the night king uses his dragon to breach the walls, as he did The Wall, sending massive forces into Winterfell. Jon is forced to defend the interior court, seeking the night king, but get bottled up by forces there, leaving the night king free to move against Bran leaving our favorite girl to win the day.

See, it didn’t have to be stupid.

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2 thoughts on “Stupidity at WinterFell

  1. Brad

    The thousands year old tradition of fortification warfare — is sieges. And that certainly would have been a simpler way to fight the battle of Winterfell.

    If the defenders retreat to inside the walls of Winterfell, that could suit the Army of the Dead just fine. The Night King could detach half of the undead host to surround Winterfell while the other half continues marching South, and then the army of the dead merely wait for the defenders to starve to death. Meanwhile the Southern March continues to grow in size as the living add their ranks to the Army of the Dead.

    The Dragons of course are a variable that completely scramble the tactical equation. The Dragons aren’t just artillery, they are more like nuclear bombs. The scale of destruction when the 800 foot tall section of The Wall was destroyed should make that clear. (the depictions of the Dragons power has been extremely variable in the last couple seasons) Dispersion is the best defense against destruction of that scale, not fortification.

    If we accept that the Night King always knew where Bran was, the simplest method the Night King could have used to destroy Bran was to send the dead Dragon on a kamikaze mission. No matter the scale of defense, I doubt Bran could have survived. Only the living Dragons might have stopped that Kamikaze attack.

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