HBO’s Game of Thrones is the series that launched a thousand lessons into a million minds. A quick query online suggests that the show (and book series on which it’s based, “A Song of Ice and Fire” by George R.R. Martin) can teach us about subjects as diverse as debt, the workplace, flexible learning, digital marketing, game theory, the Magna Carta, parenting, the perfect wedding, and, yes, even the meaning of life.
Of course, whatever the series might offer in the way of helpful hints for matrimonial bliss or rat racing, the truth is that Game of Thrones, at its core, is about human conflict and war. And it has a lot to teach viewers about real war in an era of dangerous technology and deadly weapons.
It’s not just that it’s popular, though that helps—Martin’s five books having sold eighty-five million copies worldwide (in forty-seven languages) and the show’s airing in 170 countries. It’s that Martin as the original author, and D.B. Weiss and David Benioff as the series’s showrunners, have created the world’s most watched war, and they’ve done it by stealthily injecting military history into a story that’s already focused a global audience on a single conflict for longer than Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
If the news is history’s “first rough draft,” then Game of Thrones is history’s artful remix. To watch the show is to witness a just-slightly altered visual representation war’s history.
That’s because Martin executes brilliantly a simple formula he described at Manhattan’s 92nd Street YMCA in 2014: “Take something real as your root, but you make it bigger and more colorful.” His series is largely based on the English Wars of the Roses, and coincidentally the very date of the final season’s first episode happens to be the 548th anniversary of the Battle of Barnet. On April 14, 1471, the House of York won a decisive victory over the House of Lancaster, which doesn’t sound all that different from Game of Thrones’s Starks and Lannisters.
It’s not simply the story’s structure. Martin based a leading character on a Roman emperor. The show’s infamous “Red Wedding” was inspired by what’s known as the Black Dinner of Scotland. Most prominent, Martin devised The Wall, a massive ice fortification in the series’ far north, after visiting Hadrian’s Wall in northern England on a frigid fall day in 1981. Martin said he “tried to imagine what it was like to be a Roman legionnaire” stationed at “the last outpost of what they thought was the civilized world.”
Equally important, showrunners Weiss and Benioff have amplified Martin’s tale by showing the true chaos of combat. Throughout the television series, viewers witness sieges, amphibious assaults, naval gunfire, assassination, asymmetric warfare, raids, and brutal violence. Much, if not all, of it appears to be ripped from real history.
In particular, Weiss and Benioff essentially re-created a historical event in the sixth season’s “Battle of the Bastards.” Weiss said they wanted to put on screen a pitched battle, what he called a “staple of human history.” They modeled the fight after Cannae from the Second Punic War, when the “Romans,” Benioff described in a short, after-the-episode commentary, “got caught in an encirclement by Hannibal.” Benioff also said the scene’s suffocating combat and stacked corpses represented accounts from the American Civil War.
Such immersion in these scenes is a good thing for the public, who as citizens are charged with weighty decisions on war. With military history being taught in colleges less and less, and with fewer and fewer veterans in society, it’s not surprising that Kori Schake, co-editor of a recent book on civilian-military relations, says “the American public knows almost nothing about our military or what they do,” which she finds unhealthy for democracy. That’s not good, as former president Dwight Eisenhower famously warned Americans to maintain an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” on these matters nearly six decades ago.
Fiction and film can serve as another method of educating the public on war and peace, which is likely what recently prompted award-winning historian Cathal Nolan, when asked to recommend a way to get civilians interested in military history, to answer, “movies.”
Of course, film and fiction will never replace fact. But they can be artfully used in service of fact, in particular because war fiction is “not an escape from reality,” as the philosopher Christopher Coker has said, but “animates reality.”
These lessons matter in a real world where oceans, borders, and great distances don’t stop threats the way they used to. Devastating weaponry has become so cheap that North Korea, with roughly the same economic activity as the Colorado Springs region (around $30 billion), possesses the ability to threaten American cities with nuclear strikes. In part for this reason, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists recently set its infamous “Doomsday Clock” at two minutes to midnight, the “closest it has ever been to apocalypse,” because the group sees today’s threats as a frightening “new abnormal.”
There’s an irony to Martin’s success in propagating lessons on war. The series that’s inspired so many to learn a little about war was conceived by someone who sat out the war that was the first fought onscreen in American living rooms: Vietnam. Though he never was a pacifist (he’s said he always felt “that sometimes war is necessary”), Martin asked for and was awarded conscientious-objector status during the Vietnam War and chose alternate national public service.
With Game of Thrones, Martin, Weiss, and Benioff have artfully fused entertainment and education in a way that’s brought war and human conflict into the homes and minds of many millions. Martin may have chosen to sit Vietnam out—but he, Weiss and Benioff, merit a medal for their creative public service in making this series a reality.
Millions will sit down every Sunday night for the next six weeks to be entertained by one of the most popular television series in history. In doing so, they’ll also have the chance to witness and appreciate the same forces that shape war and peace in the real world, and that’s a good thing.
Image credit: Klapi
Let's all watch TV then (so we don't have to read the book).
Of course when it's something having to do with Vietnam, then academia (including, it seems, West Point and the War College) think that our ill-conceived assistance to Vietnam is shown best in Burns' "The Vietnam War" and it's the best thing since sliced bread. Most Vietnam veterans disagree, but the lies and misinterpretations about Vietnam have continued for decades because the old adage, "If you tell a lie often enough" rings true.
As Vietnam is taught less today, the any required reading material goes for the sensationalized fiction and the usual "US bad, Vietnam good" banality of something published as history.
Too bad, if the Army had paid more attention to teaching about Vietnam, Afghanistan might have yielded better results.
I admit that I haven’t seen the entire series of Game of Thrones. What it does seem to convey is the sheer “Terror Factor” (The dragons, the attacking ships, the White Walkers, the magic) of warfare that the U.S. Army only recently seems to have adopted again with Long Range Precision Fires and upgraded lethality. The balance of utilizing Joint Forces and Combined Arms is evident (and also in the “Lord of the Rings” movies).
The Russians and Chinese with their long range ballistic missiles on mobile trucks have a much larger Terror Factor because the diameter of the missiles is much larger than ours. The North Koreans with their massive quantities of mobile artillery also have a huge Terror Factor. The Iranians, Chinese, NVA and Viet Cong, WW II German Blitzkriegs, Russian waves, and Japanese “Banzai” attacks, Insurgents, terrorists, and North Koreans have their Mass Infantry Wave Attacks—all invoked terror in outnumbering the U.S. Army. Mass Wave Infantry Attacks is a tactic not really used by the U.S. Army since the Civil War; GIs don’t yell and charge into the enemy lines willy-nilly.
The U.S. Army seems trained to fend off and attack larger forces with fewer personnel using the assumption that a smaller U.S. force with more firepower can inflict larger causalities against a larger enemy force. WW II Sherman tanks did this to Panther and Tiger tanks often outnumbering the German tanks four to one. This notion may no longer hold true as the Peer Nations have equal or greater firepower than the U.S. Army is able to mobilize on the scene. Even a richer army and nation might not be able to deploy the resources and countermeasures to combat Dragons or Eagles.
In “Game of Thrones” and “Lord of the Rings,” mass armies fought against each other and inflicted heavy casualties to the point that one side was overrun. The Terror Factor was huge in these battles. The U.S. Army’s Terror Factor still works when it mobilizes and patrols as evident in the news, but so does the Terror Factor of the Peer Nations. We need the USAF and USN patrols to also provide this Terror Factor to keep the peace.
The U.S. Army needs to balance the mobile forces of light “Shermans” (MPF Light Tanks which we have none yet) to the heavy “Tigers” (M1A2 SEP V3s) whereas the Russians and Chinese have light, medium, and heavy armored tanks. We’ve tried countless times to do this and failed. If there are all Dragons and Eagles with no backup infantry, then mass archers could theoretically take them down. These movies show us that mass armies and even single stealthy commandos and small teams can wreak havoc on the opponent in any type of situation.