We are all still getting over what a fantastic episode of television this week's 'Game of Thrones' was. It was the biggest battle ever filmed and is a huge achievement for all involved.
So look, we are not nit-picking here but come on, Jon and the gang really did not bring their A-game with that battle plan.
Yes, the image of countless Dothraki men running into the dark with their flaming arakhs made for a great shot. It set the tone for just how low an expectation of survival we should have for the army of the living.
But sending your cavalry out into the abyss like that, what were they thinking?
Surely Jon Snow could have suggested a good-old fashioned pincer move or the like, which was used so well on his army by Ramsay Bolton during The Battle of the Bastards. Let's face it, if it wasn't for Sansa and the Knights of the Vale, Jon would never have made it out of there either.
The Battle of the BastardsForget our amateur strategising though, Vox decided to get into the nitty-gritty of this by interviewing a couple military experts about the strategy used by Westeros' military leaders.
Mick Cook, an Australian combat veteran, said: "The way you prepare for a siege is you don’t march your forces out into the middle of the open to fight a numerically superior enemy. You let the enemy invest in trying to beat your defences, and the defences were all back to front from my point of view. Having the cavalry out in the front, then their infantry, then their defences behind their whole force, it seemed like they decided to plan backwards, and it didn’t really pay off for them."
While Ryan Grauer, an associate professor of international affairs at the University of Pittsburgh, said: "I'd have had the trench pushed further out, then I’d have had all of the infantry behind the trench, and then you have the catapults behind the infantry, so that as the dead come, they meet that barrier at the beginning. We saw in the episode that it took them a while to figure out what to do about that, until the Night King saw the problem and directed his forces how to overcome it."
"But in that time while they’re held up, you can employ your dragons and start laying waste to the Army of the Dead without worrying about your forces being mixed in with them. And then, when they start to break over that trench barrier, they run into your infantry, and your infantry is fresh because they’re just standing there waiting for the Dead to get over that obstacle.
"All the while the Living should be using the catapult behind the infantry to lob flaming stones and whatnot into the ranks of the Dead as the Dothraki cavalry swoop in from the sides and pick away at the edges."
Well now. That sounds like a MUCH better plan.
Thank the gods for Arya Stark.
