Stephen Baxter - The Science of Avatar

For much of the movie’s running time, however, humans are occupied with another sort of intelligence—the Na’vi’s—and on waging war against it.

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 2we 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.