Comment by tarpitt

>Or to being run over and buried by tanks with bulldozer blades, which the US used in the Gulf War

Armor and dart guns exist in dune. Not to mention poison gas. I don't know if riot shields would help much.

They also have rockets and lasers in dune, so those tanks and bulldozers will probably be ambushed like the rest of the spice harvesters, and they require supply lines for diesel. All that equipment also has to be shipped into arrakis, which is expensive, and the harkonnen didn't maintain their equipment very well anyways in a despirate attempt to extract as much wealth as quickly as possible. The lasers are effective on dune where shield use is limited because it attracts sandworms.

Even conventional artillery is used to destroy the cave systems, which play an important role in the book (and in real life if you consider this US-Iran war). Not to mention nuclear weapons exist on the planet and play a key role in diplomacy.

What happened in dune is more like what we saw when the US recently pulled out of afganistan.

Most of the important conflict in dune isn't based on knife fighting, the war revolves around raids, smuggling, suprise attacks, and the destruction and siezure of key pieces of equipment (like spice harvesters, spacecraft, atomics). The knife fighting is only really pivotal in champion combat.

>Marines say that their K-Bar knife is useful for everything but combat.

Okay but if they lived in a world where firearms were often useless against many enemies, and the flow of war was based on operating and siezing equipment, it would make sense for them to only carry a knife and not a gun. A knife is more general-purpose even as you describe. In dune the knives also have cultural value which is what makes the champion combat relevant in the first place.

>Arrakis is important because it grows "spice". Otherwise it would be a useless and planet

If it wasn't for the spice, arrakis could be a habitable, green planet. It's engineered to be a desert to facilitate the production of spice, as explained by kynes.