Terrible Defensive Tactics in Season 8 Episode 3 of Game of Thrones' The Long Night

Image courtesy of HBO

UPDATE 3 May 2019: So the Washington Post also has an article ridiculing the battle tactics the living made at Winterfell. No surprises there.
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Saw episode 3 from Season 8 of HBO's Game of Thrones and had many concerns with the battle tactics employed by Jon and his band of merry brethren in the defense of Winterfell. Well, if you haven't seen it, best get going before clicking the next link.

The following link is an article from Vox.com where they interview several military experts on what went right (not many), what went wrong (too many) and what went silly (downright slap-in-the-forehead moments) in how the living defended their castle. Seriously, I'm tempted to do a comparison with the Battle of Helm's Deep from The Two Towers. Anyway, the article interviewed Ryan Grauer, an associate professor of international affairs at the University of Pittsburgh, and Mick Cook, an Australian combat veteran who fought in Afghanistan.

Here are some choice quotes from the experts:

​The Living, at a superficial level, did about as good as could be expected with commanders who haven’t spent a lot of time leading large forces in the field. It was surprising to me that there was very little effort made to figure out what was going on with the Army of the Dead.

​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 defenses, and the defenses were all back to front from my point of view. Having the cavalry out in the front, then their infantry, then their defenses behind their whole force, it seemed like they decided to plan backwards, and it didn’t really pay off for them.

​The catapults serve to drop explosives right in front of your own forces as they attack the enemy. You try and put them only one-third of the distance behind your lead forces so that they can keep engaging the enemy while your forces are closing in on the enemy. But, to do that, the catapults still need to be protected, so they need to be behind your front lines.
You need your infantry or your cavalry at least in front of your fire assets. Also, with your close air support, like your dragon, you want to use that at the point that’s going to be most valuable to your ground forces, so that your ground forces can take advantage of any destruction that the dragons, in this case, would cause.

Click the link to read the rest of the interview. Hope the siege of King's Landing would not be as woefully executed then.

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