Quote Originally Posted by Fyraltari View Post
Duke Leto firmly intended to train the Fremen into an army to fight the Harkonnen, and, possibly use them to put the Atreides on the Lion Throne at some point down the line.

Righting the wrongs the Fremen have known was always a distant second priority at best (he most certainly never intended to help them take back control of the planet).

At this point in the book and the movie, this is also roughly where Paul's mind is at. He wants to use the Fremen to survive the fall of House Atreides, avenge Father Dear and possibly become Emperor. He's also extremely worried about escaping his vision of a galaxy-wide jihad.

It takes him a while to actually "go Native" and count himself as a Fremen.
One thing about Dune is that spice production must continue no matter what. The consequence of failing to produce spice is civilization wide collapse across the whole Imperium. The Fremen don't have the ability to produce spice on an industrial level sufficient to sustain civilization, something that everyone, including the Fremen themselves, knows. The film actually quite carefully recognizes this and has Stilgar quickly acquiescence to this reality by telling Leto 'you can mine your spice,' because the alternative is to bring the power of the whole Imperium against them.

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Paul's insight, critically, is that properly mobilized and trained, the Fremen can take on the forces of the whole Imperium and win, and therefore he leads them to crush spice production and therefore lures the Emperor to send his forces to Arrakis where the Fremen have a massive advantage. This, ultimately, is Dune's great bit of world-building sleight of hand, in that the universe is setup in a such a way that ten million or so Fremen can mobilize a fighting force sufficient to overcome the resources of an Emperor who controls hundreds or thousands of planets, something that should be impossible even if one Fremen was worth ten other fighters.