This is the sort of silly and smart and insanely-well researched bit of fun that was the norm during the blogging era of ~ 2000-2010 before the social media era really set in. I miss it.
I think we are actually past the social media era (or at least we are past its peak).
Btw, the total absolute amount of new good blog content is probably not any lower than during the golden age you harken back to. (And of course all the old material is mostly still there, thanks also to various archives.) The relative amount might have gone down, but for your and my individual content consumption absolute amounts matter more.
Agora Rd and similar small forum sites are still there, like the hole in the wall restaurants that people have to choose to go to instead of McDonald's. Prices are higher, algorithms are worse, but there's genuine connection there.
I love that this dude exists and does what he does. I don’t have the attention span to read 20 pages on Star Wars Imperial Military Doctrine, but I appreciate that it exists.
Yeah, I got the page count by opening the print dialogue - initial estimate was _196 pages_, and all but 20 of that is comments. His readers have certainly adopted the house style.
If you have time, I highly recommend reading other articles in Bret's blog. His write-up of how the roman legions got paid was my favorite read for a few weeks [1]. The detail of articles like this are right up there with the History of Rome podcast.
> I find it striking that Rome’s elections happen in late summer or early fall, when it would actually be rather inconvenient for poor Romans to spend a day voting (it’s the planting season)
Fun fact: the date the US holds their federal elections used to have the opposite intent [1] - placing it in November was because by then harvest should be over and placing it on a Tuesday allowed for farmers to observe Sunday for church-going, a day of travel and for them to be back on their farm by Wednesday for market day. But today, with way fewer people observing church, new methods of transportation and polling places everywhere, it's more of a hindrance especially for low-income workers or workers who fear they might get fired for taking time off to vote.
I learned a ton about how ancient armies and wars worked just from his series exploring warfare in the LOTR books and movies -- the things Jackson got wrong (quite a bit, but not everything) and Tolkien got right (pretty much everything).
I really loved the bread and iron series too. He breaks down very important but generally overlooked day to day retirements into very digestible detail.
Maybe just my nostalgia for old star wars lore, but I found this to be a surprisingly pleasant read. It felt like a conversation with old friends at 3 in the morning.
When fiction’s grounded like this, even if much of it is fantastical, you can have fun filling in gaps this way. It’s fertile ground for BSing about. Stuff kinda makes sense, just as a consequence of the media taking inspiration from the real and the familiar, and from the writers trying not to do anything too silly in ways that would strain credulity to the point that they break immersion.
If you write your fiction like a couple of 6-year-olds making up stories with toys in a sandbox, where there’s far less grounding in real world events and context, and plot beats or world-building elements are more likely to occur solely for the script-writer’s convenience than because they seem plausible and appropriate… well. You get what the author alludes to at the tail end of the piece.
I'm a little confused by the characterization of the rebellion as a continuation of the Old Republic fast carrier philosophy as, as far as I can recall in the current canon, there is no emphasis on carriers at all but rather on individual fighters that are independent of carriers due to their hyperdrives (which, along with shields, have been the primary distinguishing factors between the rebellion and Imperial starfighter forces).
In the original trilogy, we don’t see a Rebel fleet until Empire (only at the very end), and it’s mostly light gunships (apparently) but it’s got a lot of fighters flying around, and they must be servicing those and housing the pilots somewhere.
We don’t see the rebel fleet in action until Jedi, and it does seem to be carrier-heavy.
As for the independently-operating fighters: they have to land somewhere, the pilots can’t just live in them and they need to fuel, receive maintenance, and re-arm. That’s either planetary (or equivalent) bases, or carriers, much like pacific WWII air operations were a mix of island airstrips and carriers (lots, and lots, of carriers).
That’s all for the original trilogy. What we have in addition, however, is a limited look at the inter-trilogy insurgencies and nascent rebel alliance, in a variety of movies and TV shows (e.g. Rebels). Those do seem fairly heavy on carriers, from what we get to see, plus light gunships.
I agree with the bases -- we do see that multiple times, but we don't really see as much scrambling from carriers in the same way that we see them scrambling from planetary/lunar bases, which is what makes me hesitate about characterizing this as a fast carrier DOCTRINE.
I definitely remember gunships and troop transports, but my memory is just failing me when I try to think of carriers. I guess this is left over in the legends canon now, but much of the rebellion's fleet having been repurposed from civilian transports/cruise liners also serves as a good explanation as to why they wouldn't have many carriers as well.
The big Mon Calamari cruisers, the closest thing we see them field to ships the size of Star Destroyers, and plainly the backbone of the fleet they deploy in Jedi, seem (though our evidence is limited) to have a lot more space dedicated to hangar bays than the Destroyers do, and not to have the kind of firepower needed to stand up to Star Destroyers in a straight fight—I think casting them as something akin to gun-armed fleet carriers of WWII, like the Royal Navy’s Illustrious Class, isn’t too wild an idea.
[edit] though, I do think that line of argument’s a bit weak. I could see going either way on the question of whether the Mon Cals slot better into the “fast carrier” paradigm or are better regarded as filling the role of heavy cruisers or battlecruisers. Not a lot of Star Wars ship designs slot quite so clearly into a fast carrier designation as the Republic’s primary Clone Wars warships.
You could infer we're seeing the results of the Rebels being funded for insurgency operations by their benefactors. Without large carrier ships, while relatively expensive hyperdrives on fighters might not be cost-effective, they'd also be the only survivable assets the Rebellion could field. A squad of X-wings is perfect for a hit and run strike mission because it can actually pull off the mission. You could've supplied the Rebels with ten times as many Tie fighters and they'd be completely unable to use them since they wouldn't have large carriers able to move them around (also whether or not they're shielded is AFAIK one of those "not really explained" things in the movies - we never really clearly see much of a survivability difference between a Tie and X-Wing once someone has a lock, other then X-wings usually have heroes in them).
They also may have even more of a shortage of trained pilots than of fighters since they were willing to give a fighter to a random farm boy who happened to show up for a battle.
While the Empire can afford to throw away pilots, the Rebels need to give their pilots every chance to escape from a failed battle.
> they were willing to give a fighter to a random farm boy who happened to show up for a battle.
My impression was that Luke's X-Wing was his reward for saving Leia - in the same scene we see Han leave the Rebels while carrying a sizeable amount of money.
Very well stated! I completely agree with this and this is why I feel like the rebels don't actually have a carrier doctrine as proposed by the article.
I think it makes sense as a continuation, as opposed to mere maintaining the doctrine. Independent fighters is on the same side of a spectrum between focus on fighters and battleships that fast carriers are. The fighter models themselves are related.
Similar analysis by the Angry Staff Officer, who really is a U.S. Army staff officer. He writes critically about the military aspects of Star Wars.
"Rebel Insurgency: Without Hope or Method" is worth a read.
And this creates a bit of an oddity, because in the Clone Wars, the Republic fleet is essentially built around fast carriers – the Venators – and their fighters, whereas it is the CIS fleet which has specialized gunboats (along with the slower Lucrehulks that function as carriers), but by the time we get to the Empire, the doctrine has switched: the ISD is clearly a gun platform first and foremost, which carries its own fighter screen, but expects to win with its primary battery, not its (flimsy) TIE-Fighters
Not steeped in Star Wars lore, but I thought there was an in-novel explanation that the Emperor was planning on defending against a superior alien threat who had enormous planet-sized ships. For which the Death Star and other heavy guns would make sense.
I think it makes sense without much analysis or imagining that they're preparing to fight cthulu.
The simplest explanation is that the Empire's military doctrine doesn't make any strategic sense, and Imperial decision-makers all want the biggest, scariest ships possible for selfish reasons, and everything else flows from that. They rationalize it with speeches about how fear will totally keep the rebels at bay (unlike the last ten times they tried it), but at their core they just want the biggest toys.
Oh wow, I bailed on the EU well before that stuff, didn’t realize how close it ended up getting to the larger plot of the last couple Frank Herbert Dune books.
Yeah people pine for the old EU canon (Legends, as it's now called?) but the content that placed itself way after RoTJ got really bizarre. Not happy with the Sequel Trilogy's handling of the universe either, but I don't know if movie-goers would have been able to stomach something like the whole Mara Jade plot or Yuzahn Vong War.
>how close it ended up getting to the larger plot of the last couple Frank Herbert Dune books.
My understanding is that Sci-Fi writing for established franchises during the 80s - 90s was kind of a small circle of people. The influence would have been unavoidable. And they also often wrote for multiple franchises too.
Yeah even most of the early stuff was pretty awful. You’d get the odd cool idea, but practically none of the material is better than mediocre (no, not even that trilogy).
Many of the authors didn’t seem to understand Star Wars at all, and got the feel all wrong—in fact, in a lot of cases I wonder whether they’d just touched up a failed manuscript or partially-finished-but-not-promising draft with Star Wars colored markers, and sent that to the publisher. Stackpole was a rare exception, and Zahn kinda.
But even those relatively bright points suffered terribly from Star Wars being almost intrinsically a visual beast. It’s so tied into pastiche of other visual media that it’s remarkably difficult to get it right in print, while the formula for making a decent Star Wars film or show is easier than damn near any other franchise ever: pick one or two things, at least one of “genre” fiction, rip them off completely, and put Star Wars lipstick on it. That’s the whole deal for making a pretty good Star Wars thing. It’s all The Mandalorian did and it worked better than nearly any other efforts at Star Wars since the original trilogy. Frankly, it’s incredible that so many screenwriters and directors seem to to struggle with this (hell, even Lucas).
For the most part this is a great write-up, but there are multiple moments where it goes out of its way to badmouth the Sequels (and broader Disney canon); while the author's entitled to one's own opinion, this disdain ends up doing a disservice to the presented argument.
For example, the author mentions that in Legends the New Republic retained the Imperial fleet (or at least what survived of it), and claims that the Canon New Republic is not shown to have done so on-screen. The reality is established in the various shows (particularly The Mandalorian and Ahsoka) with about as much subtlety as a lightsaber to the face: Star Destroyers and other Imperial hardware are strongly associated with oppression and tyranny, and while it would indeed be cheaper for the New Republic to retain them than to replace them, it'd be not only even cheaper but also much more politically expedient to dismantle them and sell the scrap.
It's also readily apparent in said shows that Imperial loyalists are still prevalent; Ahsoka in particular shows the shipbuilding/scrapping supply chain to be no exception. Disbanding the Empire's old vendors in favor of shifting production to the Rebellion's vendors is another easy political win and a matter of national security.
By the time of the events of The Force Awakens, a lot of this attitude of "reject the political baggage of anything to do with the Empire" has escaped the Republic's military-industrial complex and now inhabits every facet of New Republic politics. Even the capital moved from Coruscant to Hosnian Prime - and while it ain't explicitly stated why people voted that way, it doesn't take much of a leap in logic to recognize Coruscant's association with the Empire (and its abundant population of Imperial elites) as being a driving factor.
And all this is stuff the article even directly supports and vice versa - but instead the author chose to dunk on all this, doing the otherwise-excellent analysis a considerable disservice.
To each his own but part of why the article is great is that it dunks on the Disney canon for the good of the force. Where once these and other similar franchises inspired thoughtful and detailed discussions within fandom, what we have now seems like thoughtless corporatized fare and we should not waste time attaching more meaning to it than it deserves
Imperial military doctrine evolves quite naturally when you consider what warfare in Star Wars is actually like.
In star wars ships travel through hyperspace. This allows them to quickly, though not instantaneously, traverse the galaxy, generally without impediment. This means that an attacker can suddenly show up with a massive fleet nearly anywhere, and the defender needs to hold out for some time for reinforcements to arrive. Whoever controls orbit around a planet can potentially bombard the planet to subjugate the population, or land troops to occupy the planet, or at least interdict trade, which many worlds are highly reliant upon.
At the same time, the galaxy is massive. Millions of inhabited worlds, many thousands with significant industrial and political power. In the clone wars there is a roughly even split - both the CIS and the Republic need to defend a huge number of systems. While each can field large fleets, those fleets need to be mostly dispersed so that they can resist attacks. Every victory adds a new system to defend, further limiting their capability to launch more attacks. One would expect eventual stalemate, even if the two sides weren't being run by the same guy to produce exactly that result.
For the Empire, the situation is different. The empire controls basically every system, whereas the Rebellion doesn't have to defend anyone. It is free to use all of its forces to attack anywhere, and it does not need to subjugate the planets it liberates. The Empire, therefore, must maintain a force everywhere which is strong enough to take on the entire rebellion (or at least the entirety of any one rebel faction). But this creates two problems for the Empire.
First, any increase in the Rebels' strength dramatically increases the costs for the Empire to field its military. One capital ship might double the strength of a rebel cell, which means the Empire needs to essentially double its whole navy. And second, lots of ships means lots of captains which is the real threat to the Empire. The empire is an extremely centralized government, representing a compromise for the galaxy between their freedom and security. Some portion of the people innevitably are going to be unhappy with that compromise, and the more ships you have, the more likely one of those captains will be among the discontents willing to defect (or sufficiently incompetent that discontents under their command will mutiny). On its own, it doesn't seem like that big a deal, what's it matter if one imperial capital ship in tens of thousands defects? But recall, a rebel cell adding one capital ship doubles the cost of the navy. A defecting imperial ship could be that capital ship.
Thus for the empire to survive, it needs to defend a huge number of planets with as few ships as possible. This logically leads to a focus on large capital ships which can feasibly stand up to a small fleet single-handedly, with fighters that can't act independently and support ships with minimal armament, presenting little threat if they were to defect.
Of course the Empire would be best off if they didn't need to defend their worlds. If they could sufficiently intimidate member worlds, who obviously can't get up and run the way a hidden rebel cell can, then they can tell them "tough titties, endure the rebel attack until we arrive" and avoid parking a Star Destroyer over a world. This would allow for a much smaller navy in terms of both ships and manpower, meaning those ships could be made more capable and all be placed under the command of loyal and competent officers.
The natural progression of this are the super star destroyers and ultimately the Death Star, which could concievably keep the whole galaxy in line. These superweapons serve an additional purpose though. Because they can potentially invalidate the Rebel's strategy and ensure permanent imperial hegemony, the Rebels have to attack these targets. Thus instead of millions of potential targets, the empire now knows to focus their efforts on a handful, and when the rebels come out of the woodwork to make these strikes, the empire can make them especially costly. The Yavin cell risked everything to take out the first Death Star, and came within seconds of total destruction. Likewise Endor was a trap that would have been the end of the Rebellion were it not for those meddling kids and their stupid teddy bears.
It's worth noting that the Empire's playbook worked. They consistently won victories; it was only when their power structure imploded and they descended into infighting that the New Republic was able to make serious gains, and they ultimately had to compromise with the imperial remnant rather than subjugate them by force of arms.
And note that if the Empire were to use peer-level ships they would be subject to attrition. The rebels would jump in, ambush one ship with a barrage of fire and jump back out. This can only be defended against by either making the ships powerful enough to pretty much preclude this, or by packs staying close enough together. And if you work with packs you get a certain amount of flexibility but at a higher cost to accomplish the same thing.
There is also the fact that they are fighting with shields and energy weapons. Shields mean the first damage a unit takes doesn't happen, energy weapons mean no heavy hits from small units. An ISD comes through unscathed when attacked by reasonably light forces and can't meaningfully be ambushed. That's a major psychological factor.
