Strategy Strikes Back: How Star Wars Explains Modern Military Conflict

by Max Brooks

Wisdom is where you find it. Don’t be afraid to look in unexpected places. This is a great place to start.

War and teaching about war stiffen the spine and sharpen the senses, because in either one, failure carries a steep price.

“OODA loop” (Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act)

Even if implemented well and properly, this approach isn’t without risks. The biggest risk to removing humans from harm’s way? It will be an easier decision to engage in conflict. The cost-benefit analysis of “Should we fight?” will skew toward “yes.”

As Obi-Wan says, “Only a Sith lord deals in absolutes.” Centaurs and drone swarms will likely give us safer, quicker war, but may come with the loss of the very human why.

The epigraph was spoken by Senator Palpatine in Attack of the Clones. BBY and ABY indicate before the Battle of Yavin and after the Battle of Yavin, respectively. In 25 ABY the New Republic commissioned the New Republic Historical Council to restandardize the Galactic Calendar. The council chose the Battle of Yavin, instead of the Battle of Endor, calling the former the more significant galactic event. From that point on, the year in which the Battle of Yavin occurred was the epoch used for the dating system.

you seek to aid everyone that suffers in the galaxy, you will only weaken yourself . . . and weaken them. It is the internal struggles, when fought and won on their own, that yield the strongest rewards. . . . If you care for others, then dispense with pity and sacrifice and recognize the value in letting them fight their own battles.”

There are two kinds of warriors: effective and dead. And sometimes even the dead were effective, which reveals war’s inherent unfairness.

The real requirement in battle is not the raw ability to fight but to fight amid the conditions at hand. The question is less how good you are and more how you are good: Are you better than your adversary in a given environment?

Identifying and exploiting asymmetries is the essence of strategy—war is the continuation of policy not by the enemy’s chosen means but by the means most likely to damage the enemy.

The former is a preemptive strike; the latter is a preventive strike. It so happens that Han’s “shoot-out” with Greedo illustrates both.

is where preemption differs from prevention; the preventive strike aims to prevent future strategic threats from manifesting, where a preemptive strike aims to be quicker on the draw than a tactical threat that has already manifested itself.

The Imperial task force (which included the Executor, the Tyrant, the Devastator, and the Avenger) dropped out of hyperspace in close orbit over the planet Hoth. As Vader had ordered an immediate redeployment, Ozzel followed his orders, assuming that the Rebel forces would be quick targets from orbit.

All-Terrain Attack Transports, along with an All-Terrain Scout Transport,

The Empire’s officer corps was almost completely human, and apparently “British accent” was the only real requirement for becoming an officer.

Today, the U.S. Army requires military officers to develop expert knowledge in four fields: military-technical, moral-ethical, political-cultural, and leader–human development.

As Niccolo Machiavelli observed in The Prince, “any one who would act up to a perfect standard of goodness in everything, must be ruined among so many who are not good.”24 Failure to make military preparations for plausible threats because it would be inconsistent with your ideals is a smooth path to destruction.

Georg Wilhelm Fredreich Hegel brought form and intellectual coherence to this idea of historical progress.2 Roughly speaking, history, according to Hegel, is a series of struggles between a thesis and its antithesis; the outcome of the resulting clash (or dialectic) propels the spirit of history (or “geist”) toward a better understanding of itself and its freedom. Geist, in the form of humanity, moves forward to new heights as a result of improved learning. Numerous other scholars detail Hegel’s philosophy in more detail, but for our purposes it is enough to note that in part because of Hegel’s writings, the notion of history as linear became a core component of Western thought and statecraft. It is also a philosophical and conceptual underpinning of much contemporary literature, art, and movies.

The American democratic experiment itself may be one such instance. Indeed, George Washington’s repeated insistence on adhering to the rule of law during his tenure as president and his refusal to allow himself to become a king-like ruler of the United States were two key demonstrations of agency in the face of history in the early days of the American Republic.

At an abstract level, it is a situation that recalls the “tyranny of the inbox” in contemporary policy making—a Washington euphemistic slogan for how the urgent becomes prioritized over the important. Key policy makers are often inundated by small details as the bureaucratic stovepipe in which they work increasingly narrows the scope of their perspective, making it even more difficult to orchestrate interagency and multilateral operations.

That’s the issue that I’ve been exploring: How did the Republic turn into the Empire? That’s paralleled with: How did Anakin turn into Darth Vader? How does a good person go bad, and how does a democracy become a dictatorship? It isn’t that the Empire conquered the Republic, it’s that the Empire is the Republic.11

“The average citizen deals in symbols, not rational analysis.

As G. K. Chesterton wrote, “War is not the best way of settling differences; it is the only way of preventing their being settled for you.”