The Death Star Was a Terrible Plan (and that’s kind of okay)

Two days ago was Waitangi Day! There is leftover cake at the house that I am slowly working through.

This past week I watched the miniseries The 10th Kingdom on FreeVee. Think of it as something like early 2000’s Once Upon a Time? That’s the best I can do to briefly describe it, I think.

I’m behind on book reviews, oh, dear…

This Note idea came to me a couple of times in the past couple of weeks. One time I thought about it while about to go to sleep, and I said, “Nah, I’ll remember it in the morning.” Deciding that I have definitely forgotten ideas over night before, I decided to scribble on a sticky note in the dark and deal with it later. I also considered saving it for May 4th, but by then I strongly suspect I shall forget the idea.

So here we are.

The Death Star Was a Terrible Plan (and that’s kind of okay)

A while back, I remember seeing a Tumblr post in which the user, after re-watching Rogue One, declared that the Empire was clever in creating and deploying the Death Star, because it was an effective method of keeping the galaxy in line. There are fans who suggest that the Empire should have re-worked its military, its ship design, or something like that, but that the Death Star is the best (if, obviously, highly immoral) way to cow enemies into submitting to their power. When someone objected, the OP’s statement was that “You clearly don’t understand war.”

Here’s the thing: canonically, in the text of Star Wars, this is not the case.

In Rogue One, the separate cells of the Rebel Alliance learn about the Death Star and what does that do? Several of the leaders want to turn away and hide, but in the end, it shocks them into uniting and creating a solid alliance which, ultimately, destroys the Death Star, which also has the side effect of taking out several major targets in the Imperial hierarchy. 

Let’s face it: the Death Star is a terrible idea. It puts several key figures in one shiny target. It took years to build, probably oodles and oodles of resources, and no doubt thousands of men to run. Yeah, it’s seemingly invincible, but given that people are going to throw themselves at it, sooner or later someone will find a way to destroy it, regardless of whether or not they stole the Death Star plans.

Because, guess what! People will want to take it down. It turns out that destroying civilian targets to break enemy morale isn’t actually an effective strategy. Militaries do it, and it generally has the opposite effect. Look at Britain in World War II. The Nazis bombing England and Scotland didn’t convince the British people that they should give up, it drove them to try harder to stop the Nazis (and some even declared that Germany should be genocided, though thankfully that never held mainstream sway).

 Look at Ukraine now. Russia’s army thought that bombing civilian targets would soften up the Ukrainian defenses, when all it did was convince them that they had to win at all costs. If the Russians are willing to kill people they claim they’re trying to assimilate, how do you think they being in charge is going to go?

When you see that the enemy is willing to destroy your people’s innocent lives to get you to stop, it proves that A), they don’t actually know how to fight your military in actual combat and B), those douchebags need to get shot! They’re blowing up your family, after all! It makes you fight all the harder to kill them. And with a giant galaxy of thousands of inhabited worlds, plenty of people will try until they blow it up.

If the Empire is willing to destroy an innocent world full of people as leverage, how long until it’s you?

If you’ve read Dune, this is similar to the reasoning which leads to the conspiracy to wipe out House Atreides. The Emperor sees House Atreides: a popular, powerful noble house, not-too-distantly related to his own, with an incredibly skilled, massive fighting force. That’s a threat, but if he openly declares war on them when they haven’t rebelled or done anything illegal, then all the other noble houses will decide they’re next, and team up against the Imperium. So instead, he covertly backs the enemies of the Atreides, the Harkonens, and has them kill all the Atreides, with the reasoning that now the Harkonens are weakened by the struggle and can also be wiped out by the Emperor at his leisure.

Of course, this backfires and the surviving Atreides have a reason to fight the Imperium. This Note isn’t about Dune, though.

This criticism of the Death Star is not criticism of the story, however–because yeah, I think building the Death Star is a dumb idea, it is precisely the sort of thing that an authoritarian and short-sighted government like the Empire would come up with and congratulate themselves on. Again, look at real world tyrants and the governments they run. They’d be all too happy to build themselves a superweapon to threaten enemies with. And yes, it’s entirely realistic that this superweapon blows up in their faces–I’d say that the Force just sped up the process.

You don’t need supplementary material to understand this point, but if you want supplementary material, Rebels indicates that there were rival military programs. Grand Admiral Thrawn pushed for a reform of the navy, building better, more effective starfighters that can maneuver more efficiently. This program goes up in flames because of the titular rebels, and also Imperial mismanagement, though it’s implied (and showrunner Dave Filoni agrees with the sentiment if you take such things as important) that it would have been better for the Empire had they gone with Thrawn’s plan.

This is the kind of plan that wins a war: military management, reform, and tactical thinking. Not building giant guns and pointing them at civilian targets.

—