The Essential Guide to Warfare: Star Wars

The Imperial Navy’s primary missions had been invasion and occupation, but the New Republic Fleet would concentrate on peacekeeping, patrols, and defense against external attacks, while complementing Planetary Security Forces that answered to sector authorities. That meant the New Republic Fleet would be smaller than the Imperial Starfleet, with a focus on rapid response rather than overall firepower. It would be built around starfighters, with capital ships playing two principal roles: providing support for fighter squadrons, and engaging enemies at long range while fighters sped in for strikes.

In practice, the early organization of the New Republic Navy emphasized flexibility, with preexisting squadrons and flotillas remaining intact and local loyalties taken into account. Battle groups were designed so they could be shifted within the four major fleets and area commands as required or sometimes deployed independently—the Solo Command that fought Warlord Zsinj was perhaps the most famous example of this.

Planetary assault became the most common mission profile, with Special Forces repurposed as bridgehead commandos, while a larger New Republic Army was created for occupation and peacekeeping duties.

The biggest challenge was creating a truly unified navy out of disparate units with contrasting regulations, tactics, and traditions. To achieve this, the squadrons that had not been part of Alliance Fleet Command were largely broken up, with ships and crews sent to different units. This provoked some opposition—the Bothan Combined Clans and the Corellian government-in-exile responded by withdrawing most of their units from the navy, but Admiral Ackbar was content to let them go. Fleet integration would now proceed even faster.

By 8 ABY the First Fleet guarded reconquered Coruscant, while the other three fleets had become permanent regional commands based at Elom, Kashyyyk, and Bothawui, fully integrated into the federal military. This arrangement served the New Republic valiantly against Thrawn, the Dark Empire, and the continuing threat of the warlords. By 12 ABY the battle group and squadron forces met Ackbar’s exacting standards for strength, unity, and discipline, and a more serious military reorganization could begin.

The army—which had suffered badly in Operation Shadow Hand—was abolished. Many of its responsibilities and resources were reallocated to local defense forces, and all federal military forces were placed under the four fleet commands as part of a fully integrated Defense Force. The battle groups became subcommands with defined sectors, with large forces blockading the main Imperial holdouts and smaller squadrons assigned to peacekeeping patrols inside New Republic territory.

One battle group in each fleet served as a mobile reserve, but temporary reinforcements could turn each of these into a powerful fighting fleet, thanks to a new system of multi-role task forces.

These were standardized squadrons containing a mix of vessels with complementary capabilities, designed to perform equally well at different mission profiles. The standard deployment was three Star Destroyers or heavy cruisers, two light carriers, four escorts, and five attack ships, plus a line of seven scout and support vessels. Broad terms such as cruiser or scout could denote ships of varying capabilities, but standing orders mandated that the balance of ships in each task force should be kept roughly equal, rather than allowing the bias to slip too far toward battleships or pickets—it was the number of task forces in a battle group that defined its role, rather than the internal balance of ships.

After the reorganization led to the four fleets becoming increasingly tied down as territorial deployments, a separate rapid-reaction command was activated in 16 ABY, initially consisting of five task forces and numbered as the Fifth Roving Battle Group, but commanded by a flag officer with equal status to the fleet admirals. The “Fighting Fifth” was rapidly assigned full fleet status and by 19 ABY had been enlarged to full strength, with five hundred capital ships in five battle groups and many thousands of starfighters.

When he stepped down as Supreme Commander in 25 ABY, Ackbar called the Defense Force “the best navy I can imagine. It is modern, streamlined, and high-tech, unbeaten in any conflict since Endor. It has liberated the galaxy from the worst tyranny in known history, and is capable of handling any threat that the New Republic could imagine.”

After the death of Warlord Zsinj at Dathomir and the dismantling of High Admiral Teradoc’s Greater Maldrood, the sectors beyond the Hydian Way and the Inner Rim still swore loyalty to the Ruling Council, as did scattered systems in the so-called Borderlands between the Perlemian and the Hydian and a few lonely fortress worlds in the Core. But the New Republic had seized Ord Mantell and a corridor around the Celanon Spur, knifing into Imperial territory. Ardus Kaine’s Pentastar Alignment was a strong state, but Kaine remained stubbornly isolationist, and the Imperial Moffs squabbled endlessly, paying the Ruling Council little mind.

The Empire’s days seemed numbered. But a visionary leader was about to appear, one who would rekindle the memory of Imperial might during a glorious but all-too-brief campaign.

Thrawn, the last of Emperor Palpatine’s Grand Admirals, returned from the Unknown Regions in 9 ABY and swiftly rallied the Empire’s Moffs by promising to solve “the only puzzle worth solving—the complete, total and utter destruction of the Rebellion.”

Though Thrawn was given nominal control of military forces by Ars Dangor’s Ruling Council, the Pentastar Alignment’s Kaine, and the Ciutric Hegemony’s Prince-Admiral Krennel, in reality he was starved of assets: The Moffs lived in perpetual fear of not just the New Republic but also one another. Thrawn made little protest; his reorganization of the Empire’s forces left the Moffs with adequate defenses and reinforced Orinda as the seat of Imperial power, while giving the Chiss Grand Admiral himself a decidedly modest complement. He took command of the fleet defeated at Endor, now reduced to just a dozen Imperial Star Destroyers, of which only six ships were judged fully loyal to Bastion (the Chimaera, Death’s Head, Judicator, Inexorable, Nemesis, and Stormhawk), while the remainder formed a second force under the ambitious Captain Dorja of the Relentless. Thrawn accepted this state of affairs with equanimity, assuring Captain Gilad Pellaeon of the Chimaera that the opening stages of his campaign would require relatively few warships. If anything, he seemed to relish the challenge.

The first inkling the New Republic had that something was afoot came with raids against systems in the Borderlands: Individual Star Destroyers hit such systems as Saarn and Draukyze. After studying the New Republic’s response to border incidents, Thrawn struck Obroa-skai, where he routed an Elomin-led task force that intercepted his ships, destroying four Assault Frigate Mark I’s and three wings of X-wings. The brief battle helped cement Thrawn’s legend as a cunning tactician, but the Grand Admiral was far more interested in the information his slicers had extracted from Obroa-skai’s archives: the location of Palpatine’s secret storehouse of artifacts.

After a side trip to Myrkr, Thrawn journeyed to the Mount Tantiss installation on Wayland, where he retrieved Spaarti cylinders, a prototype cloaking device, and an insane clone of the Jedi Jorus C’baoth, whom Thrawn had confronted in his younger days. Thrawn directed Imperial engineers to begin testing twenty-three cloaking devices big enough to hide a small capital ship and establish cloning facilities using the Spaarti cylinders. Used in conjunction with Force-blocking ysalamiri from Myrkr, they would allow him to grow clones to maturity in just weeks. Thrawn also made use of C’baoth’s Force abilities—they allowed his warships to coordinate attacks with incredible precision.

The Grand Admiral stepped up his raids, hitting a trio of systems in Sluis sector and assaulting Nkllon, where he stole fifty-one mole miners from Lando Calrissian’s mining operation. Now that he had all the pieces of his initial plan in place, Thrawn turned to the Moffs for additional assistance. He augmented his armada with additional Strike-class cruisers, Carrack-class light cruisers, and TIE squadrons. His target was the New Republic shipyards at Sluis Van, where more than a hundred warships were being refitted as cargo haulers for a relief effort in Sluis sector.

A cloaked A-class bulk freighter delivered the TIE fighters and mole miners to Sluis Van. As the TIEs swarmed over the yards, the mole miners attached themselves to Mon Calamari Star Cruisers, Nebulon-B escort frigates, Dreadnaught-class heavy cruisers, Corellian corvettes, and other warships, inserting spacetroopers and army units into the empty ships. Overcoming minimal resistance, the saboteurs began steaming away from the Sluis Van docks in their stolen capital ships—which Thrawn’s clones would crew.

The plan would have worked flawlessly if not for Calrissian’s quick thinking. The mole miners’ command codes had been hardwired, and Lando remembered them from tedious troubleshooting on Nkllon. He activated them remotely and watched as they burned through the stolen ships. Thwarted, Thrawn withdrew his forces. But he wasn’t dissatisfied—the warships weren’t his, true, but they’d been badly damaged.

Thrawn continued his raids, materializing in New Republic systems to assault planets and convoys before slipping away again. His was a classic variation on the ancient “stateless” strategy practiced by insurgents for millennia: The New Republic military had to keep every one of its systems safe or seem weak to panicked citizens; to look strong, Thrawn had only to stage high-profile raids and evade capture. The Rebels had once used the same strategy to erode the perception of Imperial power; now a rogue Imperial was using it against former Rebels.

But Thrawn wasn’t content with playing pirate. He had another source of ships for his clones—the Katana fleet, a task force of two hundred Dreadnaughts lost before the Clone Wars when a hive virus drove its crews insane and the task force’s captain jumped the ships blindly into hyperspace. The New Republic learned of Thrawn’s target and the race for the lost fleet was on—a race Thrawn won, making off with 178 warships.

Now that Thrawn had his capital ships, his tactics changed. He began reclaiming territory, yet sleight of hand and misinformation remained his greatest weapons. He turned his attention to the Rimward precincts of the Corellian Run, where New Republic paranoia was running high. Feints at Ando, Filve, and Condre brought the warships of the New Republic out of their base at Ord Pardron, which Thrawn promptly leveled.

That same day he seized the agricultural world of Ukio with a cunning trick: Thrawn slipped cloaked heavy cruisers beneath the planet’s shields, then fired his Star Destroyers’ turbolasers at the shields in the exact spot beneath which the cruisers waited. C’baoth’s Force abilities allowed the cloaked cruisers to open fire at the proper second, giving the illusion that the Star Destroyers’ turbolaser blasts had passed right through the shield. Ukio promptly surrendered. Over the following days, Thrawn would use the trick against other worlds, but by then it was hardly needed: Word of his coming caused New Republic and neutral systems to hastily swear allegiance to the Empire.

Thrawn roared through the Outer Rim and sent his task forces down the Rimma Trade Route and the Namadii Corridor, the beginnings of a pincer movement on the Core. He then upped the stakes, raiding Coruscant itself. The raid did little damage, but Thrawn seeded the capital’s orbit with twenty-two cloaked asteroids while dry-firing his tractor beams to make it seem as if 265 more had been deployed. Coruscant was trapped behind its planetary shields, which it dared not deactivate for fear that cloaked asteroids in decaying orbits would impact the planet. Until the New Republic could figure out just how many asteroids Thrawn had launched and ensure they’d all been destroyed, the capital was effectively besieged.

Thrawn’s triumph was in sight. The Imperial forces in the New Territories awaited orders to move on the Core, while the inner systems’ fortress worlds readied their forces to join his invasion fleets. In the Deep Core, the surviving warlords had heard of his campaign and began to stir. The New Republic’s rapid-reaction fleets deployed to defend Coruscant, Mon Calamari, Kashyyyk, and Bothawui, as if a holo-documentary of their post-Endor gains were running in reverse.

Admiral Ackbar knew the New Republic desperately needed a victory, one that would reverse Thrawn’s gains and prove to frightened citizens that he had no superweapons at his disposal, just trickery involving cloaked ships and asteroids. Ackbar focused on Bilbringi, a key Imperial shipyard that possessed one of the galaxy’s few crystal gravfield traps. (A CGT was a sensor suite that could detect cloaked ships—Bilbringi’s had been used on secret expeditions into the Unknown Regions ordered by Palpatine.)

The New Republic feinted at Tangrene in the hope of drawing Thrawn’s forces away from Bilbringi, but the Grand Admiral wasn’t fooled, and awaited Ackbar in force: Some two dozen Star Destroyers were deployed, as were eight Interdictors, thirty Katana Dreadnaughts, numerous Strike and Carrack cruisers, and TIE fighters including the 181st. Against them, Ackbar had eleven Mon Cal Star Cruisers, two assault frigates, the Star Destroyer Freedom, various escort ships, and squadrons of X-wings, Y-wing bombers, A-wings, and B-wings.

Thrawn arranged several of his Interdictors to bring the New Republic forces out of hyperspace short of the shipyards, with additional Interdictors deployed to prevent them from escaping. That left Ackbar’s task force struggling to re-form its lines under murderous fire. The New Republic received a badly needed break when a band of smugglers attacked the shipyards, forcing Thrawn to redeploy some of his Star Destroyers and starfighters to protect them, but by then Ackbar’s forces were in disarray.

It was at that moment that disaster struck for the Empire. Thrawn had long relied upon his Noghri bodyguards, who had served Darth Vader and then the Empire in return for assistance saving their poisoned homeworld of Honoghr. But Leia Organa Solo had shown the Noghri they’d been duped—the Empire’s efforts were actually continuing to poison Honoghr. Thrawn’s Noghri bodyguards had waited for the right moment to betray him; at Bilbringi, one stabbed him through the heart.

Captain Pellaeon briefly continued to give orders to the fleet, but word spread that Thrawn had been killed, and the Imperials began to panic—a New Republic victory at Bilbringi could mean the end of the Empire. With requests for new orders pouring in, Pellaeon ordered a retreat. Thrawn’s campaign was over, and the New Republic had been spared.

Arguments raged for decades among galactic historians about what would have happened had Thrawn lived. Ackbar insisted until his death that his forces had recovered from the initial attacks, and the best Thrawn could have managed was a draw—which considering the mismatch between the two powers would have been as good as a defeat. But many military historians maintained that Ackbar had stood on the edge of ruin. Pellaeon remembered that he and Thrawn had been close to summoning reinforcements from neighboring Imperial sectors to destroy both Ackbar and Rogue Squadron, and the Pentastar Alignment’s Grand Moff Kaine insisted he had decided to commit his warships (including the Super Star Destroyer Reaper) when word came of Thrawn’s death.

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WAR PORTRAIT:
GRAND ADMIRAL THRAWN

From Mitth’raw’nuruodo Reconsidered: A Patriot’s Perspective, by Lenang O’Pali, 55 ABY:

Thanks to decades of contact with the Chiss, we now understand much more than our predecessors did about Mitth’raw’nuruodo. To them, he was a red-eyed alien from a mysterious species from the Unknown Regions, known by the truncated name Thrawn. But these days we know the Chiss Ascendancy as a real place, not a name slapped on a blank spot on a map. And as we have come to better understand the Chiss, so we have come to better understand Mitth’raw’nuruodo.

He struck his contemporaries as noble, a being who spoke carefully and precisely in any of the many languages he knew. Yet we know he was a commoner who achieved adoption into one of the Chiss ruling families through his illustrious military service—then gave all of that up because of his beliefs and what he learned about the galaxy.

Since we obtained access to the records of the Empire of the Hand, we have known the basics of Mitth’raw’nuruodo’s fateful encounter with Outbound Flight, the expedition into the Unknown Regions led by the Jedi Jorus C’baoth in the final days of the Republic. We know that Darth Sidious sent a Trade Federation task force commanded by Kinman Doriana to destroy Outbound Flight, but that Doriana ran afoul of Mitth’raw’nuruodo’s forces and was defeated. We know that Doriana told him of the peril posed by the Far Outsiders—beings we now know all too well as the Yuuzhan Vong. We know that Mitth’raw’nuruodo heard of this peril from Darth Sidious himself. And we now know why Mitth’raw’nuruodo believed Sidious—because the Chiss had already encountered the Vong at Vun’Hanna and the Twilight Void.

Given what we now know, let me speak plainly: Mitth’raw’nuruodo was one of our greatest heroes, a brave and principled being who devoted his life to preparing for the Vong.

He broke with his own people—at considerable cost to his own reputation and standing—to accept service in the military of the Empire, whose leaders often treated him with prejudice and disdain. We know he spent much of that service beyond the galactic frontier, becoming a bulwark against the invasion that only he and a very few knew was coming. He created the Empire of the Hand. He crushed the Ssi-ruuvi Imperium before it could attack our civilization in force. And I have no doubt that he encountered and destroyed enemies whose secrets he took to his grave.

Doriana introduces Darth Sidious to Thrawn (Chris Scalf)

But if so, my critics ask, why was Mitth’raw’nuruodo’s first act upon returning to wage war against the New Republic?

Consider: When Mitth’raw’nuruodo returned, the New Republic was clearly the dominant power of the galaxy, with the Empire in sharp decline. Mitth’raw’nuruodo sought to overturn that order. He plunged the galaxy into chaos. Why? If our civilization needed to be prepared, why not serve the New Republic? Why not awaken its leaders to the peril drawing ever closer to the galactic edge? Why further weaken the galaxy through the loss of so many lives and the destruction of so many military assets?

The answer is that Mitth’raw’nuruodo took Mon Mothma and the rest of her cadre at their word. He believed they were creating another Republic, and this new government would be much the same as the last one to bear that name. It, too, would babble about democracy and diversity while doing nothing to combat dissent, inefficiency, and corruption. Such failings might be tolerable in a civilization with centuries to engage in self-improvement, but there has never been such a civilization—and anyway, the Vong were coming.

Which brings us to Emperor Palpatine.

During Mitth’raw’nuruodo’s campaign, the galaxy thought Palpatine dead. We now know he was not—he had returned to a clone body and was plotting his return on Byss. But did Mitth’raw’nuruodo know that? I firmly believe that he did—and that it was Palpatine who called him back.

I am baffled by critics who accept Mitth’raw’nuruodo’s account of his discussion with Palpatine about the Far Outsiders, yet refuse to revise their opinions about either man. They ignore what Mitth’raw’nuruodo reported Palpatine believed: that the weak Republic would be destroyed by the Vong, and had to be reforged into an orderly, militarized society able to resist them. They refuse to consider the possibility that the Empire’s apparent brutality and ruthlessness were necessary parts of preparing for that terrible war. Why do they refuse to do so? Because that would lead them to the only logical conclusion: that Palpatine was right.

Recent galactic history is not the struggle for freedom our children are force-fed—or should I style it Force-fed—on HoloNet channels controlled by Mothmatist news agencies. Rather, it is a succession of unlucky events that left our civilization defenseless against the Vong. The second Death Star promised to eliminate the sedition and separatism of the Rebellion, but it was destroyed and the Emperor was betrayed and slain, forced into an agonizing convalescence on Byss. During his long absence, a continuation of the destructive conflict between the Empire and the Rebellion battered down the galaxy’s defenses.

Mitth’raw’nuruodo responded to his Emperor’s call and tried to rebuild the tattered Empire. Amazingly, against all odds, he nearly did so. But for the treachery of a Noghri, he would have prepared the galaxy for Palpatine’s return and then helped restore the defenses they had worked so hard to build.

Even so, there was another chance. Palpatine had another clone body—and so did Mitth’raw’nuruodo. But both were lost—Palpatine was gunned down by the Corellian gangster Han Solo, of all people, and Luke Skywalker and Mara Jade destroyed Mitth’raw’nuruodo’s defenseless clone at Nirauan, a decade after his defeat at Bilbringi.

The Mothmatists see these events as victories. But if they were honest, they would see them for what they really were: missed chances to prevent the ruin of so much that we held dear. Our Emperor and our Grand Admiral were taken from us before their plans could be brought to fruition, and as a result we stood naked before the Yuuzhan Vong and the bleak destiny they sought for us.

Airen Cracken famously remarked that the secret of being a successful intelligence analyst is being able to discern patterns that are there without imagining ones that aren’t. Striking the right balance was rarely as challenging as it was in the months before Grand Admiral Thrawn’s rampage through the galaxy, when New Republic Intelligence had to consider many strange reports.

The most worrisome report was that Admiral Feyet Kiez and his command crew had absconded from Anaxes with the Star Dreadnought Whelm. When Osted Wermis surrendered Anaxes to the New Republic soon thereafter, he admitted he was as baffled about Kiez’s destination as anyone else. And there were other incidents to ponder. The warlord-turned-pirate Inos Fonada abandoned his bases in the Vatha sector and disappeared down the Corellian Trade Spine with his armada of scavenged Imperial warships. The top designers of an Imperial skunkworks on the fortress world of Kelada vanished, along with hundreds of schematics for experimental weapons. From the Pentastar Alignment to isolated Imperial satrapies, there were reports of Moffs, warlords, and fleet commanders gone missing, often with their warships.

New Republic Intelligence’s initial thought was that one of the warlords hidden away within the Deep Core had gained the upper hand over his fellows. But New Republic Intelligence received regular reports about the likes of Harrsk, Delvardus, Teradoc, and the former Moff Foga Brill—and there was no indication they’d abandoned their scheming and skirmishing. And few of the former Imperials who’d disappeared had ties to those petty tyrants. Nor was Thrawn the hidden attractor—neither the Whelm nor any of the missing former Imperials played a role in his campaign.

The flurry of strange reports was largely forgotten in the chaotic months after Thrawn’s death, as the New Republic sent its fleets back to the Outer Rim, eliminating the Ciutric Hegemony’s Prince-Admiral Delak Krennel and seeking to take other chunks out of the rump Empire before the Ruling Council could reestablish control of its forces. That left the Core Worlds lightly guarded—and set the stage for disaster.

Out of the Deep Core came a trio of massive task forces of Star Destroyers, anchored by massive dreadnoughts the New Republic had thought destroyed or lost: four Executor-classes (including the missing Whelm), five Mandator IIIs and three Vengeance-classes. The New Republic mustered what forces it could in the Core, moving to check the incursion at Metellos—only to be surprised by a fleet of raiders sent to Coruscant by the Ruling Council, which also sent task forces across the Borderlands to Contruum and Columex. Beaten at Metellos and its capital, the New Republic fell back from the Core, and ground forces led by General Alix Balan marched triumphantly through the grandest boulevards of Coruscant.

But the Imperial forces then turned on one another in an orgy of senseless destruction. Imperial commanders who survived the Imperial Mutiny remembered that it began with the Ruling Council and the Moffs squabbling over the selection of a new Emperor, a disagreement that became a bloody free-for-all between those two groups, naval commanders, the Inquisitorius, COMPNOR, and the Imperial Security Bureau. But these facts seemed a poor summation: All agreed that a madness seemed to consume men who had worked patiently for years to restore the Empire. The Whelm and the Mandator III Panthac destroyed each other above Alsakan; the captain of the Vengeance-class dreadnought Javelin piloted his massive ship into the torpedo sphere guarding Chasin; and squadrons of robotic TIEs tore apart the Mandator III Aculeus at Drearia.

The New Republic struck back with raids into the Core, including ravaged Coruscant. There the architect of the horror and misery was revealed: Darth Sidious had somehow returned from death.

After becoming the Sith Lord’s apprentice, Luke Skywalker learned the truth: Sidious had found a way to preserve his spirit after the loss of his physical body. After dying at Endor, he had taken possession of one of many clone bodies kept in his secret citadel on Byss, at the heart of the Deep Core. It had taken Sidious years to rebuild his strength. Once he succeeded, he began to summon his faithful servants and activate long-dormant weaponries and shipyards secretly constructed in the Deep Core a generation earlier, assembling a massive fleet.

Sidious did nothing to stop the Imperial Mutiny, perhaps because he had weapons of his own: two massive Eclipse-class dreadnoughts and a new superweapon, the dreaded Galaxy Gun. He also unleashed his World Devastators upon the galaxy, doing terrible damage to the homeworld of the Mon Calamari, whose ruin he had sought for so long.

The Emperor died aboard the Eclipse at Da Soocha, but returned again in a deteriorating clone body during Operation Shadow Hand, a second wave of destruction overseen by his dark side servants. Sidious’s final death came at Onderon, where the Jedi Empatojayos Brand sacrificed himself to drag the Sith Lord’s struggling spirit into the Force, never to return.

The Dark Empire dissipated like a fever dream, with the New Republic returning to the Core and rebuilding Coruscant. But though the New Republic leadership mourned a year of terrors, the effect on the Empire was worse. The Imperial Mutiny shredded the Empire’s fleets and killed many capable officers. The Empire would limp along under a succession of leaders, but its dreams of reconquering the galaxy were dead.

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CLOAKING DEVICES

Traditional cloaking devices used stygium gems from the Dreighton Nebula—a form of lightsaber crystal with the ability to warp perceptions around them. Known since at least 4000 BBY, stygium gems powered the cloaking technology used on Sith Infiltrator starships such as Darth Maul’s Scimitar and the Rogue Shadow. However, declining stocks made their use increasingly limited, while sensors became more capable of detecting them. The last significant use of stygium cloaks was in the modified V38 starfighters of the TIE Phantom project. In 3 ABY the Empire’s entire reserve of the crystals was destroyed with the Super Star Destroyer Terror.

An alternative to stygium was hibridium from Garos, employed in the research projects of Grand Admiral Demetrius Zaarin. Such efforts gained additional impetus after the destruction of the Terror, but hibridium cloaks proved to have prohibitive power and technology constraints, and were never truly practical.

The first commander to really use cloaking devices as more than a parlor trick was Grand Admiral Thrawn. It was long believed that his design was a perfection of the hibridium system, but while Thrawn initially pursued this angle, he acquired an alternative technology in 9 ABY, one believed to have been seized by the Empire from the Xi Char aesthete-corsairs. These cloaking devices required no special materials or large generators, and were undetectable by anything except a crystal grav trap sensor array—or a Jedi Master. The only downside was that the cloaking field was double-blind—what was inside could not see out.

With the assistance of the Jedi clone Joruus C’baoth, Thrawn used cloaked Star Destroyers and TIE fighters to devastating effect in his campaigns against the New Republic. Cloaking devices remained standard on Imperial warships for the next decade, but the technology was banned under the Bastion Accords in 19 ABY.

WORLD
DEVASTATOR

THE WORLD DEVASTATORS

Palpatine’s grand vision for the Imperial military involved three basic elements: terror weapons to make the rabble cower in fearful obedience; capital ships and starfighter swarms to destroy any who chose armed resistance; and shipyards, factories, and raw material facilities to fuel this war machine. After his rebirth on Byss, the Emperor activated projects to integrate the three concepts into a single fearsome design.

The new Master of Imperial Projects was Umak Leth, who adapted factory ship designs to house molecular furnaces, a new technology from the Maw Installation. Inspired by hyperspace vortices, molecular furnaces consumed raw material and converted it to energy, which could then be reconstituted into whatever pattern was needed. The furnaces’ vast energies also powered impregnable shields and powerful turbolasers, making Star Destroyer–sized factory ships into unstoppable battle stations called World Devastators.

The World Devastators were designed to operate in fleets, and capable of enlarging themselves by constructing extra hull sections in their onboard factories. The largest of them, General Titus Klev’s command ship Silencer-7, grew to be thirty-two hundred meters long with a towering hull that stood fifteen hundred meters high, giving it the tonnage of a dreadnought. It boasted an armament of 125 heavy turbolasers and eighty proton torpedo launchers, plus two hundred anti-starfighter blasters and fifteen ion cannons.

There was no need now for mining shuttles, or for an assault fleet to pacify the target before the factory ship arrived. A Devastator simply powered across a battlefield, using its guns and shields to destroy enemy ships and vehicles and its tractor beams to grab the shattered vessels and feed them to the molecular furnaces. The onboard factories were modular, capable of being reconfigured in moments to produce anything the Empire might want—from probe droids to AT-ATs.

As the first stage of Operation Shadow Hand, the Devastators were unleashed against Mon Calamari. The civilization that had inflicted the most damage on the Empire would be obliterated, its curved artifacts remade into sharp-edged Imperial weapons.

But Palpatine knew that an ambitious commander with a single Devastator could rapidly produce a battle fleet of his own. To guard against that, the entire fleet was governed by a single series of automated control codes. That proved the Devastators’ undoing—the command codes were stolen by R2-D2, and the Rebels were able to deactivate the entire dark fleet.

Most of the Devastators were eliminated on Mon Calamari, but a small number were pressed into service by the Alliance, used for fleet support and reconstruction projects in the months that followed. Amid outcries about their continued use, they were scrapped by the New Republic around 12 ABY.

NEBULA-CLASS STAR
DESTROYER

THE DEFENDER AND THE NEW CLASS PROGRAMS

The early New Republic military was a hodgepodge of the old Alliance fleet, Imperial warships captured or donated by sectors declaring themselves New Republic members, and ships produced by Allied Commands, most notably the Mon Calamari.

The first significant new capital ships designed for the New Republic appeared before Coruscant was retaken. The 1,250-meter Republic-class Star Destroyer’s systems were designed by Walex Blissex, and far more cost-effective than those of its Imperial counterpart. The ship was billed as a Rendili StarDrive design—a bit of political theater intended to woo Rendili away from the Empire, as its bulbous, organic lines were a tip-off that it had been inspired and built by the Mon Calamari. Meanwhile, the 2,500-meter Bulwark Mark III battlecruiser was built for the New Republic by TransGalMeg using the old Techno Union design as a starting point.

Shortly after the fall of Coruscant, the New Republic unveiled the Defender program for new warship classes, a combination of smaller-platform capital ships and starfighters in keeping with New Republic military principles. The Defender ships would be built by individual shipbuilders under the aegis of Republic Engineering Corporation, a shipbuilders’ consortium working in conjunction with the military.

The Defender starfighter (already in service) was a souped-up version of an old Incom design used for short-range planetary defense. The Defender-class assault carrier was designed to house three wings of fighters. And the Nebula-class Star Destroyer (formally renamed the Defender once it was made part of the program) refined the core of Blissex’s Republic design in a new angular hull, augmenting the earlier craft’s firepower while shrinking its dimensions further to 1,040 meters, which earned the Nebula the tag “pocket Star Destroyer.”

Later, a pair of new ship classes were added to the program, allowing two liberated shipbuilding worlds to contribute: Loronar designed and built the 400-meter Belarus-class cruiser, a rethinking of the versatile Strike class, while Kuat Drive Yards built the 275-meter Corona-class frigate, modeled after the Nebulon-B. (A contemporary of these new classes was the MC90 Star Cruiser, the first Mon Calamari design intended for other species.)

The Defender program was delayed by political distractions and the campaigns of Thrawn and the Dark Empire. When it resumed, it was as part of the New Class modernization effort. The New Class program extended the Defender principles: The Nebula-class Star Destroyer’s basic design and hull were reused for the Endurance-class fleet carrier, while the Defender-class assault carrier was the basis of the new Majestic-class heavy cruiser. A quartet of new ships filled out the program: One basic 375-meter hull design was shared by the Sacheen-class escort cruiser and the Hajen-class fleet tender, while a 190-meter design gave rise to the Agave-class picket and Warrior-class gunship.

Neither program included battlecruisers or dread-noughts, which the New Republic’s military strategists saw as obsolete. But the lessons of the Dark Empire, the Battle of Orinda, and the Black Fleet Crisis forced a change in philosophy, leading to the Mon Calamari creating the Mediator-class battlecruiser and then the massive Viscount-class Star Defender.

ENDURANCE-CLASS
FLEET CARRIER

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WAR PORTRAIT: GARM BEL IBLIS

Tough-minded and ferociously independent even by Corellian standards, Garm Bel Iblis was one of the architects of the Rebel Alliance, though political disagreements and his own pride caused him to turn his back on it for years.

In 35 BBY Bel Iblis became Corellia’s Senator, and emerged as one of Palpatine’s leading critics during the Separatist Crisis and the Clone Wars, openly questioning whether the repeated grants of emergency powers to the Supreme Chancellor were necessary and whether he could be trusted to relinquish them once the Separatist threat was extinguished.

Amid the bitter debate over the Military Creation Act, Bel Iblis and Corellia’s ruling Diktat invoked Contemplanys Hermi, an obscure proviso in the Galactic Constitution that dated back to the First Alsakan Conflict. Contemplanys Hermi allowed Corellia and its dependencies to withdraw from the Senate without relinquishing their status within the Republic—a measure that had historically caused the rest of the Senate to reconsider actions that Corellians thought perilous. But Bel Iblis’s gamble didn’t work: The Military Creation Act passed, and the galaxy was torn apart by war.

Corellia did its part for the Republic, sending task forces from its powerful sector fleet to beat back Separatist advances and aid the Jedi. But Bel Iblis no longer had any illusions about Palpatine. In secret meetings with Senators such as Bail Organa, Mon Mothma, and Padmé Amidala, he spoke openly and urgently about the need to oppose Palpatine’s rule.

After the Republic became the New Order, Palpatine struck Contemplanys Hermi from the Constitution as an ancient relic, compelling Bel Iblis to return to the Senate. Bel Iblis soon became one of the Emperor’s most dogged foes, speaking publicly about subjects that were forbidden in ways that had caused less powerful worlds’ leaders to disappear.

When Mothma fled Coruscant and went into hiding, Bel Iblis knew his time was short. At Anchoron his wife and children were killed in an explosion engineered to eliminate him. Bel Iblis fled and was believed dead, though Organa and Mothma knew he had survived, and continued to meet secretly with him to plan the resistance against the Empire.

Bel Iblis’s Corellian Resistance became one of the most successful Rebel groups, and he was instrumental in the drafting and signing of the Corellian Treaty formally declaring the Alliance to Restore the Republic. But there were tensions between Bel Iblis and Mothma from the beginning: He suspected she was more interested in accumulating power than military victories, just as Palpatine had been in his time. A sharp disagreement over an Alliance attack at Milvayne led to a break between them, with Bel Iblis leaving to wage his own private war against the Empire. After the Battle of Endor, he warned his lieutenants to prepare for Mothma’s declaration of herself as Empress. But Mothma did nothing of the sort, and soon Bel Iblis had to accept what his aides had known long ago: He had been mistaken about his former friend’s motives.

For the proud Bel Iblis, knowing this was one thing—admitting it was something else entirely.

The way back came through a chance meeting with Han Solo and Lando Calrissian. Bel Iblis’s own lieutenant urged Solo and Calrissian to persuade Mothma to ask Bel Iblis to come back—for the Corellian would never do so on his own.

Bel Iblis returned without the issue being settled, assisting the New Republic in its fight with Thrawn over the Katana fleet. Mothma welcomed Bel Iblis back and made him a general, but the Chief of State had her own pride to overcome, and denied him a place on the Provisional Council. The breach wasn’t repaired until Thrawn’s assault on Coruscant, when Mothma herself asked Bel Iblis to take command of the planet’s defenses from the overmatched Admiral Drayson. The proud Corellian had finally come home, and an old wound in the heart of the New Republic was healed.

Garm Bel Iblis meets Han Solo and Lando Calrissian (Chris Scalf)

After the collapse of Operation Shadow Hand, Gilad Pellaeon was appalled by the state of the Empire. The Pentastar Alignment’s Ardus Kaine was dead, the Moffs were divided, and the Ruling Council was a collection of petty would-be tyrants. The Empire had enough military strength to ensure its own security, but lacked a leader to use that strength wisely. The Dark Empire was succeeded by the Crimson Empire, led by the former Royal Guardsman Carnor Jax. But Jax’s realm quickly fell apart, leaving the Moffs even weaker and more divided.

Pellaeon watched Jax’s rise and fall from afar—despairing, he’d taken his own task force into the Deep Core and joined the service of High Admiral Teradoc, who commanded the largest fleet. But Teradoc and his rival warlords were even worse than the men Pellaeon had left behind, wasting their soldiers’ lives on ludicrous quarrels among the densely packed stars at the heart of the galaxy. Eventually Pellaeon did find a potential leader to follow: Admiral Natasi Daala. Daala, too, was tired of useless squabbling—and with Pellaeon’s help, she ended the infighting with vicious efficiency, luring the majority of the Deep Core warlords to a meeting and poisoning the lot.

Daala unified the Deep Core, but despite Pellaeon’s warnings, she squandered her forces with a doomed campaign against the New Republic in 12 ABY, one that led to the loss of her Super Star Destroyer Knight Hammer. Humiliated, she handed authority over to Pellaeon and went into seclusion with a handful of ships and adherents. The Deep Core, Pellaeon decided, could never support a functioning society—at best it could be a refuge for Imperial ideals. It had to be abandoned.

But first, Pellaeon swore he would gather whatever hadn’t been destroyed. First he sifted through the records of the warlords who’d served the reborn Emperor. Then, taking Daala’s fleet, he surveyed the abandoned Imperial armories that hadn’t been left unreachable by the shifting hyperspace lanes of the Deep Core, retrieving squadrons of robotic TIEs, caches of arms, and mines. In doing so, he made a breathtaking discovery: The Star Dreadnoughts Megador and Dominion had survived the war and been abandoned, empty but spaceworthy, at Harrsk’s shipyard Deep 3.

Pellaeon decided to approach the Imperial Rim factions, confident that three dreadnoughts—the Megador, Dominion, and Kaine’s Reaper—would be enough to defend the Empire against the New Republic. The Moffs agreed, making Pellaeon the Imperial military’s Supreme Commander—and he immediately decided to put his forces to good use. The campaigns around Orinda would prove critical not only to the later history of the Empire but also to the development of dreadnoughts under the New Republic.

A graceful trade world, Orinda had emerged as one of the Empire’s proudest holdings, serving as the headquarters of the Ruling Council until the New Republic reclaimed the planet after Thrawn’s death.

Pellaeon saw Orinda as the ideal place to demonstrate to the New Republic that the Empire wouldn’t simply vanish. Reclaiming Orinda and holding it, he felt, would prove an effective demonstration of Imperial power without being provocation enough to demand an overwhelming response.

Leaving the Megador at Agamar to defend against a New Republic attack from Celanon or Ithor, Pellaeon took the Reaper to Borosk, where he picked up a complement of fighters from the 181st Fighter Group, commanded by Turr Phennir, the Empire’s greatest starfighter ace.

Pellaeon and Phennir swiftly took Orinda and six systems Coreward of it along the Entralla Route, holding the line at Lonnaw. Entrenched there, Pellaeon immediately dispatched emissaries to Ord Mantell, informing New Republic officials that he had secured the Empire’s borders and retaken a world of great cultural importance to it; if the Empire’s claim were respected, no further offensives would be launched.

Pellaeon was sincere, but the New Republic leadership feared yet another assault on the Core and responded forcefully, sending Wedge Antilles to the front aboard the Star Dreadnought Lusankya, accompanied by Rogue Squadron.

It was a controversial choice. The New Republic’s military strategists had seen dreadnoughts as a relic of the Imperial past, preferring a combination of smaller-platform capital ships and starfighters—a philosophy that informed the Defender program. After her capture from Ysanne Isard, the Lusankya had been all but abandoned in the Scarl military shipyard, used as a medical research facility.

But nothing in the New Republic arsenal had been a match for the horde of battleships unleashed by the Dark Empire. With New Republic Intelligence unable to swear that other Super Star Destroyers, World Devastators, or worse weren’t still to be encountered, the Lusankya was hastily refitted for active duty, seeing action against the Crimson Empire at Phaeda in 11 ABY.

Now, a year later, the Lusankya and Reaper stalked each other through the Mid Rim, as Phennir’s 181st and Antilles’s Rogues clashed in a series of strikes and parries. Reports of the great capital ships’ duel enthralled citizens in the New Republic and the Empire alike. The New Republic military found the spectacle less captivating, and hastily dispatched the fleet carrier Endurance—commanded by Admiral Areta Bell and loaded with squadrons of new E-wings—to join Antilles.

Pellaeon carefully monitored this complex interplay of New Republic military politics, alert for any hint that Coruscant knew of the existence of the Megador and the Dominion. He concluded their survival had remained a secret—and therein rested the Empire’s best hope.

Pellaeon gradually fell back, with Antilles and Bell following. Antilles cared nothing for the military debate playing out on Coruscant, and merely hoped for a decisive battle that would destroy the Empire’s last Super Star Destroyer. Bell, however, was under tremendous pressure to prove the superiority of starfighters in general and her E-wing squadrons in particular. And serving alongside a legendary X-wing pilot didn’t help relieve that pressure.

Fittingly enough, the showdown came at Orinda: The Lusankya and the Reaper squared off, trading broadsides like seagoing battleships of old, while Antilles exhorted Bell to launch her fighters. But Bell waited—her E-wings had suffered from malfunctions and were designed for pinpoint attacks, not sorties against a huge capital ship. When the Reaper’s defenses had been reduced further, she promised, she would strike.

That was when Pellaeon sprang his trap: A sextet of Interdictors decanted in the system, and were followed by the Dominion, commanded by Admiral Teren Rogriss. Antilles and Bell were caught between two massive capital ships. Antilles fell back, with the Lusankya’s shields a sheet of flame. The Endurance was swiftly destroyed, her squadrons still in their hangars.

Antilles was preparing to abandon ship when the Rogues punched a hole in the Interdictor screen, allowing the Lusankya to flee under heavy fire. The Super Star Destroyer was saved, but the battle had been lost.

Orinda secured the Empire’s southern borders, though skirmishes were routine and the two sides constantly maneuvered for advantage in systems such as Adumar. The battle also reshaped the New Republic’s military philosophy: The age of the dreadnought wasn’t over after all.

But Orinda would come to be seen as a lost opportunity for the Empire. Pellaeon had succeeded too well. A month later, the New Republic pushed through the Borderlands after defeating Getelles, the warlord of the Antemeridian sector. The Moffs, emboldened by Pellaeon’s recent victory, ordered him to go on the offensive.

Pellaeon reluctantly agreed, and was soundly defeated, losing the Reaper to the Dornean admiral Etahn A’baht at Celanon. Hoping the Moffs had learned their lesson, he sought to build up the Empire’s defenses and turn it into a functioning state, one with the strength to defend its own traditions while coexisting with the New Republic.

But the Moffs would once again fall prey to old hatreds. In 17 ABY, the New Republic Senate lifted its ban on former Imperial officials holding elective office. The move was intended as a peace offering, but the Moffs saw it as prelude to an invasion. They contacted Daala and convinced her to fight, and ordered Pellaeon into battle. Pellaeon followed their orders, launching what would prove a disastrous campaign: Daala was routed at Columus, after which Garm Bel Iblis’s Fourth Fleet and Admiral Ackbar’s Third and Fifth fleets pummeled Pellaeon’s forces at Champala, Ketaris, and Tangrene.

At Anx Minor, Pellaeon deployed both of his surviving dreadnoughts and the Sorannan-class Star Destroyer Rakehell, known as the EX-F when salvaged by survivors of the Empire’s Black Fleet. Pellaeon hoped for a repeat of Orinda, but New Republic Intelligence knew something about the Rakehell that he didn’t: There was a weak point in the armor protecting its antimatter reservoir. From the bridge of the Star Dreadnought Guardian, Ackbar ordered repeated strikes against the Rakehell’s weak spot; the explosion of its antimatter reservoir destroyed several of Pellaeon’s warships and damaged the Megador.

Pellaeon ordered an immediate retreat to Bastion, where he convened the eight Moffs whose forces still held their sectors. There, he told them he was done with obeying their orders: Their delusions had undone five years of work in mere weeks, and brought the New Republic to their very door. The chastened Moffs accepted this declaration. Pellaeon had at last found the Empire’s leader—and he was it. Two years later he signed a peace accord with the New Republic, formally ending the Galactic Civil War that had consumed so much of his life.