The Essential Guide to Warfare: Star Wars

The Anakin Solo fires upon a wroshyr forest during a battle over Kashyyyk (Darren Tan)

With the Yuuzhan Vong defeated, the Galactic Alliance sought to rebuild worlds devastated by their invasion, resettling populations and working to reverse the effects of Vongforming. At first, the galaxy seemed united in this effort, with rich worlds helping poorer ones and populations that had escaped harm pledging to assist those that had not.

But this spirit of cooperation didn’t last. The galactic economy had been badly damaged, and many systems found once-profitable trade links broken or industries disrupted, leading to poverty and unrest. Galactic Alliance rebuilding efforts were hamstrung by inefficiency and corruption, which led to angry talk that worlds were being favored or ignored. Some systems, megacorps, and other organizations benefited from government reconstruction credits and the reshaping of the galaxy’s economic and political map, but their gains were mirrored by other worlds’ losses, breeding resentment.

The Galactic Alliance Defense Force weathered the Swarm War of 35 ABY between the Killiks and the Chiss, but the conflict revealed that the Defense Force was ill prepared for a major war. After the Swarm War, the Senate passed measures requiring more reconstruction taxes and military resources from its member states, causing some systems and sectors to balk at the idea of surrendering more credits and crews to Coruscant.

The decision to weaken the centralized military in favor of local authorities had worked to the New Republic’s advantage in defeating the remnants of the Empire and establishing itself. But now, local control of military forces was becoming a source of concern for the Galactic Alliance. Systems and sectors were seeking more powerful defense forces, citing the familiar threats of pirates, incursions from the Unknown Regions, or conflicts with destabilized neighbors.

In 37 ABY the Galactic Alliance passed the Sector Defense Limits, putting ceilings on military forces and their capabilities in an echo of the Ruusan Reformations. But enforcing the limits was a challenge, and investigations and political pressure could only do so much to prevent determined sectors from arming themselves.

The chief antagonists as tensions mounted were the Galactic Alliance and Corellia, whose prickly independence had posed a challenge for Coruscant throughout galactic history. Corellia’s government delayed its military and economic contributions and consistently opposed greater control over systems and sectors. Worse, there was growing evidence that the Corellians were covertly building warships with fast-strike capabilities and long-range weapons. Corellians countered that the Sector Defense Limits prevented member states from adequately defending themselves in a dangerous age, noting that they had always willingly borne a heavy burden in galactic conflicts, and that their planet was being taken advantage of by worlds to which it had made reconstruction loans and with which it had struck favorable trade deals.

As the crisis intensified, other independent-minded worlds such as Commenor and Fondor backed the Corellians. And the Galactic Alliance received unsettling news that the Corellian government had managed to reactivate Centerpoint Station, the ancient Celestial artifact capable of destroying worlds. Soon everything from fleet movements to stock-market gyrations pointed to the same grim conclusion: The galaxy was once again on the brink of civil war.

Depending on whose interpretation you believe, the Second Galactic Civil War was fought because the Galactic Alliance Defense Force wanted to take control of all military assets in the galaxy, or because the Corellian government was trying to reactivate the Centerpoint superweapon.

The conflict began with an Alliance attempt to impose regime change on Corellia through force of arms, and ended as a civil war between factions of the Alliance itself, each backed by a section of the Imperial Navy and the Jedi Order. The original fight against Corellia and her Confederation allies had become a stalemate several months earlier.

Most histories of the conflict construct their narrative out of the fleet battles and planetary assaults of the naval war. The Galactic Alliance’s initial plan was based on the calculation that the Second Fleet would be able to maintain unopposed orbital supremacy above Corellia, but they were driven back from there to an ill-advised occupation of nearby Tralus, and then successfully expelled from there, too.

The Alliance still enjoyed massive superiority, and warships returned in greater numbers in an attempt to blockade Corellia into surrender; but as the Defense Force’s agenda of centralizing all military resources became clear, systems with important shipyards, munitions factories, and defense fleets formed a breakaway military coalition. Led by Bothawui and Commenor, this Confederation liberated Corellia, and waged war against the Alliance.

Months of desultory skirmishing followed, punctuated when both sides attempted to force a battle at Gilatter VIII, and each refused the other’s offer. The Alliance’s civilian government was ousted by a military coup, while the Confederation went on the offensive, thrusting into the Core until their fleets were stopped at Kuat and Balmorra.

At this point, the Jedi left the Alliance, followed by Kashyyyk and Hapes—though officially neutral, they were now effectively at war with extremist elements on both sides. A Corellian ambush wiped out the Alliance’s Second Fleet in deep space, prompting retaliatory assaults in which the Jedi destroyed the Centerpoint superweapon, but the Defense Force proved once again unable to sustain an occupation.

The finale began when the Imperial Remnant entered the war to support the Alliance’s occupation of Fondor, the Confederation’s largest shipyard. This attack ended with Defense Force elements shooting at each other, and the Alliance split into two factions, each claiming political legitimacy. The key clashes of this phase of the war were at Roche, where an unauthorized Imperial offensive precipitated several confused battles for control of the system, but the final clash took place at Shedu Maad, where a primarily Imperial fleet broke the line of a primarily Hapan one, then pulled back and offered a cease-fire.

Military strategists of later years found no satisfactory pattern in this sequence of clashes. As in the Yuuzhan Vong War, the repeated attempts to force a decisive naval battle were essays in futility, and even the greatest defeats did not make the losing side surrender.

Nor was there a real narrative in the clash among the various leaders who tried to impose direction on the war—Cha Niathal, Gilad Pellaeon, Thrackan Sal-Solo, Sadras Koyan, but above all Jacen Solo. All pursued the same barren search for a decisive fleet victory, underpinned by the same political ambitions, and as such failed to effectively take control of the conflict.

Solo has been particularly vilified. His fall to the dark side as Darth Caedus dominates most narratives of the Second Civil War, but his career as a leader was as predictable as everyone else’s. He had the same motives and pursued the same tactics. If he was wrong, so were they.

Perhaps the truth was seen best by Jacen Solo—but at a younger age, when he was a teenage Jedi grappling with the Yuuzhan Vong invasion: “The galaxy is broken, and this cease-fire will not heal it. There is a fracture between what our minds have been trained to understand, and what our souls truly know—that is the true meaning of the dark side, and we went to war because we did not want to admit that we had fallen.”

The Galactic Alliance Guard was created to combat security threats from “non-military groups opposed to the Alliance.” Intended to be a force of anti-terrorist commandos, under Colonel Jacen Solo their role was quickly widened to justify the mistreatment of minority species and the transfer of millions to concentration camps.

Colonel Solo quickly expanded the Guard’s remit further, to include police-state control of civilian systems, direct command of the military, and the usurpation of executive power from the Senate. By the end of the war, the Guard had replaced the state, and Colonel Solo was Emperor in all but name; but the upper command structure remained at infantry battle group level, leading to the collapse of effective government—every major decision had to be approved by the Commandant, and Colonel Solo was too busy to even glance at the files crossing his datapad.

The Guard’s standard mission profile was despicably crude. Drop ships off-loaded ground troops with a mix of riot and combat weaponry, with orders to pacify a target zone and then arrest and detain all survivors—a tactic used with little modification whether the people on the ground were enemy paramilitaries, peaceful protest marchers, unaligned civilians, or kidnappers and their hostages.

An equally serious flaw was the Guard’s reliance on droid technology. Droid brains were ideal for monitoring seditious chatter on the HoloNet, while combat drones were useful for suppressing primitive insurgents, but when faced with skilled military or criminal opponents, GAG quickly found their equipment rendered useless by ion weaponry and signal jammers. Confederation combat and sabotage tactics often turned the Alliance’s technological superiority into a fatal weakness.

These basic tactical and technological prejudices were inherited from the Defense Force, GA Intelligence, and Coruscant Security, who had spent three decades fighting tin-pot warlords and aliens who never developed anti-sensor weapons. The Guard simply diverted excessive funding and training to perpetuate the basic mistakes of the system it sought to replace.

The Yuuzhan Vong treated Hutt Space with particular brutality, ravaging its worlds and making them canvases for their alien biotechnology. The Hutts seemed finished as masters of the galactic underworld—but in the years after the Vong defeat, spacers brought strange tidings back from Hutt Space. On many Hutt worlds the organisms spawned by Vongforming were sickly or dead. As Galactic Alliance scientists negotiated for access to worlds displaying this resistance, the Hutt clans slowly but surely worked to regain their former influence.

But the Hutts had learned a terrible lesson, one that drove them to alter the fundamental tenets of their philosophy. To the astonishment of the galaxy, in the years after the Vong invasion armed starships of Hutt design began to reappear on the space lanes. Cantina talk had long told of strange, bulbous Hutt ships that plied routes among the central Hutt worlds, following an ancient network of jump beacons. But most had dismissed such reports as legends. Sightings of them indicated that something had profoundly changed within Hutt Space.

Ever since the ancient civil war known as the Hutt Cataclysms, the Hutts had rejected war and territorial expansion in favor of economic dominance—a philosophy known as kajidic. That philosophy had made the Hutts immensely rich, and let them endure the tides of war that swept over the galaxy through the millennia. But it hadn’t saved them from the Vong, and it might not save them from the next adversary, either.

In the Second Galactic Civil War, Hutt batils and tarradas—the equivalent of gunships and frigates—supported Confederation actions at Balmorra and Kuat, joined by gleaming, chrome-clad eight-hundred-meter warships the Hutt servants called chelandions. The Hutt warships proved capable in battle, with powerful turbolasers and braces of missiles. Galactic Alliance analyses indicated that the chelandions’ shielding was weaker than expected for a cruiser analogue, but their armor was surprisingly strong. Efforts to analyze wreckage of Hutt warships largely failed; the ships appeared to have built-in self-destruct sequences.

After the Second Galactic Civil War ended, Commenori and Corellian naval officers could offer little insight into their former allies’ technology or military hierarchy: They had dealt exclusively with intermediaries from the Hutts’ many slave species. For the galaxy, the possibility of renewed Hutt militarism was a disquieting prospect.

Transcript of TriNebulon News feature “Wookiee World Horror Witness!” released to HoloNet channels, 41 ABY:

My name is Lieutenant Tirs Maladane. I was a gunner on the Anakin Solo, Jacen Solo’s Impstar Deuce. We called her the Black Annie. I fought at Hapes, and Kuat, and then Kashyyyk. Yeah, Kashyyyk. I was a turbolaser gunner—not the long-range guns, but the starboard lateral quad. And I was never GAG. To tell the truth, those guys scared me.

I knew Kashyyyk was going to be bad the second we decanted. It wasn’t the opposition—the Wooks didn’t have much arrayed against us. It was that the Fifth Fleet was behind us, stacked up halfway to Zeltros. Solo meant business, and when he did, things got hot fast.

But I never expected the order I got. Fire into the forests? I had to ask my CO to repeat that. But that’s what Solo wanted. And so every battery on the Black Annie that had a firing arc opened up. Through my long-range scope I could see the smoke rising. And then the flames.

I’m from Tatooine—Little Mochot. When I was fifteen my aunt sent me offworld during high summer to earn some credits logging greel wood on Pii III. I’d never seen anything like it. First day, it rained hard and I stood out in it laughing and cheering. The other timber rats thought I was crazy. When I got back to Little Mochot I used to dream of rain every night. And I’d read about trees.

So I’d heard about the Wookiee trees. I’d seen them on holos. How scientists thought they might be one big collective organism, the Wookiee planet’s brain and heart and lungs and everything else. I thought that was pretty amazing.

I fired my turbos. I had to. Operations would have seen if I hadn’t, and I’d have been in a brig with someone else in the hot seat. And firing at the surface, it wasn’t like I could aim high to miss the shot. I couldn’t do anything else, so I did what they told me to do and fired my turbos. If I could have done something else, I would have.

Some of those Wookiee trees were fifty thousand years old—they were a kilometer high before the Republic existed. You shouldn’t be able to kill something that’s fifty thousand years old by just squeezing a trigger. But that’s what I was doing. The whole time, the tears were running down my face. And when bogeys started coming in, I was relieved. It’s crazy to be glad you’re under fire, but I was. At least now I was shooting at something that could shoot back.

The Millennium Falcon flies amid the trees of a ravaged Kashyyyk (Dave Seeley)

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WAR PORTRAIT: NATASI DAALA

Natasi Daala was born on Irmenu and raised in a COMPNOR orphanage run by Renatasian nuns on Botajef. She was drafted into the Academy of Carida in 3 BBY, based on her aptitude for competitive sports and unarmed combat.

Daala’s training at the Academy was the formative period of her life, forging her strengths and crystallizing her vulnerabilities. She was initially selected for the stormtrooper program—her violent will to win on the shock-ball pitch, which often left her opponents in bacta, was seen as a trait that could be channeled into close combat training. Instructor Visk believed that if he could break her will with Imperial discipline, she would be an ideal clone template.

But simulator tests during basic training revealed that her ruthless approach to contact sports also translated well to capital ship combat sims. Chief Instructor Massimo Tagge followed up the anomaly, and was surprised to find that the unexpectedly gifted stormtrooper was a tall, attractive redhead. He promptly transferred her from Visk to his own navy officer-cadet course.

Daala thrived under Tagge’s guidance, heading the fleet sim rankings for her year and producing a number of admired tactical analysis papers on the Tarkin Doctrine. Nonetheless, other instructors raised complaints—not all of them friends of the thwarted Visk. They warned that her simulator victories were always achieved with brute force and heavy losses, and that they depended too heavily on logistical superiority. In her final semester, Tagge’s attempt to place her in the command class was overruled.

Instead of commanding a picket ship in the Academy flotilla, Daala was reassigned as a datapad assistant and then as a galley yeoman. She became convinced that she would be denied an officer’s commission, held permanently as a junior NCO in a dirtside assignment. Bitterness about the faculty, and about the aristocratic cadets who had usurped her place in the command class, would haunt her for decades.

Chief of State Daala and Grandmaster Skywalker (Drew Baker)

But Tagge had forwarded her analysis of the Tarkin Doctrine to his cousin Cassio, who passed it to the Grand Moff himself. Tarkin came to Carida unannounced to find his brilliant disciple … and found her washing topatoes.

Before they left Carida, Instructor Visk had been reassigned to Sirpar, and Tarkin and Daala had become lovers. The initiative is normally attributed to Tarkin, but his own fragmentary memoirs suggest the teenage cadet took the lead.

Daala progressed rapidly from aide to adjutant, and from adjutant to admiral. When Tarkin departed with the Death Star to destroy Alderaan, she was assigned to guard the battle station’s home base, the Maw Installation, and to await new orders.

She waited for more than a decade.

Daala suppressed whatever she felt, and continued to obey her orders until 11 ABY, when she emerged to find Tarkin long dead, the Empire almost destroyed, and the Rebellion in control of the galaxy.

In response, she embarked on the first in a long series of campaigns, all of which followed the same pattern—a series of brutal frontal attacks that destabilized her enemy but also devastated her own troops and ships, followed by a retreat into hiding to rebuild her forces, recruiting and rearming for her next attempt.

In short, she was replaying Academy simulator tactics, but the Empire no longer had the unlimited resources to make them work.

In the New Republic, her repeated attacks and defeats provoked fear and then mockery, but in the remnants of the Empire she became a hero. In a period of defeat and retreat, when Moffs and warlords who claimed to lead the Empire cowered behind their fortress-world defenses, Admiral Daala continued to strike back.

This lower-deck popularity accounts for the repeated willingness of Imperial factions to accept her leadership—the United Warlord Fleets, the Independent Company of Settlers, the Imperial Core, the Second Imperium, and the Maw Command.

“Daala has two types of troops,” Admiral Ackbar once remarked. “The ones she’s training now, and the ones she’s killed already.” However, while her major clashes with the New Republic all ended in defeat, Daala won victories against Imperial rivals and the Yuuzhan Vong. In 41 ABY Grand Admiral Gilad Pellaeon recalled her to his side, and after his death, she emerged as the new leader of the Galactic Alliance—the only candidate acceptable to the Empire, Alliance, and Confederation.

Daala quickly moved to consolidate her power, installing ex-Imperial allies in several key commands. She soon led the most powerful military and economic power in the galaxy—as a military dictator in all but name, controlling a state with all the resources she needed to make her tactics work.

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WAR PORTRAIT: GILAD PELLAEON

Prepared remarks by Chief of State Natasi Daala, on the dedication of the Pellaeon Gardens, Bastion, 42 ABY:

Today is Gilad Pellaeon’s ninety-third birthday. If he were still here with us he would probably ask for all of us to stop talking about him, so he could tend his garden in peace and quiet. One reason Gilad loved gardens was because they were a place where he could get away from politicians and generals and admirals and aides and journalists. So Gilad, on behalf of myself and all the politicians and generals and admirals and aides and journalists, I’m sorry. We’ll say our few words and leave this beautiful spot in peace.

Peace. That was something Gilad often sought, but that never seemed to find him. Most of his life was spent at war. He applied to Raithal Academy when he was fifteen—too young to enter—and they never discovered he’d convinced a slicer to alter his records. (By the way, Gilad, Commandant Richeu assured me he won’t place a posthumous demerit in your file. Just in case, I’ll be watching him.) He served in the Judicial Forces, then the Republic Navy, fighting bravely against the Separatists and their mechanized warships. When the Republic became the Empire he served it, too. His first command was the Chimaera, and for years she was his garden. I once asked him if it bothered him that a Star Destroyer was the closest thing he’d had to a home, and he just smiled. “Natasi,” he said, “if your heart feels at home, it doesn’t matter what your eyes see.”

Gilad Pellaeon (Chris Scalf)

Gilad served Grand Admiral Thrawn, and the Ruling Council, and for a brief time he served me. He always did so with merit and with honor. He gave his superiors neither flattery nor scorn, but information and support—and counsel, if they were wise enough to ask for it. He demanded much of his subordinates, above all else that they served the Empire with the same professionalism and pride he brought to everything he did. And by doing so, he gave much to them, too. Many of them became honorable men and women because of his teachings.

And of course for many years he served these proud sectors and these bright stars. Gilad Pellaeon preserved the Empire. More than that, he saved it. He saved it from the territorial lusts of the New Republic and the murderous nihilism of the Yuuzhan Vong, leading from the bridge of Star Destroyers and once from inside a bacta tank. He saved the Empire from the abuses and prejudice with which an unprincipled few had blackened its name. And he restored the honor and order too many had forgotten the Empire once stood for. Right here, in these gardens, he nurtured what was good and weeded out what was not, until the ideals of the Empire flourished once again.

I said he once served me, and that was a great honor. But I am more honored to say that I once served him. The legends of my homeworld of Irmenu speak of the great mariner Darakaer, who sleeps until the faithful summon him by drumming out their call for help. When Gilad and I parted long ago, we reminded each other of that story, and we pledged that each of us would answer Darakaer’s rhythm if the other should be in need.

As you know, Gilad served the Galactic Alliance as faithfully as he had served every other government—until he could no longer countenance the actions taken by Jacen Solo, lost in the madness to which Jedi seem so susceptible. He retired here for a brief time—but as always, war found him again. He agreed to assist the Galactic Alliance in the hope that it would end a terrible war more quickly and restore peace to the galaxy. But he had terrible doubts, doubts he shared with me. For he had drummed out the Darakaer, and I had answered.

The next time I heard those rhythms, he was dying—mortally wounded by a Jedi assassin. His final act was a signal to me that he and the ideals of the Empire had been betrayed. And so I answered. As Gilad would have done, had our situations been reversed.

But let us not dwell on that terrible day. For with patience and care and constant effort we are healing this galaxy. It is the task before me every day, and when I falter, I think of Gilad. I ask myself what he would have done, and hope that some of his wisdom may be granted to me. I know leaders who arise after I am gone will do the same. They will not have been lucky enough to know Gilad, as I was, but in this quiet place they will know of him, and find inspiration in his example. Here, amid the beauty of the Pellaeon Gardens, let them nurture, and let them weed. And if they hold true to Gilad Pellaeon’s example, they, too, will hear the Darakaer, and know what honor asks of them.

After the war between the Galactic Alliance and the Confederation, the Alliance began to buy more warships for its centralized military, reducing its reliance on member worlds’ military units for defense. This centralized military was built up through increased taxation and contributions from member worlds; in return, restrictions on those member worlds’ own military forces were loosened.

This new bargain, made in an effort to ease the tensions that had led to the Second Galactic Civil War, largely kept the peace. The numbered fleets, comprising warships supplied by member worlds and allied autonomous states, gave way to named fleets assigned to regions of the galaxy. But military philosophy would continue to evolve; in the years leading up to the Sith–Imperial War, the Alliance worked to reestablish sector fleets, keeping member worlds’ warships close to their homeworlds.

There are some wars that only the Jedi can fight. After Darth Caedus’s defeat, we mediated the appointment of Natasi Daala as Chief of State of the Galactic Alliance, and Jagged Fel as regent of the Imperial Remnant. Whatever their flaws—and Daala had many—they were the right leaders to oversee the long process of reuniting the galaxy.

Two years later, I chose to respect Daala’s commitment to peace and justice, and exile myself. I thought the Force wanted me to discover Jacen Solo’s fate and to show the Jedi they could act without my leadership. Instead, I discovered threats that only the Jedi could oppose.

The first threat was a lost tribe of Sith from the forgotten world of Kesh. They were building a powerful war fleet, one made more powerful by the dark strength of every warrior serving their armada. Yet there was an even greater opponent—the mysterious entity known as Abeloth.

Such enemies are the Jedi’s business. I have seen what happens when beings attempt to fight them without the Force as their ally. Only the Jedi, answering as always to the will of the Force, were able to pierce the shroud of Abeloth’s will and push back that darkness.

Wynn Dorvan, the new Chief of State, has much to contend with. But for me, the lessons of the struggles on Coruscant and in the Maw are clear. The challenges we face and the mysteries we must explore are bound up with the Force, not Mandalorians or Moffs.

Abeloth is an entity from a much older order than the Sith. We must understand her origins and the nature of the Ones my father encountered years ago. By doing so perhaps we will find a way to destroy her. Or perhaps we will learn that the will of the Force calls for us to keep her at bay, or to acknowledge her role in the galaxy and forge a new order.

And we must learn the truth about this latest incarnation of the Sith. Who is the Dark Man who came to my aid against Abeloth? What has become of Vestara Khai and Ship? And what is the meaning of Jacen’s vision?

The answers will not to be found on Coruscant, or emerge from service to the Galactic Alliance. To find them, we must withdraw from Coruscant and distance ourselves from the tumult of the galaxy. I said at the beginning of this entry that there are some wars only the Jedi can fight, and that is true. But it’s also true that only the Jedi can restore Balance to the Force. And to do so, we must dedicate ourselves completely to the Light.