Fireside this week! Next week, with luck, I'll have my 'On the Reign of Alexander III of Macedon' up as an addendum to our discussion of Hellenistic armies. But in the meantime, it is a fireside, and I thought, since it was just recently May the Fourth, we might talk some Star Wars (and history). So this is going to be a bit silly this week.
The completed Lego Star Destroyer.
For this week's musing, over the last week, as part of my May the Fourth celebration (and some enforced post-semester relaxation), I went and built the Lego Star Destroyer my better half bought for me (about a year ago - the space for building it got consumed by other things in the intervening time). This is not the very old (2002) Star Destroyer kit, nor the very newest (2024) kit, but the finely aged (2019) 'Ultimate Collector' set, coming in at a massive 4,700 pieces. It was fun to build and there's actually a lot of kind of neat engineering and design that clearly went in to making it work. With so many pieces, the set is so heavy that it needs a whole reinforcing frame (also made of legos) to hold it together internally.
But that got me thinking about Star Destroyers (not the first time) and Star Wars, so I figured I'd muse a bit at you both about the odd place of Star Destroyers in imperial military doctrine and also the nature of the Old Republic and the Empire as polities.
So let's star with the obvious about the design of the Imperial Star Destroyer (ISD), which is that it was designed (for the screen) to look a certain way, rather than as a function fighting machine. And as that sort of design, the ISD is brilliant. The lower hull seems to have been planned out for that massive opening shot: the long, flat sections make it feel like the ship goes on forever, while the three breaks in the shape (the two docking hangers and the bulge over the reactor) break up the monotony. The two docking bays, a smaller one first and then a much larger one, also stress the ship's gargantuan size: the viewer see's what they think is the primary hanger, and then, wait, no, there's another, much bigger one and then the ship doesn't end. The rear of the ship, with its massive brace of engines, also manages to communicate that this behemoth might also be fast as well as large. And then when we see the thing from the front, the presence of its raised superstructure immediately communicates its primary role as a battleship, because it has a similar sort of superstructure to WWII-era battleships, with that raised command tower looming over a superstructure above the main structure. It is simultaneously different enough from any real vehicle to be immediately memorable - not merely a battleship stuck in space - but at the same time, shares enough design language for the audience to intuit its role immediately.
As an aside, I think this is something the ISD design does a lot better than many more recent similar efforts. Both new Star Wars (particularly the sequel films) and new Star Trek (particularly Discovery and Picard) have a problem with villain ships which are wildly out of scale with the existing designs in the setting, but which are essentially just blown-up versions of existing visual language (Discovery's Dreadnought and The Rise of Skywalker's Xyston-class both come to mind). Even the First Order Star Destroyers often felt like they had to be massively bigger than the ISD because they otherwise lacked new ideas. But the ISD itself was pretty fresh as a concept and delivers on it extremely well (and the SSD is a better, "that, but bigger, scarier and in Vadar's theme colors" variant than anything in the sequel trilogy).
Of course, the ISD initially existed without any context - it is the second thing we see on screen after the crawl (not counting planets) - but it eventually got one, a design lineage from the Republic-era Venator. 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, while it is the Rebellion that eventually adopts a fast-carrier kind of doctrine.
Now, the out-of-universe reason for this is that George Lucas thinks it is cool to have the protagonists flying fighters against big enemy battleships and so that is the doctrine he gives to the 'good guys' in each films. I wonder if that is itself an influence from the Second World War (and the war films Lucas studied to block out his space battle sequences), where the early phases (particularly 1942) in the Pacific were the plucky efforts of a few American fast carriers and cruisers against fleets loaded with imposing-looking battleships. It also, of course, makes storytelling sense: the characters we care about can be in the fighters, while the bad guys in their big Death Stars and Star Destroyers are distant, powerful and imposing.
But it creates a lore problem, which is, 'why did the Galactic Empire entirely change its doctrine after winning the Clone Wars?' 'Legends' canon - that is, the pre-Disney canon - had its answer, which is that 'it didn't.' Instead, there was a longer progression of ship designs late in the Clone Wars, from the carrier-oriented Venator and Accalamator to the up-gunned version, the Victory-class Star Destroyer (VSD), which was supposed to be a late-Clone Wars design which serves as the bridge from to the ISD. With the VSD in the design lineage, the ISD makes sense: the Empire deployed, late in the war, a more gun-based platform, then won the war and continued development along that 'successful' design lineage, producing an extreme version of the VSD in the ISD.
The Canon ('Disney-Canon') technically has the same narrative (the VSD is technically still canon, according to Wookiepedia), but has never put the VSD on screen. In the scenes where we ought to see a transitional VSD, we instead see an ISD, and the new canon has also removed one of the main 'Legends' advantages the VSD had: in legends, the VSD was capable of atmospheric flight, but the ISD was not, but in canon, the ISD now can do that. The reason here, I have to assume is that brand new models are expensive and Disney would rather keep reusing and modifying Rogue One's very high-quality ISD-I model forever if necessary, even in places where it makes no sense, like for the Xyston-class or in games set after the Battle of Endor. If Disney can't be bothered to make a high-detail ISD-II model, they surely can't be bothered to work up a new VSD model.
Front view of the set, where you can see that it comes with a Tantive IV CR90 Corvette to scale (it fits neatly into the docking bay).
But I think I can actually puzzle out a 'history of the Galactic Empire' which makes a bit of sense and into which the ISD has an understandable - if not sound - doctrinal place. First, we need to understand what kind of polity the Old Republic - and thus the Empire - is. And here, the phrasing I go to (somewhat imprecise) is that the Republic was a 'Republic of Princes' in the same sense that the Holy Roman Empire was an empire of 'princes' or more technically 'imperial states.' I promise we will get back to Star Destroyers here eventually.
In short, the Republic was not a democracy of people but a republic of states, the 'princes' which in turn governed their own territory internally. These 'princes' could be any form of government. And indeed, the imperial states of the Holy Roman Empire could be noble rulers, but also bishops ruling cities (the 'prince-archbishops'), monks running abbeys (Imperial prelates), grandmasters running holy orders, and even cities governing themselves (free and imperial cities). So too with the Republic, which is why the Trade Federation can sit on the Senate alongside democratic Naboo and monarchic Alderaan.
Crucially, each of these 'princes' is internally self-governing, but also has its own military, some large and some small, and its own resource base with which to develop such a military.
Given that, what I think a historian of this period, looking back would conclude about the Star Wars story would be this: the Clone Wars were essentially a civil war between the princes of the Rim territories against the princes of the core regions (as the later effectively ruled the senate). That civil war produced political momentum among some of the core princes towards centralization, which fuels the career of Palpatine. Palpatine's reign and the Empire in general is thus understood as a reaction to the Clone Wars primarily aimed at centralizing power at the expense of the princes.
That in turn produced two related reactions. On the one hand, it produces obvious discontent among the 'princes' themselves - the ruling classes of these planets. The Bail Organas and Mon Mothmas. But the centralization also begins to disintermediate the princely governments themselves, suddenly exposing their citizens to direct rule by the empire (we see this quite clearly in Andor) and it turns out, they don't like it. After all, you have to imagine generations of local government means all of these planets have different assumptions about their rights and customs, and now here comes the Stormtroopers attempting to institute one law and one custom. That creates a separate but symbiotic popular movement against the empire, which the princes are able to co-opt into their rebel alliance, promising that a return to princely government will mean a return to the traditional liberties and customs.
As this is happening, the Imperial Navy is in a state of change. During the Clone Wars, it was fighting a peer adversary using a fast-carrier doctrine aiming to win a war that was already raging. But now there are simmering tensions which the Imperial Navy is supposed to tamp down. As a result, imperial designers reach for escalation dominance in their designs, aiming to build ships which can, on their own, intimidate the militaries of the princes - because remember, the 'princes' (planetary governments of whatever form) all have their own small navies - in order to avoid a conflict. The ISD is the end result of that design philosophy: a gun-platform powerful enough to be effectively beyond the ability of any planetary princely navy to fight effectively.
Those same designers are also, of course, dealing with a bubbling hit-and-run insurgency, which manifests as popular insurgents whose weapons and resources clearly suggest they are being funded and supplied, in secret, by some of the princes. Those same imperial designers respond by emphasizing force protection, to try to keep the key imperial assets well-enough armored and defended so as to limit the damage of ambush and hit-and-run. In this sense, an ISD is a gigantic MRAP (Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicle; a kind of vehicle designed for the Global War on Terror). Sure, it's less practical than the more Humvee-like Venators, but its size and firepower places it beyond the capability of rebel hit-and-run attacks, allowing it to deliver its troops and firepower in safety.
Of course, it risks exactly the same problem that MRAPs do: troops buttoned up on their force-protection-oriented vehicles may be safe (though they may not be), but they're not accomplishing the mission. But what the ISD avoids is getting weekly reports about losing a few ships here and there as these irritatingly well-funded rebels pick off this or that small force. Instead, imperial force is concentrated in a handful of mega-platforms that are effectively beyond attack.
The immediate problem, though, is that building a huge navy of brand new massive Space-MRAP-Battleships is probably really expensive, with the massive cost increasing dissatisfaction among the princes and the people, fueling the discontent already simmering in frustrations about this centralizing government. Finally in 0BBY, the Empire makes its disastrous move: deciding that the best course of action would be to intimidate the princes by beheading one of them (Alderaan) as an example to the others, while disbanding the senate and essentially abolishing princely rule. But like Ferdinand II marching into Bohemia and the Palatinate in 1618-9, this assertion of direct imperial power ends up triggering a more general revolt of the princes (intensified, of course, by the fact that the Empire loses the Death Star almost immediately, meaning the threat meant to keep the princes in line while their administrations were dismantled had vanished).
From that point, the Empire actually unravels quite quickly: slow, grinding centralization had taken two decades from the end of the Clone Wars to the Battle of Yavin, but from the Battle of Yavin to Endor is just five years. The problem is a classic feature of military-tributary empires: an army can intimidate many enemies, but it can only fight one, so once the state has to turn potential force into deployed violence, the intimidation value of those armies collapses in the absence of bedrock legitimacy to keep people in line without force, as every actor in the systems' interests suddenly recalculate against hegemony and towards balancing.
The Rebel Alliance, constructing a navy from scratch, builds one to the doctrine of the last peer-conflict, the Clone Wars, thus a fast-carrier oriented force, while the Empire, saddled with high costs is stuck with the ships it has: giant Space-MRAPs designed to intimidation and counter-insurgency. But with the princes broadly in revolt, what the Empire increasingly has on its hands is actually a peer, conventional conflict. The issue comes to a head at Endor, where the Emperor tries a Dien Bien Phu-gambit with the same historical results: thinking he can lure the rebels into a conventional battle and win, he does so but finds to his dismay that the balance of conventional forces is not so lopsided as he hoped.
Naturally a later historian is going to be unaware of the personal elements of the story, but "the emperor, having clearly bungled the strategy and unwilling to change course - I mean, he built a second Death Star - is assassinated by his close associates (Darth Vader) who remain loyal to the empire, just not the emperor and hope to change strategy" is a pretty standard way for dynasties to end. And what we get after Endor is a pretty standard way that gambit often plays out, with imperial forces fragmenting instead of congealing around a new strategy. Unable to coalesce around a new strategy or a new leader, the remains of the emperor's half-built centralized government are dismantled by the princes who then reestablish the old Republic of Princes, albeit with some more centralized components (a central military, for instance) kept. Restoring the intermediate layer between the Galactic government and the regular people perhaps does calm popular anger as well, as local rulers are better able to handle local issues (in a cuius regio, eius religio sort of way).
As a coda, one of the things I liked in the old Legends canon that we haven't seen on-screen, at least, in the new Disney-canon was that the New Republic's centralized military - something they keep from the Clone Wars experience, evidently - ended up having lots of imperial ships, including ISDs and even SSDs. Which makes a lot of sense: having reasserted control, one of the things the princes want both for themselves and to deliver to their newly-quite-well-armed populations is lower taxes and thus less naval spending. But less naval spending doesn't mean that you build smaller, cheaper ships: it means you keep the old ships. So the New Republic isn't going to build a new, cheaper navy, but look for ways to repurpose this pile of giant Space-MRAPs they've inherited from the defunct empire, alongside their Ferix-Junkyard collection of ships from the war. I'd absolutely expect, then, to see some newly blue-trimmed Star Destroyers, employed as the flagships for Republic Navy task forces, even as New Republic officers complain about how poorly suited they are for the role and New Republic designers draw up endless new plans for high-tech, highly capable fast-carrier designs that they can never get funding to build at scale.
And then, of course, fortunately, the story just sort of trails off, because the notion that some insurgent power in the outer rim would conjure into existence not one but two fleets of Star Destroyers out of nothing with no one noticing and casually overthrow this entire system off-screen between movies is the daft sort of thing which would only have been excusable if paired with really good character work, if anyone had bothered to do any.
Of course I can't leave you without a cat picture, so here is Ollie helping me manage my research filing system, also known as "a giant mess in at least four languages."
On to recommendations!
Excavations in Pompeii turned up some remarkable new frescoes of mythological scenes earlier this month, which you can see in this BBC report. I am always struck by the focus in domestic Greek and Roman artwork on mythological scenes which are often, at least to my mind, deeply fraught; Apollo and Cassandra (where the former is about the curse the latter for her chastity) is hardly what I would want in my dining room, but the ancients seem to have preferred scenes of high emotional and moral tension, even if it was unpleasant tension. CUNY Professor in Classics and History Liv Yarrow offers some additional thoughts on the frescoes on her blog, which I'll also recommend generally for her musings about ancient material culture objects, their mysteries and what we can understand from them.
Meanwhile, Cardiff University's Flint Dibble wrote in The Guardian about his experiences as an actual archaeology taking on pseudo-archaeological nonsense. I agree with Dibble that the actual past that archaeology reveals to us is more interesting and wondrous than the wild fantasies that pseudo-archaeologists project on it, in no small part because the real past can surprise and challenge us in a way that psuedo-archaeology cannot, as it is always just a distorted mirror of our own biases and assumptions. It is, however, profoundly frustrating how major outlets, like Netflix, continue to present nonsense peddlers as if they are asking unanswered questions, rather than asking extensively answered questions, the answers of which they steadfastly refuse to read.
Over at the Partial Historians, I want to pick out a really neat special guest episode from about a month ago on the Mausoleum of Augustus, with Dr. Victoria Austen. The mausoleum is one of those monuments in Rome that gets a bit less attention from tourists, and has been undergoing preservation work (and thus not open to the public) for quite a while now. But the conversation between Drs. Radform, Greenfield and Austen, I think, is a really useful way to think about how the mausoleum fits in with Augustus' building program, but also his use of space generally on the Campus Martius (the area of Rome it was in), as well as discussing the way that monuments like that get reused, repurposed and re-imagined by subsequent generations.
Finally, on a gaming note, I just wanted to point out game-analysis YouTuber Rosencreutz has a long video-essay putting the cult-classic Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines in the context of the broader genre of 'vampire games' that I found quite interesting. Rosencreutz videos are an interesting sort because they tend to be ruminations on a theme rather than focused deep-dives of a single game (the more common format), but they are often insightful. I'll also shout out his take a few months ago on "Valkyria Chronicles, Persecution, and Atrocity" for making an argument I've thought for some time: that it is strange and also quite interesting that one of the more serious takes on the holocaust in gaming is to be found in an alternate-universe anime-WWII tactics game. His channel is well worth if you are interested in thoughtful analysis of the themes and ideas in video games.
For this week's book recommendation, I want to recommend J. Lyall, Divided Armies: Inequality & Battlefield Performance in Modern War (2020), a book I am legitimately surprised I have not already recommended and which is well on its way to becoming one of those modern classics of military history scholarship. The central argument of the book is actually quite easy to state and fairly intuitive: armies with a high degree of inequality - specifically inequality of membership in the political community - suffer recognizable pathologies that cause them to perform more poorly than they might otherwise have done on the battlefield. Alert readers will pick up from our series on Hellenistic and Roman armies that I have been noodling around my own version of this argument for those ancient armies (indeed, since before this book was published; you can see the foundations of my ideas on this back in my 2018 dissertation), so Lyall's book came like a bolt of deliverance: here was a sustained, focused study of the modern instantiation of a phenomenon I thought I could detect in ancient armies.
Of course it is easy to make the observation that it seems like high levels of inequality negatively impact combat performance, but it is another thing to prove it. Lyall comes at this problem with a political science methodology, which is to say that the foundation of the book is a quantitative approach which seeks to measure - in numbers - inequality (a 'military inequality coefficient') and battlefield performance (a 'battlefield performance index') and then compare the two. These sorts of quantitative approaches almost invariably lead historians to cry foul and I will admit I have some concerns about the quite subjective foundations of these apparently objective, quantitative coefficients and indexes. If that was all there was, I'd be concerned. But that isn't all there is. Indeed, Lyall spends relatively few of his pages on the quantitative aspects of the study and instead buttresses the validity of his figures with a series of detailed, well-developed case studies running from 1800 to 1942. That said, I also think Lyall's definition of inequality is actually a really good one, focusing in not on economic inequality or even political representation but on inequality of membership in a political community: who is considered a full member of the polity, who belongs even in polities where belonging doesn't bring a certain economic standard of living or set of political rights. As Lyall, I think, demonstrates well, when it comes to military effectiveness, this is the question that matters.
Lyall makes a strong effort (noted in a forward) to try to make the book approachable and consequently confined much of the technical matter to appendices available online. But I think for the reader looking for the general insight of the negative impact of inequality within armies (rather than the particular, quantitative relationship), the case studies carry the necessary weight. These are delivered in plain language and with enough context for the reader to follow, and with a historian's granularity in following the course of specific key moments. The result is a book that, as long as one kind of skims the quantitative sections (or, as one of my mentors once quipped, of a different political science work's quantitative chapter, "don't read it, but don't skip it"), is very readable and even quite engaging. More to the point, its a very valuable working, taking something I think many of us kind of knew in a general sense ('inequality damages army performance') and providing a focused, in-depth study of the phenomenon in both particular cases and in general that puts substance behind that general sense.
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