Grand Blog Tarkin

Ed: This piece comes to us from repeat Blog Tarkin contributor Don Gomez, whose writings can be found at Carrying the Gun

A skyscraper-sized Reaper descends to dominate a planet.

This event, entirely fictional, is inspired by chapter 33 of T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In it, Lawrence lays out his vision for how the Arab Revolt  might defeat the Turks in Arabia. In this, I lay out the counter-insurgent’s dream, a fantastical imagination of the introduction of the Reaper, a la Mass Effect fame, as the ultimate weapon in counter insurgency.

This guest essay by notorious airpower theorist and New York Times columnist Guilo Douhet. In his words: 

This is a response to the April 1, 2013 post at “Danger Room” by one Andrew Exum, a thinker of moderate intellect and exceedingly conventional vision. The issue in question regarded a series of scenarios describing possible wars between “Tennessee” and “Georgia,” apparently  pair of your American states. After exhaustively researching the histories and capabilities of these two nations, I have set forth a series of events far more likely to take place, and considerably more interesting to the strategic theorist.

A Tennessee Air National Guard C-5A Galaxy

The causes of the war of August 2014 are not interesting or relevant, apparently involving some sort of trivial dispute over water. The logic of modern warfare applies independent of the political exigencies of any particular conflict.   Regarding the order of battle of the two antagonists, the only weapons relevant to our analysis air the air fleets that each could access. Fortunately, the government of Tennessee had the foresight to initiate a set of agreements with Federal Express that allowed the conscription of FedEx planes and pilots in case of invasion from Georgia or Kentucky. These agreements would prove critical in the end stages of the conflict. Altogether, Tennessee would eventually call on the following fleet of aircraft:

• Airlift Squadron: 5 C-5 Galaxy
• Airlift Wing: 6 C-130 , 12 MQ-9 Reaper
• Air Refueling Squadron: KC-135R
• Fed Ex Express:
• 35 A300
• 18 A310
• 28 757
• 8 777
• 3 MD-10
• 21 MD-11

Georgia pursued a different path, eschewing the difficult work of developing relationships with the many airlines operating out of Atlanta International Airport.  Instead, Georgia concentrated its efforts on small aircraft and helicopters, the better to support the advance of its ground forces into Tennessee. In addition to a plethora of such small craft, Georgia was able to draw on some large aircraft from the Georgia Air National Guard.

• Air Control Wing: 6 E-8C Joint Stars
• Air Lift Wing: 6 C-130H
• 250+ helicopters and small aircraft

Fundamentally, this war represented the cleanest collision of the air-minded and the ground-minded.  Consequently, it also represented the clearest vindication of the principles that I had set forth in my volume Command of the Air.

Georgia’s land offensive made initial progress, but bogged down as bands of primitive East Tennessee hill people ambushed and harried Georgian columns and logistical trains. Tennessee had wisely invested in only minimal land forces, relying on the inherent savagery and fighting prowess of the Appalachian tribesmen to sufficiently slow the Georgian advance until airpower could prove decisive.  Regular Tennessee National Guard forces prepared a defense-in-depth in the outskirts of Chattanooga, allowing the Georgians their initial prize while working with the tribesmen to make them pay for it. However, this defense would not have held for long in the face of a renewed Georgian offensive if airpower had not won the day.

Georgia foolishly squandered the airpower available to it in by dissipating its aircraft and pilots across a variety of secondary missions.  Georgian C-130s supplied operational air mobility and some close air support, but could not sufficiently break open Tennessee’s defenses to allow penetration into vital areas. The fault lay not with the airmen (who were surely brave and skilled) but rather in their employment in service of a land offensive that could not possibly produce decisive results in the brief period before Georgia’s cities began to burn.

The aircraft appropriated by the government of Tennessee were not designed as bombers, which reduced their effectiveness.  In the future, state governments should take care to arm their Air National Guards with dedicated bomber wings.  Nevertheless, the courage, tenacity, and technical know-how of Tennessee’s air guardsmen allowed the conversion of these cargo craft into strategic bombers, albeit often in awkward, dangerous fashion. Given the ad hoc nature of the Tennessee Air National Guard offensive, a robust air defense system, supported by pursuit aircraft, might have prevented or at least substantially delayed the decisive blows of the war.  Unfortunately, Georgia devoted so little attention to air-centric matters that it failed even to mount the most tepid air defense.

The first fire-raid came on August 20, as over 40 Tennessean bombers appeared over the city of Athens.  Renowned for its cultural significance, Athens proved little match for the 2000 tons of incendiaries dropped by the “Volunteers.” Additional raids devastated Roswell and Macon, with a follow up raid against Athens throwing the region into chaos on August 30.

On September 1, 2014 the decisive moment came in a pre-dawn raid against the Georgian capitol of Atlanta.  4 C-5, 4 C-130s, 25 A300s, 13 A310s, 20 757s, 6 777s, 1 MD-10, and 18 MD-11 delivered nearly 5500 tons of ordnance onto the city and surrounding suburbs.  Tennessee’s attacks concentrated on the downtown financial districts as well as on wealthy outlying areas. The municipal capacity of Atlanta was overwhelmed, with fires continuing to burn for days.

The timing of the strike was no accident. Coming 150 years to the day after the burning of the city of Atlanta by a band of Northmen, this raid proved a political masterstroke, shattering the will of Georgia’s political class to continue the conflict. Georgia responded with a desultory attempt to bomb Knoxville, but apart from gutting a few square blocks of the University of Tennessee, the attack had no serious strategic impact. Their homes in ruins, soldiers in Georgia’s advanced ground elements began to desert and mutiny against their officers.

At this point the details of the conflict become uninteresting to the historian, allowing us to shift to strategic lessons learned.  Tennessee won this war because of a culture of airmindedness.  It had prepared (through laying the groundwork of a relationship with Federal Express) to acquire an air force capable of strategic action. Tennessee then used this air force to strategic effect, rather than dissipating it for ephemeral battlefield advantage.  The smoking ruins of urban Georgia attest to the folly of yoking airpower to conventional ground thinking.

Ruins of Atlanta deopt after burning by Gen. Sherman’s troops, 1864

March 19, 2013 marks the International Hindsight Day–a day in which Internet pundits sit back, reflect, and inform the world that they were against the Iraq War the whole time.  Unfortunately, news articles from 2003 paint a far different picture–one in which the war enjoyed far greater popular support. 

Of course, it’s not the first time pundits have distanced themselves from ill-fated military adventurism.  Gene Rodenberry supported the Vietnam War through an allegorical proxy war with the Klingons in a Star Trek episode which aired in February 1968.  Kirk’s insistence that the Federation continue to arm a primitive race with weaponry reflects what many felt was a need to keep the Communists in check in Southeast Asia.  Or “staying the course” as we’d say these days.

Of course, no one remembers being for escalating the Vietnam War.

Dear Katniss,

If you’re reading, please consider this humble treatise as a token of my affection. Time and again, our love has been tested, equally by Peeta’s noble heroism as by your detractors’ defamatory bile. The latest such knave, Scott Weiner, emerged yesterday from his trollish cave, penning a condemnable screed against your revolutionary insurgency. Weiner references your revolution as a “post-Orientalist” phenomenon, which he views as a reflection of liberalism’s exploitative underbelly. As you and I have discussed, however, your laudable violence is hardly liberal, and instead reflects an abiding commitment to Frantz Fanon‘s liberationist violence.

Before your arrival, Panem was a seething, festering sore of political governance. As residents of District 12, we were underresourced, underfed, and underappreciated: our women were poor, our children emaciated, and our men rarely able to manage the psychological, social, and financial burdens of family upkeep. Our wages were low, and scarcely commensurate to our invaluable contribution to Panem’s militaristic, decadent economy. My grandfather Karl‘s warnings were prescient, and bore remembering: in Panem’s pre-revolutionary economy, we laborers risked dehumanization: alienation from ourselves and, perhaps most importantly, from our collective consciousness of common dignity.

When you returned from your triumphant Hunger Games, you inculcated our people with a sense of pride, a fierce urgency of revolutionary upheaval. Your violence was a model of rebellion, and your image an icon of our anti-imperialist politics. Where Gale–the erstwhile object of your flirtation, and now a Panem official in District 2–compromised his humanity, you rejected the prospect of political conformity, opting instead to cast off the yoke of your oppression, and of ours. Through your liberationist violence, you imagined a new Panemian humanity: where our industrial labor is duly compensated, and where each District’s profound creativity is heralded as representative of Panemian civilization. Contra Weiner, your violence was hardly a form of self-empowerment, so heralded in Ms. Winfrey’s antiquated texts. Rather, it was a vessel for humanity, for the manifestation of dignity in a liberated politics.

Where Panem’s prior revolutionists imagined a hierarchical vision of a new society, you refused exclusion, prompting a notion of egalitarianism that has inspired widespread, liberating revolt. You acknowledged Panem’s lumpenproletariat, the invisible society of District 13, as a revolutionary force, a dormant opportunity for liberationist mobilization. In your embrace of District 13, you also embraced your mockingjay identity, a palpable demonstration of your resilience and revolutionary leadership.

As Dan Nexon observes, however, your liberationist violence had its consequences: your post-traumatic stress disorder, a result of your trying management of revolutionary authority, has become increasingly apparent throughout the past weeks. If you’ll let me, I’d like to help you, to enable Panem’s liberation to continue. Call me, maybe?

May the odds be ever in our favor,

The Real Tarkin

Today’s guest post comes from Scott Weiner, a Ph.D student in political science at George Washington University.  He writes on state-tribe relations, ethnic politics, and the game theory behind Carly Rae Jepsen songs.

Spoilerplate Warning

A map of Panem by AimArrowsHigh

The Hunger Games trilogy presents a case study of revolution which is on the one hand instructive and on the other hand puzzling. The state of Panem (post-apocalyptic America) experiences a revolution that shares both uncanny similarities and unmistakable differences with other revolutions, fictional and non-fictional. At the center of the revolution in Panem is the heroine of the series, a teenager by the name of Katniss Everdeen, who is played in the film version of The Hunger Games by actress Jennifer Lawrence. To Western audiences, Katniss Everdeen is the epitome of a revolutionary leader. However, a critical examination of the society of Panem and its revolution should raise serious questions in this regard. While many Westerners view Katniss Everdeen as empowered heroine, a critical comparison of her actions reveals deeply troubling attitudes and beliefs at play.

A fan-made map of Panem by Helmet 31

Flaws In The Revolutionary Account

The events which take place in Panem are uncritically accepted by many as a “revolution.” However, several aspects of these events throw this claim into doubt, particularly in light of scholarly accounts of the phenomenon.

First, the uprisings in Panem are exclusively by lower-class populations. Yet Barrington Moore (1966) underscores the importance of the “landed upper class” to revolution. It is of course possible that a landed upper class exists in the Capital, but accounts make no mention of this class defecting during the rebellion. While individuals with personal ties to Katniss Everdeen make efforts on her behalf, the major force of the uprising is from the peasantry. Moore predicts than in such cases the outcome of the revolution will be fascism. However, Panem lacks the privatized corporations which would be necessary for this outcome to occur.

Perhaps then the revolutions are a case of peasant rebellion a la James C. Scott (1976). This account too is incomplete. Peasant rebellion and the “everyday resistance” Scott writes about – criminal activity committed in defiance of the State – is usually confined to the periphery. In Panem, the population is reacting to national-level events in a national uprising whose goal is the downfall of the regime. These uprisings are also largely separate from the insurgency itself, comprised of what Bueno de Mesquita et al (2004) refer to as the “minimum winning coalition” or inner circle of the regime.

Finally, the source of the insurgency is not what existing accounts of revolution predict. Humiliation is often a key variable in a person’s decision to rebel. Additionally, Ted Robert Gurr (1970) identifies the role of relative deprivation in sparking a person to rebel. He argues that it is those underprivileged members of society who interact daily with the advantaged group who feel most painfully their own oppression. However, were this the case in Panem, the instigators of the rebellion should have been the Avoxes, criminals who have had their tongues removed by the State and serve as a source of domestic and municipal labor. True, the actual instigators – former winners of the Hunger Games – faced relative deprivation upon their arrival to the Capital. However, the Avoxes experienced the humiliation of this power differential much more sharply. While the lack of civil society in Panem may be partially to blame, it is more than conceivable that Avoxes should have at least participated in the rebellion once news of it came to the Capital.

Ultimately, the revolutionary account cannot explain the puzzling dynamics of the overthrow of President Snow in Panem. To better understand the uprisings there, we must ask why this is the case. A critical perspective is most instructive in this regard.

A fan-made map of Panem by Vamg

The Post-Orientalist Explanation

The Hunger Games revolves around the heroine Katniss Everdeen. Everdeen is an strong, empowered, individualistic minority member of society. In this regard, she represents the Liberal ideal type. Liberalism has its roots in the 19th century as a European ideology stressing individual empowerment for the benefit of society as a whole. Everdeen’s credentials as a liberal are established during the Hunger Games themselves. Everdeen’s reluctance to kill, her alliance with Rue, and her compassion after Rue’s death all speak to liberal notions of empowering the self, benefiting the social benefit of all. Her decision to convince Peeta to swallow nightlock – even though they were eventually stopped from doing so – is the ultimate act of self-empowerment and cooperation. As a result, Everdeen is touted later by the rebellion as the epitome of Liberalism. However, critical examination reveals that Everdeen’s actions are anything but empowering to her victims.

Liberalism as an ideology has also been used to justify violence and subjugation of non-liberal societies, often under the pretense of “humanitarian intervention” (Duffield, 2001). Katniss Everdeen is an empowered girl, but invokes the ways the Capital limited citizens’ rights in Panem as the pretense for violence against the State and its citizens. Her nickname is “Mockingjay,” a reference to genetically altered birds in Panem which can remember and mimic complex sound patterns. However, the nickname refers to Everdeen’s role as one who travels throughout Panem, diffusing her ideology and “enlightening” the citizenry. At the same time District 2’s citizens are supposedly being liberated, Everdeen is complicit in an attack in which citizens are killed – a paternalistic exercise of her own empowerment. Additionally, when the revolution’s leaders take a vote on whether the children of the Capital should be forced to participate in a Hunger Games of their own, Everdeen votes yes. The democratic nature of this proceeding should not distract from its decidedly illiberal leanings.

In a sense, Katniss Everdeen is an post-apocalyptic Lawrence of Arabia. Critical scholars understand the political role played by Lawrence of Arabia and other Westerners who visited the region as part of the ideology of Orientalism (Said, 1979). Orientalism is the idea that Western beliefs and attitudes of superiority towards the Middle East legitimized its domination of that region. Katniss Everdeen is an orientalist for a time after Orientalism – a Post-Orientalist. Her travels are not “liberating” for Panem’s citizens but rather preserve her own superiority over them. As one who created Liberal cooperation in the state of nature which is the Hunger Games, Everdeen flaunts her credentials for personal gain. Her aim is not to liberate the citizens of Panem but to use Liberalism as a cynical cover for her aims of national domination.

~

For further reading on the political science of the Hunger Games from Duck of Minerva, please see here and here.

Clones can think creatively, you will find them immensely superior to droids
–Taun We, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones

Okay, we get it. We shouldn’t rely on “Death Star” weapon systems. They promise too much, come in over-budget, and come with all sorts of pesky design flaws.

But that doesn’t  mean we should rely too heavily on droids to carry out our foreign policy.  As our Empire has moved away from traditional fleet-on-fleet warfare, we’ve taken on more policing actions in the ungoverned ares of the Outer Rim, which require the use of droids to carry out our dirty work.  But our battle droids have yet to encounter a hardened, competent opponent.  Sure, they’re great for hunting Jawas, Ewoks and Gungans.  But what if they came up against a conventional, or “hybrid” force?

In one incident, an eight-year old child  flew an N-1 Starfighter into a Droid Control Ship, disabling the primary controls for an entire droid army.  Moreover, droids are increasingly reliant on the Electromagnetic Spectrum, making them susceptible to hacking and jamming.

Sure, we can produce autonomous, hunter-killer Vulture Droids…but would we really want to take a Neimoidian out of the loop?

Let’s face it, we need to invest in people, rather than technology.  We need well-trained, educated Clone Troops who can adapt to any situation.  We need to reverse a decade’s worth of growth acceleration and allow our Clones the opportunity for broadening assignments and leader development.

Unfortunately, hundreds of Imperial Senators have fallen under the control of a Sith Lord, Darth Sidious, who stands to personally profit from the construction of a Death Star.  And by spreading out contracts for the Death Star among his cohorts in the Techno Union, the Corporate Alliance, and the Intergalactic Banking Clan, components of the Death Star superlaser are built in seemingly pacifistic systems, such as Alderaan and Naboo.

If the Imperial Senate can’t kill this project, I’m afraid nothing will, with the possible exception of a proton torpedo fired down a conveniently-located exhaust port.

With this sort of Senatorial gridlock, it seems that Clone training, education, and leader development will be the first thing we sacrifice, should the Imperial budget be cut.  Already, Clone Pilots are unable to maintain currency in their LAAT/i Gunships.  Marksmanship training has been cut so significantly, I fear that our Stormtroopers–legendary for their “precise” marksmanship–won’t be able to hit the broad side of a barn.

So forget Battle Droids; invest in people.

Invest in our Clones.

Some late but worthy entrants in the Hoth symposium have arrived, and it’d be a shame to let them go unread. Enjoy, as final pairing, a defense of canon: the Empire did well given the circumstances of it’s birth, and despite protagonists surviving Hoth really was a major Rebel defeat.

Let’s Cut the Imperial Fleet Some Slack

It’s difficult to tell from the original three movies, but the Imperial Fleet is a very new organization. Their operational and strategic missteps make much more sense in this light. A galactic fleet cannot be built in a day. Although we see a Star Destroyer at the end Revenge of the Sith, a fleet is comprised of more than just ships. Doctrine, tradition, staff work, planning processes, and institutional experience are just as important as the ships themselves. Even though decades elapse between Revenge of the Sith and The Empire Strikes Back, it was just not enough time for the Imperial Fleet to become an elite force.

The Battle of Hoth occurs twenty-two years after Palpatine seized power.The first expeditionary operation conducted by the US Navy after their formative battles during the American Revolution occurred between 1801-1805, twenty six years after its formation. Both of these conflicts were waged against non-state actors by very new nations. Although the First Barbary War was successful for the American Fleet(thanks to a few Marines) there was an embarrassing mistake. The USS Philadelphia was run aground and captured, along with its entire crew, without a fight. Additionally the expeditionary force had to depend on third party support from the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Presuming that years in the Star Wars galaxy are identical to our own, the two young fleets had a similar amount of time to develop. The Imperial Fleet that we see in Empire, while presumably leavened with
clone-veterans from its formative battles, just did not have the know-how to conduct counterinsurgency on a galactic scale. The tactical and strategic situation that the fleet faced at Hoth was, to them, a new one.

The fact that Palpatine was even able to marshal the resources, clone army notwithstanding, to operate a galactic fleet in so little time is impressive. The US Navy is the most powerful navy in the world, but it has spent 238 years getting to that point. The US Department of Defense uses the acronym DOTMLPF- doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership, personnel, and facilities- to evaluate new programs. All of these aspects of a military organization takes years to develop, even for just a single new unit. Palpatine had to create and validate all of these aspects of the Imperial Fleet from scratch, all while Vader was force-choking officers with years of experience. Additionally, Imperial policy excluded non-humans from service, so the Empire could only draw from humans to find the knowledge and skills necessary to man a fleet. The institutional incompetence and poor staff work evident in the botched attack on Hoth is evidence of his haste and Vader’s toxic leadership.

Brett Friedman is a Marine with delusions of grandeur, and one of the editors at Grand Blog Tarkin.

Missed Opportunity: Rieekan’s Failure at Hoth

The conventional wisdom regarding the Battle of Hoth is that it was a major Imperial victory, described in terms of the Rebels as the massively overmatched ragtag band scattering before the unstoppable Imperial juggernaut. The contrary wisdom of sci-fi strategists focuses both on the tactical blunders made by the Imperial force, and the strategic factors that influenced the decision-making of key leaders. Both narratives are wrong. The Rebel Alliance was anything but a ragged insurgent mob; they were a well-equipped and well-organized hybrid threat# at the time. The Battle of Hoth should have been a decisive victory for the Rebels, perhaps even as significant as the Battle of Yavin had been. The Imperial forces bungled what should have been a fairly simple HVT capture or kill mission, their staggering incompetence playing right to the Rebels’ strengths. However, the Alliance only managed to scrape by with a strategic draw due to their failure to take advantage of key opportunities during the battle to strike a massive blow to the Imperial fleet and the Empire’s key leadership. Hoth was also not a total tactical failure for the Empire; in fact they managed to pull off a partial victory, since Echo Base was indeed reduced to rubble, and the Rebels lost a large amount of materiel in the process of their hasty withdrawal under fire. The Imperial forces managed to salvage a partial success out of what by all rights should have been a crushing defeat, thanks to the even greater failures of their Rebel opponents, in particular the criminal negligence of General Rieekan.

The Rebel failure at the Battle of Hoth started long before the fighting began. Casually disregarding the key element of Echo Base’s defense and evacuation plans—the planetary energy shield—the Rebel force did not even make an attempt at denial or deception, not bothering to conceal or camouflage the shield’s power generators with so much as a camo net. This oversight enabled an Imperial probe droid to easily obtain photographic evidence of their presence, and later for the assault force to quickly identify and destroy the generator. General Rieekan compounded this error with poor or nonexistent reconnaissance planning. He did not clearly identify his priority information requirements (PIR), had no communications plan or contingency for missing personnel, no counter-recon plan, and relied far too heavily on unmanned sensors. Because of this, there were no additional resources committed in response to a report of a suspicious meteorite (that turned out to be a probe droid), Luke Skywalker was forced to investigate alone, and was then out of communication for hours before anyone even noticed he was missing. Once the probe droid was finally discovered, it was by an unmanned sensor and a SIGINT intercept of its transmission, the damage already done by the time the impromptu QRF—consisting of Han and Chewie—was able to locate and destroy it. Once the ground invasion started, the poor reconnaissance planning was even more apparent: with no screening force forward of the main trench line, the defenders did not see the AT-AT assault force until they were within visual and ground-shaking range. Of course, the lack of scout observation posts was irrelevant because the Rebels did not even attempt to employ indirect fires or obstacles to disrupt, turn, or block the attackers. Despite being able to see the enemy main body well beyond direct-fire range, the Rebels simply allowed it to literally walk directly into its main objective, nearly unopposed. The only token resistance offered was pitifully ineffective direct fire from medium crew-served infantry weapons, a stunningly poor choice against the entirely predictable circumstance of the enemy using armored vehicles. Lacking any depth whatsoever, once the single defensive line was easily overrun, the assault force had an uninhibited path to the power generators, enabling the destruction of the base. The attempt at close air support is almost too embarrassing to mention. Lacking effective armor-defeating weapons, the snowspeeders had improvise an attack solution on the spot using harpoons and tow cables. Even after all the other failures, this might have worked if not for the cartoonishly suicidal tactics of Rogue Squadron. Ignoring their near-infinite maneuverability advantage over the AT-ATs, they insisted on attacking directly through the walkers’ incredibly narrow frontal cone of fire instead of from the flanks or rear, resulting in multiple aircraft losses. This technique also placed the speeders directly in the line of friendly fire as well, though no blue-on-blue incidents resulting from poor airspace deconfliction are shown.

The responsibility for all these failures falls to General Rieekan, the Rebel commander at Echo Base. Blame cannot be placed on lack of resources; the Rebel Alliance was remarkably well-equipped for a non-state actor, with capital ships, heavy weapons, and advanced fighters at its disposal. General Rieekan managed to secure anti-access/area denial capabilities to defend Echo Base (the energy shield and ion cannon); effective anti-armor systems, artillery pieces, and engineering equipment should have been easy to obtain. Rieekan simply failed to conduct a proper mission analysis. The failure was also not of Rebel Alliance military culture writ large. Disruptive thinking, tactical innovation, and maximization of limited resources was practically institutionalized at the Battle of Yavin. The Battle of Hoth turned on a failure of basic defensive preparation. If General Rieekan had made even a token effort at engagement area development, the small Imperial ground assault force would have been easily defeated. This in turn would have enabled the Rebels to target and disable the blockading Star Destroyers (which Admiral Piett clumsily positioned within range) with the ion cannon, and then call for reinforcements to finish them off, or cover a more deliberate evacuation. Instead, General Rieekan’s negligent incompetence and failure to accurately assess the situation cost the Rebel Alliance an opportunity for a major victory at Hoth.

Mike Forbes is an army officer with an IPA focus and a MENA hobby. He can be found on twitter.