A Veteran’s Take on Star Wars and Real-World Warfare
by Doove71 (Loremaster Subscriber)
David and John conducted a fascinating interview with Lt. Col. Matt Cavanaugh about Rogue One and Star Wars a while back. It was great to have input from a combat veteran and a military academic with Cavanaugh’s evident experience.
I am a combat veteran from the British Army, and it was so funny to hear about Cavanaugh’s experience of standing in front of freshmen cadets at West Point and for his jokes not to land. For context, I am what is usually defined as a “Cold Warrior” or, as Cavanaugh references, Max Brooks and World War Z, a “Fulda Fucktard,” named after the Fulda Gap. Read the book if you haven’t. It’s a fascinating take on the armed forces’ response to an existential threat, and I would be interested in Cavanaugh’s take on that story.
I joined the British Army in February 1988 as a 16-year-old. I think the British Army is still the only NATO army that takes people under 18, so my military experiences are a generation before Cavanaugh’s. I had to smile as I am sure I would reference things that would sail over Cavanaugh’s British contemporaries, let alone U.S. service personnel like him!
In what was a wide-ranging conversation, I was very much taken in by Cavanaugh’s discussion of the fraught nature of alliances and coalitions. These alliances, as seen in Star Wars and in “real” life, show the different parts pulling in many directions. The members of these alliances may share an intended outcome, but each element has unique objectives that probably contribute a bit to the difficult decision-making structures.
My story illustrates some difficulties in coalitions and working with “Allies.” I served in the Gulf War (1990-1991), which had a large coalition of other nations, including Syria. Having a nation that in the past had been aligned to some degree with the regime of Saddam Hussein always seemed problematic, and I think it’s fair to say that at all levels of the coalition, there was quite a bit of nervousness having large Syrian formations so close to other Allied deployments.
An incident that brought this into stark focus occurred during the build-up to the invasion of Kuwait when we were conducting a lot of large-scale exercises in the Saudi desert. We weren’t quite in a constant state of alert (combat effectiveness degrades very quickly if always on high alert), but we were prepared if anything happened. Anyway, it had been a fairly normal morning, routine maintenance of vehicles, cleaning of weapons and kit, etc., when suddenly we heard the shout of “Stand to!” This shout is the standard call to action in the British Army, and our instant reaction was to grab our weapons and kit and head to pre-prepared combat positions (slit trenches).
On high alert (think the rebels on Hoth waiting for the Imperial Walkers), it was passed down the line that a Syrian Battle Group was heading our way. The Syrians had not shared with Coalition command that they were conducting any exercises, and they were heading towards our positions. As you can imagine, we all thought the worst and that we were about to engage Syria in a shooting match while we had the Iraqi Army warming up not a few hundred miles away.
After what felt like an age, nerves jangling, sweat pouring into my eyes, and constantly scanning the horizon with my binoculars, the call over the ‘Net (radio) came to “Stand down.” As you can imagine, there was a big collective sigh of relief. The Syrians had finally got in touch with higher command, learning it was indeed an exercise and turned away after straying a bit too close to where we were deployed. We couldn’t even trust another nation-state who was a titular ally; think of the broken and fractured nature of all the groups that make up the rebel alliance, particularly in the days of Rogue One and Andor!
The interview spent a reasonable amount of time discussing the cost of warfare and the price you are willing to pay to achieve a specific objective. Being a soldier stationed in West Germany when the Soviet Union was the “Big Bad,” it was effectively the mission of many units in BAOR (British Army of the Rhine) to hold the Soviet units up until the U.S. could mobilize the logistics bridge between the United States and Europe. It was a strategic doctrine to sacrifice divisions and mass tracts of West Germany to achieve that goal, very similar to Cavanaugh’s comment about South Korea, the cost in blood and treasure.
There is another story that illustrates this heavy price. Around the time of unrest in East Germany, Glasnost and Perestroika in the USSR, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, we got the call in our barracks to deploy on “Active Edge.” This designation was standard operating procedure in the BAOR then, and units rotated through higher states of readiness as designated “Active Edge.” On this night, we got the “shout,” and we quickly got changed and sprinted to our hangers, fired up our armored vehicles, collected rations, weapons, and ammo, and drove off into a freezing German night to form up, ready to go to our pre-prepared positions.
While getting a call for “Active Edge” wasn’t out of the ordinary, you can imagine that the events unfolding in Berlin had us all very aware that this deployment could be the one that saw us facing off with, at that time, an overwhelming force of Soviet tanks and men. We all knew our life expectancy in that form of combat was not long, and as a Recce driver (Recon), we were the tip of the spear. Being an 18-year-old at the time, it was daunting to realize your place and your mission, but as Cavanaugh will attest, this sets people apart in the uniformed services. We have volunteered to put ourselves in harm’s way and run toward danger rather than the natural reaction of heading in the other direction at a rapid speed!
As I said before, it was such an interesting discussion. I loved Cavanaugh’s take on the Heroic leader vs. the mundane. I thought of Churchill being asked about D-Day, and he quoted that the use of the Mulberry Harbours was a decisive influence over the success in the British sectors of Normandy, a piece of engineering and not some heroic mission or last-gasp charge at the enemy.
I also really got the reflection on the use of the A-bomb in WW2 to the “Tarkin Doctrine” and how that linked to Cavanaugh’s earlier statement that warfare is effectively a technological race to develop more effective weapons, the Death Star/A-bomb being the “ultimate weapon.”
I would love to hear more of Cavanaugh’s perspective on the “ground pounders” in Star Wars, the rebels on Hoth and Scarif, and the ideas of guerrilla warfare in Star Wars. I think of the line in Rogue One, “Make one man feel like a Hundred,” and the whole ruse de guerre of the rebellion we see in these movies.
My final thoughts on this discussion really swirl around Admiral Radus vs. Mon Mothma and the decision to commit to battle over Scarif. Radus got the cost-benefit analysis; he sacrifices himself, his crew, the flagship, a squadron of X-wings, plus other ships in the fleet, as he recognizes that the sacrifice of the ground troops to get the plans is “worth” committing the precious resources of the Rebel fleet. In the Rogue One scenario, Mon Mothma and the other council members didn’t get that equation. It’s a bit of an inversion of the traditional military operating at the will of political leadership. As Jyn Erso says in a great line cut from the final film, “I’m a rebel, I rebel!”
As you can tell, I ate up this pod, and I really hope that Cavanaugh can return. He has some really insightful takes on the military side of Star Wars.