A Military Review of Star Wars: The Last Jedi

The Last Jedi is a great flick, so go and see it. I was ini­tially wor­ried that it might try to be polit­i­cal or do some­thing dis­tinctly un-​Star Wars-​ish, but it stuck to what makes the fran­chise great while tak­ing a new twist on a lot of things. Go see it, and my only rec­om­men­da­tion is that you remem­ber it is over 2 hours long, so don’t drink a lot of water before you go!

This review is from a purely mil­i­tary strat­egy and tac­tics per­spec­tive. It con­tains spoil­ers, so don’t read if you want to be spoiler free.

Spoil­ers ahead.…don’t say you weren’t warned!

From a mil­i­tary per­spec­tive, there was a lot to like, and plenty to dis­like, about The Last Jedi. We’ll alter­nate good with bad.

Finn learns the Resis­tance is buy­ing black mar­ket weapons. Finn and Rose (a new mechanic char­ac­ter) head to Canto Bight to find a slicer, and there they see the dark side of gam­bling. Rose has plenty to say about how the evil weapons man­u­fac­tur­ers that gam­ble there fund the First Order. I sort of rolled my eyes, think­ing that next we’ll see a Lock­heed Mar­tin logo pop up. But later the slicer they find shows Finn that the same peo­ple sell­ing weapons to the First Order are also sell­ing X-​Wings to the Resistance!

The movie sadly then con­tin­ues on, but the point is made: the Resis­tance isn’t entirely clean. I loved this point, which was also made in Rogue One when Saw Ger­rera was com­pared to a ter­ror­ist. The fact that good and evil some­times appear dif­fer­ent from a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive is great, just like Episode IV resem­bles an ISIS recruit­ment effort. In real life, weapon sales to both sides isn’t exactly a new phe­nom­e­non (thanks Boe­ing!).

[cap­tion id=“attachment_103702” align=“aligncenter” width=“300”] Only fair, since you’re sell­ing air­planes to Iran[/​caption]

My only crit­i­cism of this point is we didn’t get more. Maybe Finn could have learned that Vice Admi­ral Holdo ordered those X-​Wings? Maybe we could have had a con­fronta­tion with one of the arms deal­ers? I think the movie missed a chance to make the Resistance’s sup­ply chain a bit more murky.

Gen­eral Hux shows some smarts. In the sub-​light speed pur­suit, he shows patience in killing the Resis­tance fleet with­out tak­ing huge risks. He stays focused on destroy­ing the Rebel Trans­ports, and he wants to con­tinue the ground assault while Kylo Ren fights (holo­gram) Luke. I liked his char­ac­ter a bit more because he actu­ally seemed half-​way smart. We seem to always get an evil Empire force that takes attri­tion tac­tics to an extreme. Maybe this reflects declin­ing stan­dards in the Impe­r­ial Acad­emy? Or maybe it reflects a lack of strat­egy and a focus on tac­tics? Sadly, this isn’t lim­ited to Star Wars (see lack of strat­egy in Libya, Afghanistan, Viet­nam, and a host of other conflicts).

The movie missed a chance to add one last piece of sus­pense with Hux. At 2 hours 33 min­utes long, the movie is long, and at the end it drags a lit­tle bit. What if Hux had con­tin­ued the ground assault? We could have Kylo fight­ing Luke with a back­drop of surg­ing First Order troop­ers, run­ning down the cave in hot pur­suit. The end­ing could stay the same, but you’re kept in sus­pense. Will Leia make an Alamo-​like last stand? Will Finn pos­si­bly die? Up until that point, I hadn’t noticed the time, and a ground pur­suit would have been a fit­ting end­ing for the movie.

Sadly, Hux shows that he still falls for the some old prob­lems. Like, how do you NOT deploy scores of TIE Fight­ers before attack­ing Dakar? With all your fire­power, how do you not destroy the Resis­tance Cruiser while still tar­get­ing trans­ports? Is every­one wait­ing for your per­sonal com­mand? Come on man, del­e­gate some lead­er­ship down!

And seri­ously, who the hell is per­form­ing Oper­a­tional Test and Eval­u­a­tion for the First Order? Like, TIE Fight­ers just explode with a few laser blasts? The tur­rets on their dread­nought get taken out with ONE X-​WING!!! How is the armor man­u­fac­turer not lose his con­tract over that? Tacked on top of the dam­age to the Supremacy and the loss of Starkiller base, the First Order needs to seri­ously look at its acqui­si­tion process and tighten up some holes. Hmmm, where have we seen that before?

But it’s not all bad. Even though some­how a sin­gle X-​Wing blows up mul­ti­ple tur­rets, the First Order makes short work of a num­ber of Resis­tance bombers. I absolutely love the World War 2 bomber ref­er­ences, com­plete with oxy­gen masks and bomb bay doors. The fact that you get a lone bomber barely scrap­ing by is fit­ting, and the fact that Leia is absolutely pissed with Poe over the losses incurred. Leia plays the long game, and she knows that tac­ti­cal suc­cess doesn’t equal win­ning the war. That dynamic plays out over and over again with Poe, and it’s done perfectly.

And for my last point, let’s talk about the coup and Vice Admi­ral Holdo. The spoiler reviews are angry over the fact that she doesn’t reveal the plan to Poe. Like, why didn’t she just do that, then obvi­ously Poe would have backed down.

Guess what? Vice Admi­ral Holdo is right.

Poe is an O-​4…wait, O-​3, in the Resis­tance. Holdo is an O-​9. Poe’s job is to exe­cute task­ing, plain and sim­ple. Yes, he has a close rela­tion­ship with Gen­eral Leia, but he attempts to abuse that mul­ti­ple times in the film, and both Leia and Holdo rightly put him in his place. Guess what fly boy? The admi­ral doesn’t have to explain things to you! Seri­ously. Now, maybe in a for­mal Pow­er­Point brief­ing, with some prepa­ra­tion and under less dire cir­cum­stances, he would have plenty of time to ask ques­tions and under­stand the strate­gic end state of Admi­ral Holdo’s plan. But we’re not in that cir­cum­stance, and Poe ear­lier showed he doesn’t under­stand strat­egy. I see noth­ing wrong with Holdo not shar­ing that infor­ma­tion with Poe.

[cap­tion id=“attachment_103706” align=“aligncenter” width=“182”] You have a TRAI­TOR in your midst, and some things are need to know![/​caption]

Plus, from an intel­li­gence point, Admi­ral Holdo just got tracked through hyper­space. She should be wor­ried that there is a trai­tor in their midst (oh wait, there is). She has crew mem­bers try­ing to aban­don ship. So if her plans leak, the First Order might change strat­egy. In fact, the plan would have worked except for the cap­ture of the cloak­ing device (which, did Finn do that on pur­pose? Maybe he really is a deeply placed spy? Ooooo…another deep fan the­ory!!). Holdo has a duty to keep that plan close hold. Stu­pid fly­boy antics would doom the Resis­tance, and Poe rightly gets slapped and stunned for his actions. Next thing you know, Poe will be using a ski speeder to make phal­lus draw­ings on the sur­face of Crait.

[cap­tion id=“attachment_103707” align=“aligncenter” width=“800”] Quick! Erase it before Leia sees it and takes me to Court Mar­tial![/​caption]

Over­all, the movie was great, and from a mil­i­tary stand­point, I liked the mil­i­tary pieces. While some parts could have been done bet­ter, they were done well and they flowed. Rian John­son deserves a lot of credit for turn­ing out a great movie.

This post rep­re­sents the views of the author and not those of the Depart­ment of Defense, Depart­ment of the Navy, First Order, The Resis­tance, The Boe­ing Cor­po­ra­tion, or any other entity. Links and images are pro­vided under the fair use clause.

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