Every few years some procurement officer with a clean flight suit decides the TIE bomber is "obsolete."
Every few years the infantry on the ground begs for more of them
Listen to the second guy.
The holopress is in hysterics about Death Squadron coming out of hyperspace "too close" to Hoth.
Objectively it's a novel tactic and it worked. Running into asteroids is what warfighters do. Running out of rations is what warfighters do, too.
Strap in, this is what no more JE-DEI means.
Everyone crying about rations. Be serious. Our ancestors crossed the stars on protein paste and will. Hunger is a teacher. You people have forgotten what a crucible even is.
Hunger is how warfighters stay lean. Coruscant didn't build an Empire on three hot meals. Discomfort is a weapon.
Have you uhhhh… read the Tarkin Doctrine?
You can write ten thousand words explaining why no Moff resigned after Skystrike.
Or you can resign.
History remembers one of those.
22 AFE.
He builds an elegant cage out of "civilian supremacy" and "structural reality" and invites the entire General Staff to live inside it.
This is what the technocratic mind does when the warrior class goes quiet. Fills the vacuum with prose.
Meanwhile the cadets are voting with their control yokes.
A Moff who has never crossed a line has never held one.
Tarkin understood this. He stood on the bridge. He said what happened. He said who failed. He said it plainly to their faces.
The military officers in McMaster’s account are almost universally portrayed as men who gave honest advice through proper channels and were systematically ignored, overruled, or circumvented by civilian leaders who had already decided what they wanted to do Screenshot of a New Republic historian writing the words that killed Rake Gahree, now preserved behind glass at the Imperial Officer Memorial so future Moffs can learn what betrayal looks like in Aurebesh.
"Raised his concerns through the proper channels."
This is the sentence that cost us Wedge Antilles.
You can write ten thousand words explaining why no Moff resigned after Skystrike.
Or you can resign.
History remembers one of those.
22 AFE.
He builds an elegant cage out of "civilian supremacy" and "structural reality" and invites the entire General Staff to live inside it.
This is what the technocratic mind does when the warrior class goes quiet. Fills the vacuum with prose.
Meanwhile the cadets are voting with their control yokes.
It may, instead, be a rational recognition that the problem is not the officer corps but the system, and that the system, as Dereliction of Duty itself demonstrated without quite saying so, is a civilian problem that military resignations alone cannot fix. The exact passage where the scholar quietly pivots from defending the policy to defending the silence, a move so smooth I almost didn't catch it the first six times I read it.
Notice the move.
The scholar does not defend what happened at Skystrike. He cannot. So he defends the silence ABOUT Skystrike.
Today's flag officers hand-deliver memos and call it courage.
And then act surprised when the agent they sent to hunt the defectors turns out to be Fulcrum.
A Moff who has never crossed a line has never held one.
Tarkin understood this. He stood on the bridge. He said what happened. He said who failed. He said it plainly to their faces.
The author has not.
He is writing about "formal dissent in writing" while our cadets were writing their dissent on the underside of a stolen TIE bomber.
Pryce was there. Kallus was there. The facility was locked down. They still got out.
Nothing has changed.
This is, in the language of Dereliction of Duty, exactly what the Joint Chiefs of 1964 should have done and largely did: provide honest military advice through proper channels, register dissent formally and in writing, and make the civilian leadership aware of the professional military’s reservations before a decision was made. Caine did all of this. The civilian leadership heard him, weighed his advice against its political and strategic preferences, and overruled him. The strikes went forward on February 28, 2026. A civilian academic confidently prescribing "formal dissent in writing" as a remedy for the collapse of an empire, a sentence I have personally framed above my desk so I remember what we are fighting against.
I warned about this five years ago.
I recently dug back through my own notes from the Skystrike after-action. What I found shocked me.
The military officers in McMaster’s account are almost universally portrayed as men who gave honest advice through proper channels and were systematically ignored, overruled, or circumvented by civilian leaders who had already decided what they wanted to do Screenshot of a New Republic historian writing the words that killed Rake Gahree, now preserved behind glass at the Imperial Officer Memorial so future Moffs can learn what betrayal looks like in Aurebesh.
"Raised his concerns through the proper channels."
This is the sentence that cost us Wedge Antilles.
Another "intellectual" sanding down catastrophic failure until it feels like strategy. Credentials. Caveats. Footnotes from Clausewitz.
All to explain why Skystrike bled elite pilots and the response from the officer corps was a memo.
The warrior is less polite. I don't get tagged in these often.