Air Force Officer Says Death Star Was a Bad Investment

[keserak]

The article at issue misses the point of the Death Star.

It also fails, severely, to understand the point of an empire. Not merely "the" Empire, but also the point of an empire like the United States.

The Death Star, and constructions like it, are very cost-efficient for an empire. Indeed, they are far better investments than devices that actually protect imperial holdings from attack.

This is because the enemy of an empire isn't any external threat: the enemy of an empire is the citizens of an empire. External threats are the best thing that ever happened to an empire.

The point of the death star was not to blow up planetary threats. Doing so for strategic benefit is incredibly inane. After all, empires want to steal from people. They're massive kleptocracies. Blowing up entire planets means there's less stuff to steal.

The point of blowing up a planet is so that you can intimidate quadrillions of sentients.

And what is that worth? That is worth pretty much any price. Why? You're not spending your money! Empires, again, are thieving machines. You WANT a destitute people because impoverished people are easy to control. You WANT military boondoggles because military budgets are under the direct purview of the most powerful people in government and because the the corps doing the work are your friends, in your pocket, or both. The Death Star used shoddy contractors and experienced price overruns? Good! The bigger the sinkhole, the less money to empower citizens. Shady contractors are easily intimidated by corrupt law enforcement -- that's you -- and easy to dispose of if something goes wrong. Which, actually, it did.

Failing to understand the politics behind a military endeavor is a failure to understand the war. To use a science fiction analogy from a slightly-less space opera gig, when Jack O'Neill in Stargate was explaining the difference between the P90 and the Jaffa Staff Weapon, he put it thusly: "This [the staff weapon] is a weapon of terror. This [the P90] is a weapon of war."

The Death Star is a weapon of terror. If it means controlling your citizens, it is worth any price, since the citizens are the ones paying for it.

 

[Sean951]

So glad how the american tax payer money is put to good work... Really hope Canada millitary dont do anything as stupid...

Damn what it is with American public sector and stupid report,, we had the FMA report on Zombie invasion, and now that... Does they have that much money to spend that they dont know what to use it for?

I think The Death Star would be a much more practical investment if it was used as a deep-space exploration vessel instead of a mobile planet-destroying monstrosity.

I mean, think about it. It can travel through the Galaxy, holding years worth of rations and enough people to populate any suitable planet while the Deathstar helpfully orbits said planet to keep an eye on things. Man can travel pretty freely from Earth to the Moon so taking a moon-sized space station and sending it to any given Earth-like planet would be a pretty safe bet I'd think. You know, once we can get our own version of FTL travel or, finish our own version of the Hyper-Drive.

It would still be expensive as hell but using the station as an exploration vessel could potentially pay off in a HUGE way.

Hummm no... You realise the whole series, including the EU all take place in the same galaxie... It's able to travel from star systhem to star systhem, not from galaxies to another

Yup, I really hope Canada doesn't have the military do articles like this. It seems they should really spend more on English classes.

The Death Star would be incredibly impractical. If we could fit over 1 million star destroyers, which were very large and very practical, inside a single Death Star, then imagine how many droids this would be. Each ship holds roughly 50,000 people, and I'm pretty if you used the materials from each ship, you could get 100,000-250,000 droids per ship. Multiply that by 1,000,000 and suddenly your military is at least 100 billion, and has many more functions than destruction. They can destroy, rebuild, occupy, and protect. They require no food, no water, no air, and unlike in the battle droids in Star Wars, they could be programmed to never surrender. Their accuracy would be much higher, since even with today's technology, we can guide projectiles within inches of the desired target, and lasers would only be more accurate. Add all this onto the military you already have, which was roughly a million men on the "ground" per sector, combined with all the tanks and other vehicles. Then Navy had roughly 4,000 ships and 25 or so Imperial Star Destroyers and all the crew to go with them.

As History has shown, with all else being equal, the more nimble force is the bigger threat. Sure, a Death Star can destroy a planet, but so could several million battle droids that were competently constructed. The difference? You still have that planets resources to construct new droids, replenishing losses and beefing up the force even more.