"Those Rebel animals," Grand Admiral Sloane said, softly, as the report came in – the Star Destroyer Haruspex had been effectively hulked by some form of sabotage, the details unclear but it had involved something to do with a reactor breach.
Whether it had been internal sabotage, manufacturing sabotage, or a bomb infiltrated onto the ship… that wasn't yet known.
"This must be something to do with the New Republic," the officer added. "If they want a war, we'll have to give them one. Rollo!"
"Ma'am?" Rollo Yarnet asked.
"Run me the numbers," she requested. "Can we do some kind of deniable strike on some New Republic system? Or… something that will stop them from doing this?"
"Well," Yarnet began, and his tone of voice made Sloane sigh.
"I'm not going to like this answer, am I?" she asked, testily. "All right, let's hear it."
"To put it simply… no," Yarnet replied. "Not for, and I use this term advisedly, Admiral – generations."
Sloane blinked.
"...what?" she asked. "What do you mean, we can't do anything for generations?"
She swept her hand across. "The New Republic's military is far smaller than it should be – it's not even as big as ours is! We should be able to break loose a strike force, at least."
"That would be very difficult," Yarnet said. "For… well, generations, as noted."
"Then explain, Rollo," Sloane snapped. "Explain to me how the decadent Old Republic could build a fleet to shake the galaxy in months, but for us it's impossible!"
She was shouting by the end, and Yarnet folded his arms behind his back.
"We are not the Old Republic," he said, succinctly. "Nor, I will note, are we the Empire, though we are structured much the same. The problem is scale… and, chiefly, legitimacy."
Graphs appeared on the bridge holoprojector, and he pointed at them helpfully.
"The Old Republic was militarily extremely weak, for its production capacity, size and legitimacy," he said. "Decadent, as you called it. But it was the unquestioned, elected government of most of the galaxy, however skewed those elections were – it was believed to be the elected government. The people who lived under the Republic may have thought it was basically useless for many purposes, but they did not question that the Republic was who should be in charge of them. The Separatist movement was largely driven by rich companies, who exploited what legitimate grievances did exist for their own purposes, but in many cases those rich companies brought their own manufacturing industries to the table – and, of course, did not require heavy contributions of labour or resources from most of the Separatist worlds."
Yarnet glanced across. "I won't dissemble here, Grand Admiral. The Separatists were created to be defeated by the Emperor; this was generally fairly well concealed during the Emperor's reign but is considered to be more or less evident now. The important point here is that the Old Republic represents what we can call the mobilization model of economic output – the people in the Republic believed that it had a legitimate claim on their effort, and their population and economic base was so vast that it did not require a significant contribution from any given world to field a vast fleet… which, of course, crushed the Separatist fleet."
He shrugged. "The Separatists were largely raised through what we can call the existing power model – they simply already had significant production assets and private armies and put them at the disposal of the Separatist state, but loss of those facilities was crippling to Separatist war production."
Sloane's expression had been stormy since Yarnet mentioned the Separatist's being created to be defeated, but she controlled her initial reaction.
"I don't believe you about the purpose behind the Separatist movement, but… I suppose it's not especially germane," she said. "So… we have a problem because the New Republic is bigger? The Empire was bigger than the Rebel Alliance, but they wanted victory more. Isn't that why they're now in charge?"
"No," Yarnet told her. "The cause of the rapid collapse of the Empire's military position is because of the Empire's economic and military system – it was what is called a military-tributary empire. That is, the Empire's military – originally built up under the Republic, I will note, and subsequently modernized – used the threat of military force to extract value from systems under Imperial control, ultimately dismantling every other power structure that did not represent the ability to exert violence. This permitted higher productivity from an individual system…"
His voice trailed off.
"...so what's the problem?" Sloane asked.
"Most of the value extracted from the systems went into maintaining the military that provided the threat of violence," Yarnet explained. "I actually did my dissertation on this. In hindsight, the tipping point was probably reached in about Imperial Year Twenty or Twenty-One."
"Tipping point?" Sloane repeated. "Explain."
"If the military sustains losses that are too severe and its image of invincibility is too sharply damaged, then a runaway collapse can take place," Yarnet said. "Unrest grows, demanding harsher suppression to maintain productivity, meaning that more and more of the capacity of the military is occupied in simply keeping the extractive system running; at the same time, the ability of the Rebels to recruit assets expands."
He highlighted a graph. "By Imperial Year Twenty-Three and the Battle of Endor, the Emperor was attempting to stabilize the situation with a second Death Star, but effectively the entire Imperial military not constituting the garrisons and nodal forces running the extractive systems was present at Endor – and, I will note, lost the battle, leaving a weakened but still extant Rebel fleet."
Sloane was frowning. She hadn't heard this before, but she could run a strategic analysis.
"So… there were no longer any good options?" she said.
"Correct," Yarnet agreed. "Surrendering a large portion of the galaxy and concentrating the fleet for a fighting retreat, maintaining both a sufficient fleet in being to punish Rebel attempts to accelerate the timeline, would have probably allowed the Empire to retain extractive control over that reduced area for longer, but instead the caretaker government engaged in the Jakku campaign."
"Shavit," Sloane muttered. "So… hold on. The New Republic is seen as legitimate and so they had the ability to build ships quickly, because their population was actually putting in effort without blasters to their heads, while we were pulling out ships and our productive capacity cratered… okay, I see how the collapse happened. But-"
She stopped, and ran through the numbers again.
The First Order had a fleet, still… but it was mostly spread out into, as Yarnet had put it, garrison and nodal forces running the extractive systems.
She looked again at the screen showing the hulk of Haruspex.
"Are we past the tipping point?" she asked. "Should I be calling for a withdrawal and consolidation – would that even help?"
Yarnet was silent for several seconds.
"I don't… think we are," he said, eventually. "But it's close. In fact, Admiral, I would say that we need at least one of two things. Urgent peace with the New Republic, not merely a cold war… or to focus on building legitimacy of our own. To reach a point where our civilians will work without blasters to their heads – simply reaching that point effectively frees up our entire military for campaign."
"That would take decades, even if I could get the rest of high command to sign off on it," Sloane said, then groaned and rubbed her temples. "Which is… exactly your point. Right."
She sighed. "All right. Is there any other way we can resolve this?"
Yarnet frowned.
"Well," he said. "If we were not the successors to the Empire and presenting ourselves as such, we probably could expand and recruit other smaller powers into our overall structure, but we are the successors to the Empire and that would obviously require too many aliens in positions of authority. If we had a superweapon then we could intimidate the New Republic into backing down and that might let us expand our control without needing to maintain the ability to fend off a possible attack… and of course if the New Republic got rid of their entire military, we wouldn't have any opposition anyway. But aside from that the only thing I can see that would break the logic of the situation would be if we got hold of several hundred fully crewed capital ships that appeared out of thin air. In that circumstance we would be able to destroy the New Republic fleet in being, and then re-establish a tributary empire over enough of the galaxy to overcome the New Republic on a medium term basis – essentially the Separatist theory of victory."
Sloane sat down.
"So, no, then," she said.
"More or less," Yarnet agreed. "You did ask."
AN:
Turns out, running an empire through violent extraction instead of inherent legitimacy is actually quite fragile. (Drawn from the idea of the "Hellenistic glass jaw" as discussed on ACOUP.)