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On the GAR, regulations, idiosyncrasy, and the genesis of Imperial and later First Order military culture

Anybody who’s been in the military knows they love their regulations.

What I've found some people are less aware of is that military culture and regulations are not uniform across the board, not even across services in a single country. Even rules on fraternization can differ; yes, the US UCMJ prohibits fraternization itself, but what constitutes fraternization is not 100% consistent. It’s beyond the scope of this post but I will win if you argue, so…moving on.

And this isn't so much as glancing at the differences in customs and regulations between different countries' services, to say nothing of cultural differences in the way the military fits into government and society, which is not a constant the world over.

Okay so what's your fucking point, you ask?

How would this matter worth a shit for the Grand Army of the Republic which lol totally threw me the first time I heard it ~20 years ago because there was a real life one that was a veterans’ fraternal organization? Well, in short, at the beginning of it, clones aside, they pulled a bunch of people who are not clones and who have never been a part of a melted command structure together and apparently expected them to get along perfectly.

Okay. According to what rules and regulations, customs and protocols?

I think the clones would have a solid grasp of their roles and could be flexible about details. Anyone else? Well…that’s a bit of a different story.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen this discussed before but I think it bears examination. Most discussions of the GAR focus on the clones' experience--and that's more than valid—but also...as prone as people are to blame Tarkin entirely for the behavior of the Imperial military, and the later First Order which became a caricature of the previous generation, I can't imagine Tarkin would be able to manage what he did if the building blocks weren't already there for him to take advantage of. It’s an impulse to blame him entirely, but that’s simply too reductive and avoids a tragic participatory aspect, because Star Wars likes to focus on big bads and not the banality of evil seen in Andor.

What preexisted the GAR? Small, planetary defense forces and corporate fleets. Regional or privatized strength, which, during the Clone Wars was...pooled and then exhausted, leaving a galaxy weakened both economically and in military strength, unable to resist even if it wanted to. I’m pretty sure throughout TCW it’s at least implied the Republic is not doing well economically and needs to be bailed out by an increasingly fucked banking scenario.

My experience except I never watched TCW as a kid in the first place:

I wonder if it might actually be more appropriate to compare GAR top brass to the Austro-Hungarian military which had major issues with things like communication, logistics and competing interests, while the clones’ experience might be more comparable to the US military's historical treatment of black officers and enlisted personnel. For example: a white service member might have not saluted a black officer, or refused to obey orders given by a black officer, and rarely was anything done about it.

But we’re not here to talk about the clones today.

I need folks to understand that throwing a bunch of people together without a carefully thought out plan to execute is a recipe for institutional insanity. A fuckshow wouldn't be the half of it. Yeah, there is coordination between militaries—if we take, say, D-Day for example, different militaries were given individual beaches and coordination was at a high strategic level, it did not mean your privates were all smashed together hehehehe.

And also, during WWII, yes, joint operations were a thing, but perfect coordination is a Hollywood invention. Folks had opinions on one another and they did not always get along. For instance, the Americans thought the Brits took too many breaks. The point is at no point did they fully integrate the militaries of different countries. Coordination =\= integration.

Yeah, it's a cute throwaway line to show how much of a rule-follower Echo is to have him going over the latest reg manuals but having been in the damn military, while it's not rare to update rules and regulations, the Rishi Moon incident took place about a year into the war...

Echo: Personally, I like that it's so quiet out here. We can catch up on the reg manuals.

Okay so...catch up on the reg manuals? Never once in my whole time in the military did I ever feel compelled to catch up on the regs like there were volumes I could possibly fall behind on knowing like there were outdated versions I was still following in error. I knew the damn things. They never changed quickly enough to need to catch up, and when they were changed, it was repeatedly and noisily communicated with zero ambiguity (even when the regs themselves were ambiguous—where they were left up to the interpretation of individual commands or supervisors). Yes, you could read them for detail, maybe to hold someone accountable or to sea/barracks lawyer, but it wasn't something to catch up on.

It's entirely a theory, but I rather think that the GAR's leadership at the levels above frontline troops struggled to find organization until a strongman *coughTarkincough* made everybody shut up and behave. Because that's kind of what happens in institutions when the rules of said organization break down or never existed to begin with: it reverts to personal power or charisma, and while I don't credit Tarkin with much charisma besides massive Regina George energy, he had Palpatine's backing.

What does this mean, in practice? It means that there would likely have been a lot of infighting between non-clones in the GAR, a ton of frustration, and metric tonnage of toxicity all above one group which has no rights and no recourse and is therefore a perfect target to vent their frustration.

A lot of competing voices standing on shifting sand. Yes, senior officers are quite practiced in coordination and working with others, but this is a situation where they would mutually affect each other in ways that would not have happened previously see above. And that’s not counting the ones potentially from corporate fleets: the corporate world operates very differently than the government. This is on purpose and a feature, not a goddamn bug.

All to say, this might have created an incredibly toxic environment which devalued the lives of frontline troops and made them into an outlet for frustration and led to the kind of abuses and disinterest in the value of life such that we see in the Empire. Morale? What’s that, the clones aren’t even people /s

In short, what this probably created before being strong armed into line to was idiosyncrasy. Each officer would likely operate by their own lights in the absence of an apparently mutable set of expectations—my point is, even in reasonably well-functioning, organized systems there can be issues. A chain of command consisting of personnel all hastily thrown together from a bunch of different groups all with their own operating norms and an inconsistent, shifting set of expectations is going to be an absolute. Fucking. Nightmare.

Oh and if Fox is stuck on Coruscant dealing with those fucks, as we see him dealing with Tarkin from about mid-point onward…Fox. Fox honey.

So what does this say about the later Imperial, and much later First Order military culture?

It means you have a brass that is used to treating their frontline troops like cannon fodder, who probably are in less of a hurry to change the way they’ve learned to operate effectively than come out on top, and whose new troops might be encouraged to be even more self-sacrificing than the clones were, because don’t you want to prove you’re better than they were? Not that most of them seemed to value the clones at all; the point is they would have to operate differently.

As for the First Order…well they’re the shittier, more rabid caricature of the Empire, likely kept alive with kids raised on stories told by hard liners that never quit the Empire when it fell which didn’t really capture the sprawling banal reality of it. My evidence for that is Canady and Peavey. They spend TLJ (well, Peavey does, Canady dies fast) unimpressed with Hux.

To summarize: the operating norms of the GAR were the breeding ground for Imperial military culture, and the FO dialed it up to eleven.

I don’t really have much expectations when it comes to Tarkin’s empathy. My guy blew up a whole planet in cold blood after all 🤷🏼‍♀️ still, to react so coldly towards your own niece’s murder… that’s a new level of fucked up 😅

Although it does provide some interesting contrast to “Of MSE-6 and Men” 🤔 Tarkin didn’t have time for failures even if said failure was his own niece. TK-421 failed multiple times. He failed to complete his delivery task on time. Tarkin got knocked down by his fleeing mouse droid in front of a subordinate, and instead of punishing him most severely he ended up falling in love with that grossly incompetent trooper. Then TK failed his first assignment after his promotion that not only got him killed but also led to Leia’s escape. And Tarkin mourned for him, mourned for their shared future that would never come to pass, before the battle that would decide the fate of the Empire no less.

If I had any doubts about what exactly was between Tarkin and TK, I guess this new comic kinda settled it. Tarkin was the worst monster in his time. He finally became human at the end of his life, and eventually that was exactly what doomed him and everyone else on Death Star. (“Live like a beast, and no event, no matter how harrowing, will ever be able to move you.” What if he’s not living like a beast anymore?)

Bonus: we finally got another glimpse at the Tarkin Family Estate and Eriaduan fashion, and in present day no less 😂 (honestly did they give Tarkin a new sibling? Or was that a cousin? Guess we’ll find out soon)