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Danger Room

Defense Nerds Strike Back: A Symposium on the Battle of Hoth

The ground attack was a sideshow; the real mistakes were in orbit. Image: Lucasfilm

Hoth Showed Imperial Overstretch

The Battle of Hoth is difficult to understand without considering Imperial political order. Professor Daniel Nexon argues that empires maintain control through indirect rule and contractual relationships. The Empire is no exception, as coercion alone would be prohibitively expensive in a galactic polity. We don’t know how much wealth the Empire could draw on from its subordinate polities, but even an optimistic estimate still doesn’t change the fact that military operations in space require expensive capital-intensive military platforms, logistics, and expert technical personnel.

The Empire had no local partners on Hoth, and Vader commanded a large personal armada that was nonetheless barely adequate for the daunting task of completely blocking off both Hoth’s surface and orbital expanse. A much larger ground force with air superiority met with similarly subpar results during the Clone War’s Battle of Geonosis. In contrast, all the Rebel Alliance needed to do was evacuate its elites and reconstitute its forces elsewhere. As Graham Jenkins points out in this roundtable, the Rebels deserve credit for their tenacious — and effective — delaying battle.

Why didn’t the Empire devote more resources to Hoth? It’s hard to tell from the Canon alone. Maybe other political machinations necessitated competing Imperial deployments. Palpatine, intending to replace Vader with Luke Skywalker, may also have been wary about giving his heavy-breathing subordinate a larger force than the substantial units Vader already commanded. Finally, supporting large expeditionary forces and building the second Death Star likely strained Imperial finances. Despite Vader’s operational errors and structural disadvantages, the outcome was still dangerously close for the Rebel Alliance. Imperial command decisions were not the dominant factor in Imperial strategic failure.

Adam Elkus is a Ph.D. student in International Relations at American University.