A Flanking Maneuver Into The Killbox: A Valentine’s Tactical Assessment of The Battle of Hoth

It is Valentine’s Day, which means that couples everywhere are discussing matters of the heart. They are having heart-to-hearts about their relationships. Their futures. Their dreams. And, if that couple has been together for a while and know each other in a truly intimate manner, they discuss things that truly matter. Things such as the shortsighted and deeply flawed attack plan that Darth Vader launched following Admiral Ozzel’s clumsy and stupid drop from hyperspace into Hoth orbit, where he used overwhelming armored forces to achieve exactly fuckall, due to his apparent belief that a “flanking maneuver” is a Correllian sexual position, and that a “killbox” is a derogatory euphemism for a skilled laboress who trades in the Correllian Flanking Maneuver.

Well, it’s a good thing that, earlier this week, Wired Magazine published a lengthy article by defense blogger Spencer Ackerman discussing, in fairly low-level detail, the tactics used by Darth Vader and his attack fleet during the Battle of Hoth, a battle that only a week ago I would have sworn under oath that I knew more about than not only any American military battle, but also knew better than any of my childhood fistfights.

Turns out? Yeah, not so much. It turns out that the heroic escape of the Rebels in the face of overwhelming evil and incredible odds was, instead, the military equivalent of suckerpunching a kid in a helmet who drew up his battle plan with Crayolas.

In great detail including interactive maps, detailed battleground diagrams and easy to understand language, Ackerman, in a single page, demystifies the Battle of Hoth from an epic struggle between good and evil into a shitfaced game of Risk played between two Freshman Poly-Sci majors. Among the ridiculous tactical errors Ackerman points out:

• The Rebellion gathered the entirety of their core leadership and most effective fighters into a single base on a single planet under a single shield, putting them in a position where they could all be wiped out by a particularly aggressive Chewbacca Tandoori fart.
• The Rebel’s defense shield stops incoming artillery, but it allows ships to penetrate it and land, while simultaneously preventing their own ships from escaping from anywhere outside the line of sight of the ion cannon while it’s operational. Meaning that either the Rebels Armorer is a guy who thinks “Front Towards Enemy” is an instruction you give to a Correllian Killbox, or that he really needs to stop buying his defensive ordnance from Crazy Watto’s House of Child Slave-Built Crap Tech™.
• The Empire, rather than taking advantage of the fact that the Rebels can only escape in one direction, instead send their Star Destroyers all around the planet to blockade it, leaving that single direction vastly less defended than it could have been. This is probably either because Vader also likes to assign a detachment of Stormtroopers to defend his collection of Battlefield Earth DVDs and copies of Dianetics, or because Imperial Human Resources have banned the use of the word “killbox” as being potentially offensive to Correllian skanks.
• After an extended battle, the AT-ATs manage to destroy the shield generator, opening the Rebel Base up to bombardment… that never comes because Vader has gone all Captain Kirk and led an away team to the base to carve himself off a piece of Rebel tail. Rebel tail that has already fled the base. So when it comes to chasing tail, Vader is a day late and a buck short, possibly explaining why he spends so much time locked in his isolation chamber polishing the ol’ helmet.

So go check out the entire thing so you have something to talk about over Valentine’s Day dinner! Once you explain to your lady how the Empire might have lost due to lack of air support for the AT-ATs and the failure to send one walker, I dunno, maybe right or left or somewhere other than in a straight fucking line towards the cannons, you can be sure that the ol’ Killbox’ll give up the Flanking Maneuver. Or perhaps the Tattooine Force Choke, if that’s how you swing (remember: the safety phrase is, “It’s a trap!”).