An example is the purchase manager who’s willing to walk away from a 6 month negotiation process if one measly line item in the contract isn’t changed. One of the more effective negotiation tactics, from a game theory perspective, is to convince your opponent that you’re crazy enough to do something stupid. The strategic calculus of the Death Star, on the other hand, may be more rewarding. It may produce them at a higher cost than would justify the operation of the factory, but at least at the end of the day there’s some shirts. Even the shittiest factory in the world at least produces crappy T-shirts. Thousands of lives are lost and millions of man-hours are spent producing things that will break, explode or be exploded. War in general makes poor economic sense.

That would require long-term occupations in several places, and even in this long-ago, far-away place, Halliburton’s prices are steep. The loss of Alderaan hurts, but is better than letting the rebellion spread to other planets. Based on the number if representatives in the senate we see in the prequels, there are hundreds of planets in the empire. You need an unaccountable monarch to make the ruthless decisions required to hold disparate cultures together.Īs for the economics, it really depends on the number of planets in the empire. This dichotomy is why I don’t think you can have a democratic empire. Why else would the rebels set up shop in such an inhospitable place? There’s not a planet with Cancun-like weather anywhere in the Empire? He nukes Alderaan and so all the habitable planets have turned the rebels away – too afraid of the Empire’s new weapon. Like Truman and Hiroshima, he need to prove to everybody that he was willing to use it. Palpatine, the absolute monarch, had a new apocalyptic technology. To my mind, this is why the rebels are on Hoth in the second film. Of course, the American people wouldn’t have accepted that course of action and the Afghans and Pakistanis knew it. Pakistan would be a lot more hesitant to shelter them.

Imagine if we’d just nuked every town in Afghanistan in 2001. One key part of our strategy, preventing the Taliban from sheltering inside Pakistan, has failed completely because so many Pakistanis welcome the Taliban. Did these stormtroopers have problems with blaster fire accuracy?Īs America has learned in recent years, chasing down rebels is hard.

Star wars empire at war death star