Strategy and Tactics in The Clone Wars.

The Clone Wars, surprisingly, features combat! I know, crazy innit?

I want to discuss the tactics and strategy used in the show. Sometimes we are given excellent maneuvers that make sense in the context of the show, other times we get monumentally stupid battle strategies that seem designed to inflict maximum meaningless casualties.

One such disaster is Anakin's brilliant diversion tactic to have an entire company walk straight towards the droids in parade marching into open ground. Not only is this suicidal, but it is also detrimental.

Even the droids would think that such a movement would seem suspicious, and it also means that the diversion is shorter. Increased casualties for less damage. If the company had moved towards the factory the normal way clones would, using cover and air support, the droids might think it was an actual attack, rather than an obvious ploy.

This scene bothered me a lot, so I made this thread.

Lets discuss the tactics and battle movements used in The Clone Wars.

 

That surprised me as well. Granted Luminara did say it was crazy, but generally the idea with that kind of strategy is to force the enemy to focus their full attention on you rather than ask them to please come out and kick your butt.

The thing that really bothered me was way back in season 1 - in downfall of a droid grievous goes through the asteroid field because "attacking from above would give them the advantage" uhhh, the top of the ship is where that giant hangar full of fuel and unloaded ordnance just asking to be blown up is. Could we not have gone with "they won't see us coming if we hide in the asteroid fields" instead of having the supposed general completely ignorant of the venator design's glaring weakness?

They do seem overall to have gotten better though. The invasion of geonosis seemed to have much more thought put into it than Ryloth did, between landing at different areas and the mentions of battles going on in other parts of the planet, and Yularen actually saying he couldn't afford to divert resources, Landing at Point Rain felt much more like a piece of a planet-wide invasion than Innocents of Ryloth did.

 

Tactics and Strategy have definitely been all over the place on the show.

But to this day, my favorite strategy they've used was in Storm over Ryloth when they banked the Resolute on its side to protect the hangars and bridge. That was the first time I saw "strategy" used with capital ships, rather than just having them stand formation and fire at the enemies.

Another great example was in "Grievous Intrigue" when Anakin exited hyperspace very close to Grievous' ship so they wouldn't be detected. Not sure if this one holds up though, since we've seen the Sepies being able to detect ships coming out of hyperspace before they do so, but we can argue that in the heat of battle, they wouldn't be paying attention to that sort of thing. So we'll let that one slide.

Also, I think the pod hunters are some of the most effective devises the Sepies have used. We've seen them several times now and they always work!

Worst tactic:

Anakin and the cloaking ship in "Cat and Mouse". I still find it far-fetched that it only took him like 2 seconds to figure out the admiral's "brilliant" strategy to detect cloaked vessels. That whole scenario just seemed forced to me.

 

I wish I could have seen the battle of Dorin. Anakin must have done something amazing to win a space battle in the vicinity of two black holes.

 

That would be the Marg Sabl Maneuver, one of the things from the EU they did
right.

 

I've seen and read about a lot of battles that were pretty straight-forward by now, but I realise it is very hard to come up with an original strategy. However, this is one of the reasons I really want to see Oppo Rancisis on the show, since he's probably the best strategist in the galaxy.

 

I think it would do the writers of the show a lot of good to read The Art of War.

 

Unfortunately a lot of what he writes is totally contrary to how the Jedi prefer to do things, Sun Tzu basically advises that you don't fight unless you're relatively sure you'll win, Jedi go for a fight anytime they think it's the right thing to do and they have even the slightest chance of winning. Anakin obviously is the epitome of this. Some of what Sun Tzu says is also impractical politically, specifically that he'd no doubt advise leaving some worlds totally undefended to secure ones that are strategically valuable, but leaving people to the mercy of the the opposing faction like that looks *really* bad and you'd get half the senate/separatist council pitching fits even if it's the correct military choice. I think it would be good if they incorporated a Jedi or an Admiral who thought this way, but I don't think they could turn it into the Republic's or Separatist's general strategy at this point.

As for Cat and Mouse, the biggest issue I had was Trench not firing at Anakin when it became clear what his tactic was. He might've at least shot down some of the incoming missiles.

 

That sounds a lot more like Darth Revan's strategy. Leave planets to die to fortify strategic points.

 

It is indeed. Another element of Sun Tzu that found its way into Revan's strategy was the idea of capture being preferable to destruction - it was mentioned in both games Revan preferred to keep the worlds he took largely intact so they could be used later whereas Malak was much more brute force. Some of the comments about Revan's strategy for turning Jedi, preying on their weaknesses and "assassinating Jedi psychologically" in the second game also bear some resemblance to the early sorts of psychological warfare Sun Tzu wrote on. Drew Karpyshyn (or whoever wrote those bits) clearly had read Art of War

Jedi by and large don't think like that - too hung up on doing the ethically rightest thing at all times, which obviously denies them some options which makes it harder for them to win. I'd love to see Anakin or another Jedi who's less light-sided try to fight in more practical terms than moralistic ones, particularly after the whole Zillo beast incident and Palpatine's arguments in favor of practicality over morality. Making Anakin the Revan of the clone wars would certainly be a very interesting direction for them to go.