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After U.S. Army strategist Matt Cavanaugh was deployed to South Korea to work with Korean troops along the border it shared with its hostile northern neighbor, he tried to think of ways to talk to them about his thoughts about warfare. A West Pointer, he’d spent his career immersed in American military history. But he quickly learned that his Korean counterparts had no idea what he was talking about when he tried to talk to them about the Battle of Gettysburg, a confrontation from a civil war far removed from their own experience.
Eventually, he had an epiphany. He began talking to them using examples from a conflict they all knew—the war between the Galactic Empire and the Rebel Alliance. Released in 1979, Star Wars became a global phenomenon and the most successful film franchise in history. Darth Vader, Yoda, Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa and Han Solo are instantly recognizable characters across generations and national borders. Suddenly, his Korean counterparts knew exactly what he was talking about.
When Cavanaugh returned from Korea he became a fellow at the Modern War Institute, an independent think tank hosted at West Point. He told the institute’s editorial director John Amble, an intelligence officer who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, that he wanted to do something with Star Wars. “It’s so universally recognized,” Amble tells Playboy. “You talk to people about that Battle of Hoth, and more people have a better understanding of what you’re talking about than if you bring up the Battle of Iwo Jima or something from military history. Just that so many people are familiar with it that you have a ready-made framework to talk about this stuff.”
The result was Strategy Strikes Back: How Star Wars Explains Modern Conflict, a collection of essays (as well as a recently launched podcast) by military officers, national security experts and others. The forward is written by retired General Stanley McChrystal, and it includes essays by former NATO commander Admiral James Stavridis and Australian Major General Mick Ryan, currently the commander of the Australian Defence College. “They’re all Star Wars geeks,” says Amble. “I don’t think we would have gotten anyone on board if they were lukewarm on Star Wars.”
Saturday Night Live alumnus and World War Z author Max Brooks, whose father Mel Brooks famously parodied Star Wars in Space Balls, is also among the contributors. Brooks gained the attention of national security pros who were impressed by his zombie books and saw them as creative avenues to discuss national security issues and disaster preparedness. He’s a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council and at the Modern War Institute.
Brooks tells Playboy it’s still surreal for him to be in these circles. “The first time I was ever asked to speak at the Naval War College I asked them if they were sure they had the right guy,” he recalls. “Like, are you sure there isn’t a Lieutenant Commander Max Brooks accidentally wandering around Comic Con?”
But Brooks has always been passionate about war and the study of geopolitics. He tells Playboy that growing up, he and his friends would modify their copy of the Axis and Allies board game so that they could recreate World War I instead of World War II. For Brooks it became all too real one day in the SNL writers room as he watched the Twin Towers crash to the ground on September 11. Being in New York that day left a deep impact on Brooks.
“You find any topic being covered in ‘Foreign Policy’ or ‘Military Times,’ and you’ll find it in a ‘Star Wars’ movie. It deals with nation-building. It deals with the erosion of the democratic process. It deals with bureaucracy versus the efficiency of tyranny.”
For Brooks and the other contributors, Star Wars is the perfect intersection of pop culture and weighty sociopolitical issues. “It deals with everything, every single subject that you would find at a Strategic Studies group at the Pentagon,” Brooks explains. “It deals with nation-building, it deals with leadership styles, it deals with mechanized warfare versus insurgency tactics. It deals with the erosion of the democratic process. It deals with bureaucracy versus the efficiency of tyranny. You find any topic being covered in Foreign Policy or Military Times, and you’ll find it in a Star Wars movie.” Brooks’ own essay focuses on making the case for a comprehensive post-war plan for the moon of Endor after the events of Return of the Jedi.
“We thought we were very fortunate in the post-Cold War unipolar American moment where there was no peer or near-peer adversary that could or would face us on the battlefield,” Amble says. “But what that left the door open to were some really messy stability operations and counterinsurgencies that historically we would call ‘small wars’ that end up being categorized by very big challenges.”
As the world grapples with bloody insurgencies, drone warfare, cybersecurity and questions of surveillance, the science fiction world of the Star Wars galaxy seems less distant. “Star Wars really presents some of those same complexities,” says Amble. He points to the use of droids by various factions, as well as the mismatch between the scrappy rebels and the hugely powerful Empire with its Star Destroyers and Death Stars. “Is more technology better?” Amble asks as he points to the way the Rebels—and Ewok insurgents—brought the Empire to its knees.
He says that can give us a new lens to look at some hi-tech programs in the real world, specifically noting the costly and controversial F-35 jet, and pointing out that an increasing reliance on hi-tech solutions can become a crutch and a vulnerability for military forces.
Many of the essays critique the Empire’s approach to warfare and look to what can be learned from its mistakes. Topics include the ethics of Grand Moff Tarkin’s decision to destroy Alderaan with the Death Star and blistering scrutiny of Darth Vader’s counterinsurgency strategy. It’s perhaps ironic that some military professionals—who typically think of themselves as the guardians of Western democracy—would see so much in common with the Empire. But Brooks argues that as a superpower it’s hard not to. “We are, whether we like it or not, Goliath versus David. And we never intended to be Goliath,” he says. “In 1945, the British basically handed America the keys to the world and said ‘we’re going to invent the Beatles’ and then ran away and left us holding the world.”
The world of* Star Wars i*s rich with supporting characters and competing interests. Han Solo, who will be the focus of the forthcoming Solo: A Star Wars Story, offers fans a glimpse into the shadowy underworld of crooks and mercenaries that cared little about the galactic conflict. Largely motivated by profit and pursuing agendas of their own, they nevertheless had a regular impact on the larger war between the Empire and the Rebels.
Brooks points to Jabba The Hutt—whose antagonism with Solo had a huge impact on the events of the films—as a particularly interesting local powerbroker. The imperials could have easily crushed Jabba—a crime lord in the Tatooine desert—but preferred to leave him be because they evidently found him useful. And both the Empire and Jabba hired outside people to handle jobs they couldn’t. “The large, mechanized, bureaucratized empire is incapable of hunting down an insurgent and has to turn to an outside contractor, which is Blackwater Boba Fett,” says Brooks.
“Unwitting Jar Jar Binks essentially elected the Empire. Almost all dictators throughout history are ushered into power by the well-meaning and ignorant.”
The new crop of films have added new layers to the world of *Star Wars *to examine. “I think one of the things I liked about Rogue One was that they finally showed that the rebellion and the rebels were not a monolith,” says Cavanaugh. “Some of them had taken things farther than others were willing to go. And I think that often happens, we’re seeing that right now today in Syria and in much of the Middle East where opposition groups cannot be put in a neat little cereal box—there are a lot of flavors.”
Brooks says that revisiting the prequel films for this project has made him reassess them. While he says that he understands the gripes fans have with them, he thinks they wrestle with important questions about democracy and governance. He points out that ultimately Palpatine’s arguments that bureaucrats are inefficient and should be replaced by strong leaders closely resemble the arguments of the alt-right and of populous movements sweeping Europe. “Unwitting Jar Jar Binks essentially elected the Empire,” says Brooks. “Almost all dictators throughout history are ushered into power by the well-meaning and ignorant.”
Brooks says it’s important for pop culture to tackle the big issues. “As the average citizen, you don’t need to be an expert, but you do need to be thinking. Star Wars is not a military war college, but it is an introduction.” He said that was something that bothered him about fellow artists in the immediate wake of 9/11. “If you go back and look at the sketches we turned out after 9/11, they were the same kind of harmless, innocent, useless pre-9/11 1990s sketches. We didn’t change, and America was hungry to process this…. Friends, the number one show in America, taking place in New York, never dealt with it.”
Of course, there’s also reason to be cautious about looking to pop culture for solutions to real-world problems. After 9/11, the hit television show 24 became a source of heated debate among national security and legal professionals. While speaking about the legal ramifications of torture, the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once infamously told a crowd in Canada that “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles…He saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?”
Some American soldiers who watched 24 drew inspiration from the show’s depiction of torture as they shook down suspected terrorists for information. Cavanaugh says he personally witnessed the impact of action movie role models on troops while fighting overseas. “I served in Iraq in 2003 and 2005, and I swear some guys thought they were in the twenty-fifth hour, envisioning themselves as Kiefer Sutherland.”
Many national security professionals consider torture to be a sloppy and ineffective way of gathering intelligence even without the legal, moral and ethical questions the subject evokes. But in popular culture, torture nearly always works. In recent years, Americans have cheered on tough guy anti-heroes on television and in video games as they engage in torture that’s often depicted as visceral, cathartic and a satisfying comeuppance for bad guys. Even as Hollywood elites have spoken out against American torture programs, some of those same artists have created pop culture that relishes in similar acts of violence.
“Pop culture is not inherently good or bad,” says Brooks. “It can be used for good and evil. The Nazis were masters of that. The Soviets were masters of that…. Any form of art has repercussions.” But in many ways, Cavanaugh argues, that’s all the more reason to study pop culture and take it seriously, whether it’s watching Nazi propaganda films or watching Rocky Balboa punch out Ivan Drago in Rocky IV. “You can really get a sense for what the latter part of the Cold War was like just by watching a greased up Sylvester Stallone,” he says. “You can learn lessons about others, you can learn lessons about yourself. You can sort of use it as a mirror to better understand ourselves.”
“When you get down to it, ‘Star Wars’ is a war. And it’s the one war we all know. It crosses languages, cultures, generations. In the films, you see blockades, rebels, Empires.”
To several generations, the characters of Star Wars were aspirational role models. Perhaps no character exemplifies this shift than Princess Leia’s journey to becoming resistance leader General Organa. Strategy Strikes Back includes an essay by U.S. Army strategist Erica Iverson charting both the on- and offscreen evolution of women’s roles in the military.
“The films themselves actually form kind of an interesting arc for the evolving way that Americans see women and war,” says Cavanaugh. He points out that in 1977, when the first film came out, women in the military were explicitly told any training time they spent with a weapon was to give them “confidence”—not to train them to fight. Today, women are graduating from Ranger School and serving in combat roles. “The Star Wars films have had an impact on and reflect a pretty important change in American strategic culture and the way we view women and war.”
It’s something that connects all the generations currently serving. “If you asked a general or admiral who grew up in the 1930s about science fiction, they’d ask you ‘what, you mean like Flash Gordon?’” says Brooks. “But now if you say ‘Star Wars,’ the generals today were teenagers when it came out.”
Today, American troops are conducting operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Niger, Somalia, Yemen and several other countries. American Navy ships continuously patrol waterways across the globe, and aircraft are constantly moving worldwide to keep these operations supplied. “This is an effort to talk about war with the American people,” says Cavanaugh. “When you get down to it, Star Wars is a war. And it’s the one war we all know. It crosses languages, cultures, generations. In the films you see blockades, rebels, Empires. This is the connecting point.”
Getting Americans to care about war has been a challenge since long before the Twin Towers fell. When Richard Nixon ended the draft in 1973, the baby boomers’ anti-war sentiments quickly morphed into apathy when it became clear they wouldn’t be forced to go to Vietnam. A 2015 survey by the Harvard Institute of Politics polling Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 found that 60 percent of respondents supported sending U.S. combat troops to fight the Islamic State. But tellingly, an almost equal number—62 percent—said they would “definitely not” join the fight personally. An additional 23 percent would “probably not” sign up to serve. That left only 15 percent actually willing to participate in such an endeavor.
“Since 9/11, I have been shocked and awed at the divorce between the American people and those tasked with defending them,” says Brooks. “There’s a Grand Canyon-sized chasm between the two, and I would postulate that some of that was part of a direct plan on the part of the Bush administration—remember Bush made the speech ‘don’t get involved, pray, hug your kids, go to the mall.’ So some of that is the government’s fault. But most of it is our fault. Because we are the government, and we chose not to get involved. We have this professional Army we’re using up, we’re burning through it, we’re breaking it. Because deep down we believe they chose this way of life, and we don’t have to feel guilty about it.”
However, recent events have, to some degree, jolted Americans out of apathy. Between the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and North Korea’s missile tests—coupled with the wars American troops are already fighting—many Americans seem to be paying closer attention. “The U.S. is involved in a lot of fighting right now,” says Cavanaugh. “I’m not making a comment on whether that’s good or bad, my job is to kind of just lay it out there and say ‘what do you want us to do?’ and try to let the American public decide.”
Brooks is more blunt. “There is a willful ignorance that Americans have been living in since the end of the Cold War,” he argues. “But history is back. National borders matter, and big stuff matters. And we can’t afford to be Jar Jar Binks anymore…. The world is way too complicated and way too dangerous for the citizens of the world’s most powerful nation to not give a shit about anything.”