Ahsoka‘s first season concluded with the New Republic on the precipice of the greatest challenge to its nascent power yet seen in this period of contemporary Star Wars continuity: the return of Grand Admiral Thrawn to the galaxy far, far away, backed by dark Dathomiran magics and an undead army at his command. We’ve known for a long time that all this—and Ahsoka season two and The Mandalorian & Grogu—are building to one of the most important films in Lucasfilm’s ever-evolving Star Wars slate in the form of Dave Filoni’s “Mandoverse” team-up movie, pitting the New Republic against the Imperial Remnant. We know it’s heavily inspired by Timothy Zahn’s legendary novel trilogy Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, and The Last Command… but how exactly did Thrawn go about assaulting the galaxy in those books?
Commonly referred to in the Expanded Universe as the Thrawn Campaign, Grand Admiral Thrawn’s remnant movement rises and falls over the course of a few months, just five years after Return of the Jedi in 9ABY. But despite its briefness, the Thrawn Campaign set the stage for an incredibly volatile moment in the galaxy, putting the still-fledgling New Republic on the back foot while also setting the stage for a future solidification of the Imperial Remnant as a system of power. Time will tell just how much current Star Wars continuity will pull directly from Zahn’s work—even if not directly, there are already some interesting parallels—but here’s how it went down the first time the galaxy learned of the true threat of Thrawn.
Early Engagements
The state of the galaxy heading into the Thrawn Campaign was a period of uneasy, but hard-achieved peace for both the New Republic and the remnants of the Empire. The former’s war against Warlord Zsinj had ended one of the most potent threats to the nascent New Republic, after a series of offensives lead by various commanders in the New Republic military pushed back Imperial space and denied the Empire access to vital material and, more crucially, resources for recruitment, heavily diminishing the effective capability of the Imperial naval and armed forces.
The New Republic itself, while victorious against Zsinj, similarly found itself stretched thin and depleted by its ongoing military campaigns. The loss of the capabilities of the Kuat shipyards during a tactical self-inflicted sabotage campaign by Kuat Drive Yards significantly restricted the production capabilities of one of the premiere sources of capital ships, and by 9ABY the galaxy had settled into something of an entente cordiale, drawing back from direct conflict to consolidate resources. It’s in this moment that Thrawn made his gambit: taking respected veteran Imperial officer Gilad Pellaeon as his second-in-command, Thrawn began a series of campaigns against pirates in Imperial space to gain support and resources from the remaining Moffs, slowly but steadily raising his status through his tactical acumen.
By the time Thrawn was ready to begin engaging the New Republic, he commanded two fleets of six Star Destroyers, including his personal flagship, the Chimaera. But the now nominal Supreme Commander of the Imperial Navy also realized that he needed tactical advantages beyond what his minimal fleets could provide. Thrawn returned to the planet Honoghr to re-affirm the Noghri’s loyalty to the Empire after the death of Darth Vader, who they had revered as the savior of their world (although Vader and the Empire actually secretly kept Honoghr slowly dying), gaining access to their warriors as elite operatives and commandos, as well as a personal Noghri bodyguard in Rukh.
While using his fleets to begin poking at the edges of New Republic space and get insight into its tactical strategies, Thrawn further looked to bolster his resources. After a skirmish with the New Republic at the library world of Obroa-skai, Thrawn learned of the planet Wayland, and Emperor Palpatine’s secret storage of technology and artifacts within a facility built in Mount Tantiss. It’s at Tantiss that Thrawn secured three of his most vital aids for the early days of his campaign: a series of Spaarti clone cylinders, which let Thrawn mass produce clones of Imperial officers to replenish his forces; designs for cloaking technology to hide his ships; and Mount Tantiss’ Dark Jedi guardian, the clone Joruus C’Baoth. Utilizing access to Force-dampening creatures he had secured in a deal with the smuggler Talon Karrde, the Ysalamiri, Thrawn made an uneasy alliance with C’Baoth, offering the capture of Jedi siblings Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa-Solo (as well as Organa-Solo’s unborn twins) to C’Baoth for training. In exchange, Thrawn would receive the aid of C’Baoth’s Force mastery in the art of battle meditation, allowing the Dark Jedi to aid relaying commands to Thrawn’s ships where conventional communication was impossible, giving him a significant advantage even with lesser numbers.
Thrawn immediately began putting these advantages to work. With access to thousands of rapidly created clones—manufactured in a matter of weeks rather than the conventional year-minimum, their stability maintained by seeding Mount Tantiss with Ysalamiri—Thrawn suddenly had the capability to commit to a series of lighting attacks across the Inner and Mid-Rim, using the mobility he gained from not having a major base of operations to be able to guide forces where the New Republic’s defenses were weaker. In an early attempt to bolster his fleets, Thrawn raided Lando Calrissian’s mining business at Nkllon, gaining access to a raft of mole miners that he then used in a cloaked assault on the Sluis Van shipyards, where the New Republic was currently in the process of retrofitting military ships into transport vessels to aid its struggling supply lines.
Although Thrawn was foiled at Sluis Van by the actions of Calrissian himself, it was a Pyrrhic victory for the New Republic. Calrissian was forced to use his stolen miners to completely disable the capital ships before Thrawn’s forces could steal them, denying access to both the Empire and the Republic. But while the secret of Thrawn’s use of clone armies was outed at Sluis Van, the New Republic didn’t have time to capitalize on the shock emergence of this dangerous new force. Unbeknownst to its highest chains of command, Thrawn was exploiting the use of Delta Source, a Clone War-era surveillance system in the heart of the Imperial Palace (now the heart of the New Republic’s power structure) to gain insight on his foes, creating a political crisis that climaxed with Bothan senator Borsk Fey’lya getting Admiral Ackbar, the New Republic’s most senior commander, arrested for treason—significantly frustrating the New Republic’s response to the threat of Thrawn.
Dark Forces Rising
While the political quagmire instigated by Fey’lya was resolved relatively quickly, Thrawn leveraged the New Republic’s inability to effectively respond to his mobility by continuing to assault key New Republic worlds, doing enough damage not to outright destroy New Republic defenses, but damage them enough to force the New Republic to spread its limited assets even more thinly. Meanwhile, Thrawn focused on his next major gambit: finding the legendary missing Katana Fleet, a huge arsenal of Old Republic capital ships driven by slave-rigged machine networks allowing it to be controlled by a fraction of the necessary sentient crew. Although most of the Katana Fleet was destroyed shortly after its maiden voyage through sabotage, rumors that a fraction of its surviving ships had persisted throughout the fall of the Republic and the reign of the Empire.
Operating on intelligence acquired from Karrde and other smugglers, Thrawn ascertained the location of roughly 200 remaining capital ships from the Katana Fleet. Although the New Republic attempted to get to the ships before Thrawn could, in the ensuing battle Thrawn successfully managed to capture 178 of the Katana ships, significantly bolstering his naval capability. Now with access to a fleet capable of wiping the New Republic out, Thrawn’s campaign could begin in earnest—even as cracks in his coalition began to form. C’Baoth’s increasing degradation into insanity saw him slowly but surely attempt to consolidate his own power within the Empire away from Thrawn’s ambitions, while on Honoghr Leia Organa-Solo managed to successfully reveal the Empire’s poisoning of the world to the Noghri, fomenting their rebellion against Imperial control.
But even with these looming setbacks, Thrawn now had the upper hand on practically every front of the conflict. The Katana ships allowed Thrawn to launch simultaneous attacks on a large number of worlds, drawing responses from the New Republic’s forces that led to them increasingly losing fights. His suddenly amplified threat began to threaten the destabilization of the New Republic’s already unsteady support, as worlds informally committed to the New Republic began declaring re-allegiance to the Empire the closer Thrawn drew to the core worlds. Thrawn also leveraged his expanded fleet to capitalize on resource acquisition that was already stymying the New Republic’s response rate: Thrawn returned to Nkllon and razed Lando’s holdings to the ground, acquiring vital material that now could no longer aid the Republic; then, using the tactics of his cloaked vessels to trick his rivals into believing he had access to a planetary superweapon capable of subverting shield systems, he successfully managed to occupy the agriworld Ukio in a single offensive, gaining access to a significant source of food.
As Thrawn marched closer and close to the galactic core, arguably the height of his campaign’s success saw him come close to the brink of total victory. He drew New Republic forces away from Imperial Center on Coruscant with a feint attack on Mrisst, a world in the colonies sector between the Inner Rim and the Core. The distraction not only ended with Thrawn’s occupation of the world, but an opening for him to besiege Coruscant directly. Although a last-minute reinforcement from Corellian general Garm Bel Iblis saved Coruscant from being drawn into a devastating battle for occupation, Thrawn still managed to put Coruscant out of the conflict entirely for either side, using a series of cloaked asteroids to effectively blockade the planet entirely.
The Collapse at Bilbringi
The loss of Coruscant, even if not directly placing it under Imperial control once more, was a debilitating blow to the New Republic war effort. Hundreds upon hundreds of systems, already only loosely committed to the New Republic’s grasp on power, began declaring neutrality or allegiance to Thrawn, his victory seemingly assured. The Republic had little choice but to allow Thrawn’s forces to effectively take control of the war as its own remaining military capacity was gathered for one final counteroffensive at the Bilbringi shipyards. Commanded by Ackbar in an attempt to secure sensor array technology that could detect Thrawn’s asteroids and break Coruscant’s blockade, the New Republic relied on a similar tactic to the one the Rebellion had deployed on the eve of its similarly desperate assault on the second Death Star.
Just as the Alliance had hoped to feint the Empire away from Endor with an assault on Sullust, Ackbar committed a small fleet to the Imperial fortress world of Tangrene in the Outer Rim. But just as was the case at Endor, Thrawn saw through Ackbar’s strategy and ascertained that Bilbringi was the Republic’s true target, setting a trap to destroy the remnants of the New Republic once and for all. Using interdictor cruisers to bring the New Republic fleet out of hyperspace outside of the shipyards, Thrawn’s offensive line encircled the surprised Republic forces and began hammering them in the confusion.
But Thrawn’s tactical genius couldn’t stop the destiny of those aforementioned cracks in his coalition coming home to roost. Firstly, little did Thrawn know that Karrde—a former partner turned opponent by Thrawn’s repeated haranguings and betrayals of his smuggling business—had successfully coalesced a union of similarly disgruntled smuggler factions into the Smuggler’s Alliance, who were already inside Bilbringi attempting to steal the sensor technology. Declaring for the Republic and attacking Thrawn’s forces from within, the Republic and the Smuggler’s alliance successfully breached the Imperial defensive line… at which point Rukh promptly assassinated Thrawn.
Incapacitating Pellaeon as he reported on a Nohgri-allied assault on C’Baoth at Mount Tantiss, Rukh speared Thrawn through the chest with his knife, pinning the Grand Admiral to his command chair as he bled out, before being killed himself during his attempted escape. With Thrawn’s death and the tide slowly turning against the Imperial Fleet, a recovered Pellaeon, now in acting in command of Thrawn’s forces, realized without Thrawn’s acumen the campaign against the New Republic was unsustainable, ordering a full retreat into the Unknown Regions. With the team at Tantiss (lead by Han, Luke, Leia, former Hand of the Emperor Mara Jade) successfully killing C’Boath, the Thrawn crisis was over.
The Legacy of the Thrawn Campaign
If the post-Zsinj campaigns had pressed both the Imperial Remnant and the New Republic into a state of peace through degradation, the Thrawn Campaign was an even more rapid and devastating reduction in both faction’s capacities. The New Republic, already struggling to maintain legitimacy in its claims over territory, lost nearly a third of its member regions over the course of the campaign. Its military was also significantly damaged, losing up to 40% of its capacity between outright loss or damage. Meanwhile, cracks had already begun to form in the trust between various members of the upper echelon of the Republic’s ruling council that would only be compounded further by the immediate assaults by the cloned Palpatine as well as the temporary loss of Coruscant, setting the stage for flashpoints like the Caamas document crisis to emerge down the line.
While the Thrawn Campaign could be seen as ultimately being a strategic victory for the Empire due to the sheer damage inflicted on the New Republic, in the immediate future the Empire still found itself in a similarly degraded position. The immediate rise and fall of a new Imperial coalition in the wake of the death of the cloned Palpatine and the forces he had amassed at Byss during Thrawn’s campaign only served to keep the Empire in a fractured, compromised state, one that would take it the best part of a decade to coalesce into a formal Imperial Remnant thanks to the aid of Pellaeon. With the formal end of the Galactic Civil War in 19ABY, both the Remnant and the New Republic settled into a more stable peace… at least, for a little while. This is Star Wars, after all.
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