In his first scene, Thrawn is fighting some Imperial troops which are camped in the forest. He figures out that their shield system must let through small forest animals, or they’d be constantly dealing with false alarms. So he tapes bombs to squirrels and blows up the Imperial camp.
Now, I have no idea if this is a legitimately clever military tactic, or if it makes sense that Thrawn is the first person to think of it. I’m not a tactician.
This is also the plot point of a different fantasy story I’ve read, and also not too different from some of the Taliban’s actions in Afghanistan.
I’m sure Zahn knows at least some of them: they are a semi-common trivia point, and stealing from military history is a time-honored strategy—history is far more clever and imaginative than you are, it has built-in verisimilitude (even if they wound up turning out to have never happened, clearly a lot of people believed they could have happened), readers won’t notice, and the ones who do will appreciate your allusion/twist.
If you’ve read the Thrawn books, do you agree with my analysis of why they end up working? Are there factors I missed?
I haven’t read the new ones, as I swore off the EU long ago after finding the NJO cringe, but I find it interesting how different your description is from the original Thrawn trilogy. After all, the entire point of it was that Thrawn was eventually killed at the height of his success when a needlessly elaborate and over-convoluted scheme (recall the definition of the word ‘thrawn’) he executed because it was ‘so artistically done’ backfired on him & he was assassinated. (Planning your campaigns by staring at random artworks for hours is, however entertaining as a novel, also not the sort of thing real generals do to win battles.)
This is also the plot point of a different fantasy story I’ve read, and also not too different from some of the Taliban’s actions in Afghanistan.
Zahn probably got the idea from the many anecdotes/stories of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_animal#As_living_bombs historically going back before the Mongols to even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olga_of_Kiev#Drevlian_Uprising (or earlier https://historyofyesterday.com/5-bizarre-uses-of-animals-as-weapons-in-war-by-armies-7a57108afcb ).
I’m sure Zahn knows at least some of them: they are a semi-common trivia point, and stealing from military history is a time-honored strategy—history is far more clever and imaginative than you are, it has built-in verisimilitude (even if they wound up turning out to have never happened, clearly a lot of people believed they could have happened), readers won’t notice, and the ones who do will appreciate your allusion/twist.
I haven’t read the new ones, as I swore off the EU long ago after finding the NJO cringe, but I find it interesting how different your description is from the original Thrawn trilogy. After all, the entire point of it was that Thrawn was eventually killed at the height of his success when a needlessly elaborate and over-convoluted scheme (recall the definition of the word ‘thrawn’) he executed because it was ‘so artistically done’ backfired on him & he was assassinated. (Planning your campaigns by staring at random artworks for hours is, however entertaining as a novel, also not the sort of thing real generals do to win battles.)