“Dramatizations conceal some of the more important aspects of the Battle of Hoth. Hoth, though short, was a bloody battle, and exceptionally so among the elite soldiers and officers among both the Empire and the Rebel Alliance. (These elites, of course, had both been trained in the Haut Ecole Militaire du Republique; some of the “predictabilities” of their tactics rose from their common training and reading.) The Empire, in particular, lost more than half of the Imperial Guard in this “minor action”; although it could still command the great ships of the Navy, it no longer had a trained corps available for ground action. The hastily scraped-up infantry of the post-Hoth Empire, a combination of raw recruits and clones–the latter never suitable for operations involving initiative or expertise–were much reduced in ability; their inability to fend off the poorly-armed indigenes of Ewok was dramatic, but characteristic of the general degradation of Imperial ground capabilities following Hoth.

The decimation of the Rebel cadres was likewise of great consequence. The elite of the Rebel Alliance died in the defense of Hoth; this was also the human-Coruscant elite, and thereafter the balance of power within the Rebel Alliance shifted to the non-human Federates of the Alliance. The rise of Admiral Ackbar is emblematic of this transformation. It should be mentioned that there are persisting rumors that Ackbar conveyed the location of Hoth to the Empire, and then arranged for his portion of the Alliance Fleet to be “undergoing retrofit in the Setif Asteroids” during the Hoth campaign. This is entirely plausible of the being who would rise to be Life President of the New Republic, but these remain no more than rumors. In either case, Hoth remains an inflection point in Galactic history, the point where the civil war within the Human-Coruscant metropole so enfeebled it that it lost the long-term ability to maintain control of the Republic-Empire. While it would be too bold to say that this was a decisive turning point, it would likewise be too bold to say that it was merely an episode in an inevitable longue duree. Before Hoth, the Human-Coruscant hegemony seemed unchallengeable; afterward, it did not. We should not undervalue this contemporary perception–not least since such perceptions themselves played a role in the ensuing torrent of military and political developments. Without Hoth, the Ackbar Dynasty may well have been unthinkable.”