FudgeDiver wrote:Alvin Flummux wrote:FudgeDiver wrote:Alvin Flummux wrote:The Watching Artist wrote:Tafdolphin wrote:EDIT: I reeeeeeeally like that second possible opening though. That would have been a fantastic way to start.
You'd have to come up with a decent logical reason for dumping it.
My guess is that they'd have to turn Jakku into an official military dump for the New Republic, not unlike the USAF's Boneyard.
You forget that the republic decided to disband their military despite the empire not being completely defeated because the writers for the new trilogy are literal troglodytes
Pretty sure they still had a navy to protect the government, which is what all the ships, personnel and other resources of the Resistance were drawn from. That navy was wiped out when Starkiller did its thing.
Going by the wiki, they cut the military by 90%. The Resistance was an illegal organisation formed by Leia after she got kicked out for being Vaders daughter and then calling them retards. No matter how you look at it, the decision to cut arms like that is literally nothing anyone would agree to. Hell the strawberry floating arms companies, which Last Jedi likes to hamfistedly wobble at you in an attempt of relevance, supplied the Republic/rebel alliance. Theyd surely have some friends in senate thatd block it from passing.
Compared to this, Lucas was practically Shakespeare
I've not read the books set in that era, or the Wiki, but if I had to rationalize it, I might liken it to the pre-WW2 era; when all the people who served in WW1 as junior officers, regular soldiers etc were by that time in influential senior military, government etc roles, and nobody wanted to face a return to the horrors of the last war. This fear in Star Wars' context might translate to a near deafness to the warnings of Leia and others about the First Order's rumored/reported activities, a chronic over-cautiousness, and a general deep seated unwillingness to militarize on a large scale, as the Empire beforehand had. Perhaps there was also a fear that a large New Republic military might fall under the sway of malevolent forces operating in the shadows, and that steps must be taken to minimize that kind of threat too.
Maybe there was some financial stuff as well - nobody knows what kind of fiscal state the galaxy's banking institutions, nor the government itself, were in after the reconstitution of the Republic.
I'm just going to put it down to those kinds of forces at work in the minds and wallets of the New Republic leadership.