Rebel Alliance

• 1. Introduction

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  The Rebel Alliance, formally the Alliance to Restore the Republic, measures all of history from a single battle. In the Star Wars calendar, BBY means before the Battle of Yavin and ABY means after it, with the destruction of the first Death Star as the zero point. The Alliance also goes by a simpler name, the Rebellion. It is a stateless coalition of dissidents and defectors who oppose the Galactic Empire and its authoritarian rule. Its stated aim is to bring back the old Galactic Republic, which ended when Palpatine seized absolute power and declared himself emperor. The Alliance is the main protagonist faction of the original Star Wars trilogy.

  The Empire's propaganda labels every dissenter an extremist or a terrorist. Across Star Wars stories, the Alliance is portrayed instead as a group of resilient freedom fighters, built on tolerance, self-empowerment, and hope for a better future. It is also badly outmatched, because the Empire can always field greater numbers and greater firepower. So how does such a movement begin, and who first dared to organize it? Who actually gives orders in a rebellion made of rival cells? What kind of war can a poorly supplied coalition fight against an overwhelming navy? And did everyone who hated the Empire want to belong to the Alliance at all?

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• 2. Seeds of Rebellion

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  Six Senators met in Bail Organa's office while the Clone Wars were winding down, in a scene that was cut from Revenge of the Sith in 2005. Titled "A Stirring in the Senate," the deleted scene offers the earliest possible origin of the Alliance. Padmé Amidala and Mon Mothma were among the six. They feared that Supreme Chancellor Palpatine was "subverting the Constitution" with extraordinary powers that had no justification. Mothma described their goal as "preserving democracy within the Republic."

  Amidala hesitated at first. Palpatine had supported her during the Trade Federation's occupation of Naboo, shown in The Phantom Menace and set in 32 BBY, so she doubted his intentions were evil. Organa and Mothma still announced the formation of an organization against him. The six Senators agreed to a pact of silence.

  A second deleted scene, "Seeds of Rebellion," takes place in Amidala's apartment, where two new Senators join the group. Here the plan takes shape. A body of disgruntled Senators, later called the Delegation of 2000, would present a petition to the Chancellor. Amidala was now more willing to resist him and wanted the Jedi involved, or at least Anakin Skywalker. Only one other Senator agreed. The rest doubted whether the Jedi Council would be loyal to the Republic or to the Chancellor, so they chose to wait.

  The Delegation made its move in 19 BBY. It demanded that Palpatine lay down his emergency powers. Instead the Clone Wars ended, the Jedi were purged, and Palpatine was declared Emperor ad infinitum. Most of the petitioning Senators then disappeared from public service. In The Imperial Handbook, Grand Moff Tarkin relates that most of them were arrested. Mothma and Organa kept their Senate seats by staying outwardly obedient to Palpatine. In secret, they set about uniting scattered bands of insurgents into what they called the Rebel Alliance.

  Amidala is counted as a co-founder, yet she died only a few days after the Alliance took shape. She gave birth prematurely to twins, Luke and Leia, and Organa adopted Leia. Mothma would become the Alliance's commander in chief, while Organa would head its council.

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• 3. Heist and Massacre

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  On the planet Aldhani in 5 BBY, a small team of proto-rebels, Cassian Andor among them, broke into an Imperial payroll vault and stole 80 million credits. The mastermind was Luthen Rael, who ran the Axis network from a Coruscant antiques shop called Galactic Antiquities and Objects of Interest. The money was meant to fund further attacks. The real prize was the reaction. Luthen wanted the Empire to overreact, because he believed its brutality would push dozens of separate insurgent factions into one coalition.

  It worked. The Empire raised its security spending and tightened its policing. It suppressed political discourse, dismantled grassroots democratic movements, and criminalized dissent. Each violent crackdown was met with radicalization, and each assassination with retaliation. The Tarkin Doctrine only escalated the insurrection. On Ferrix, the funeral procession for Maarva Andor moved along Rix Road carrying a message she had recorded in advance. Residents rose up, and a planet-wide riot erupted as they charged Imperial checkpoints and garrisons. It became a massacre when troops were ordered to fire indiscriminately into the crowd.

  The Axis network understood the odds. Palpatine was always ten steps ahead of them, with 10,000 times the firepower. Their resistance was less about destroying the Empire than about making it bleed bit by bit from the inside, so that a true power could someday turn the cuts into severe wounds. Luthen's ruthless methods, including a willingness to sacrifice allies, made him a controversial figure within the Alliance.

  A different kind of resistance formed on the planet Ghorman. Its Ghorman Front, based in the capital city Palmo, was led by Carro Rylanz, an Imperial loyalist, politician, and businessman. Rylanz saw Palpatine as the hero who ended the Clone Wars and blamed abuses on corrupt officials. The Front cared little about galactic affairs. Its members protested a planned office complex in central Palmo that was really an Imperial armory. They saw it as an insult to a monument for the 500 unarmed protesters whom Tarkin had crushed by landing his cruiser on them in 19 BBY. In 2 BBY they also protested plans to strip-mine the planet for kalkite, a mineral used to coat the Death Star's reactor lenses. The protest ended in the violent suppression known as the Ghorman Massacre.

  In the second season of Andor, Senior Senator Mon Mothma answered with a speech that named Emperor Palpatine as the one responsible. She called the killings "unprovoked genocide" and described Palpatine as "the monster who will come for them all soon enough." She called the death of truth "the ultimate victory of evil." The speech ended her double life. Cassian Andor smuggled her off Coruscant and escorted her to Yavin 4, where she was handed to Gold Squadron and the Spectres. In the Rebels episode "Secret Cargo," she escaped further assassination attempts. At Dantooine she called on the cells to unite, and many rebel ships gathered above the planet to form the Alliance to Restore the Republic.

  Her Declaration of Rebellion claimed that the Empire had usurped the rights of free beings, and so it was their unalienable right to abolish it. It ended with a pledge: "To these ends, we pledge our property, our honor, and our lives."

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• 4. Command Without Control

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  Mon Mothma held the title of commander in chief, yet she had no real power to command the factions that supported her. The Alliance was never a single cohesive unit. It was a patchwork of rebel cells, each with its own motives, plans, and ideologies. As Rogue One shows, every faction voted on major military and political decisions, then kept maximum autonomy afterward. Each had its own chain of command and chose which missions to join. Leaders refused any mission they thought would harm their unit. The shared goal was simply to avoid being destroyed by the Empire.

  Alliance Command itself has been described as a centralized, de facto elected dictatorship. It was a temporary arrangement, a consequence of running a revolution. It reformed into a more democratic system the moment the Emperor was dead. Even so, other rebel leaders took issue with it.

  "Mothmatist" was an Imperial label for anyone who preferred democracy to military dictatorship, and it pointed above all at Mothma and her followers. They wanted to restore the Republic as it had been before Palpatine twisted it beyond recognition. They believed in democracy, equality, and pluralism. They also wanted to end the persecution of nonhumans and abolish slavery. Their planned New Republic would differ from the old one, with a weaker executive and weaker courts, and with sectors and systems given more autonomy.

  Bail Organa built the second great pillar of the movement, the Alderaanian Resistance, out of the Delegation of 2000. He used his Senate diplomatic privileges, his household guard in the Alderaanian Diplomatic Corps, and refugee aid programs as cover for a complex operation. He set up a network of informants run by spymasters known as "Fulcrum," who told the Rebellion what the Empire planned. Ahsoka Tano served as spymaster for covert operations and as the first Fulcrum agent. Alliance Intelligence, headed by Organa and Tano, kept communications open, found missions for the cells, and held the decentralized structure together. Breha Organa, the ruling monarch of Alderaan, managed the Alliance's funds, according to the 2017 novel Leia: Princess of Alderaan.

  Organa also hid bunkers, ships, weapons, and resource caches on rebel safe worlds across the galaxy. Many of those assets were later repurposed by General Leia Organa's Resistance.

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• 5. Cells and Outsiders

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  Lothal was rich in minerals and hosted Sienar Fleet Systems' experimental TIE Defender operation, which made it the proving ground for the Phoenix cell. The Disney XD series Rebels begins in 5 BBY, fourteen years after the Republic fell. It follows a motley crew aboard the freighter Ghost, who called themselves the Spectres under Hera Syndulla. They learn of other cells, such as Jun Sato's Phoenix Squadron. Organa and Tano helped coordinate these splinter cells into a real threat, funded primarily by the Royal House of Alderaan. Phoenix cell was active on Lothal by 4 BBY, and it tied up a disproportionate share of Imperial resources there. The Empire sent Tarkin, Colonel Wullf Yularen, Grand Admiral Thrawn, and Darth Vader to crush it. In 1 BBY the cell dismantled TIE Defender mass production, freed Lothal, and banished Thrawn and his fleet to the extragalactic planet Peridea.

  Hera Syndulla's father, Cham Syndulla, led a separate insurgency called the Free Ryloth movement, which focused on defense and domestic issues. Hera left to join Phoenix, knowing that cooperation was the way to free her home world.

  General Jan Dodonna formed the core of the Massassi group, the Rebellion's first battle-hardened professional soldiers, drawn from ex-Imperial defectors. Dodonna was a Clone Wars veteran and had been among the first captains commissioned to a newly designed Imperial-class Star Destroyer before he defected. He knew the Imperial fleet down to ship schematics and weaknesses. After the battles of Scarif and Yavin 4, the group was disbanded to avoid capture by Vader's purging operations.

  On Mon Calamari, the Empire's occupation began in 18 BBY. Admiral Raddus led the planetary defense force in a successful underwater campaign and converted civic buildings in the great underwater cities into warships. Many Mon Calamari escaped in civilian craft to form the Mon Calamari Exodus Fleet. After the Battle of Yavin, Captain Ackbar's Mon Calamari Mercantile Fleet defected and brought cruisers that became the backbone of the Rebel Navy. Raddus died at Scarif when Vader boarded his ship.

  Some who hated the Empire never joined. Saw Gerrera's Partisans were Clone Wars veterans trained by Republic Special Forces on his home world of Onderon. Saw cared little about restoring Republic principles and wanted to strike back by any means. He treated anyone who helped the Imperial war machine as a legitimate target, and he accepted mass civilian casualties. He despised Mothma's idealism, and the Alliance, in turn, distanced itself from him and ordered his assassination for war crimes. The Partisans fractured on Jedha when the Empire tested the Death Star there, killing many, Saw included.

  Separatist holdouts, remnants of the Confederacy of Independent Systems, were still fighting the Clone Wars in their own minds. General Kalani's force on Agamar refused to join. Anto Kreegyr's group was in contact with the Axis network, yet it was wiped out in a trap when Luthen chose not to warn it, in order to protect the Imperial Security Bureau spy Lonni Jung.

  The Clone Underground, founded by former Clone Captain Rex on Teth, sheltered clones who had overcome their behavioral modification biochips. An Imperial clone trooper found their base and it was assaulted. A few members escaped with the aid of the Bad Batch, and Rex pleaded with his friend Wolffe, who agreed to spare them. The Hidden Path, founded by Jedi Master Quinlan Vos, gave surviving Jedi and Force-sensitives new identities. It counted the Stinger Mantis crew under Cal Kestis and Cere Junda among its members.

  On Naboo, the former handmaiden Sabé founded the Amidalans after Padmé Amidala's death, pledging to hunt down her killer. Three years after the Battle of Yavin, they concluded that the murderer was Darth Vader. Only Sabé deduced that he was also Amidala's former husband, Anakin Skywalker.

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• 6. A Fleet Without Giants

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  Several MC80 star cruisers, supplied by Mon Calamari, were the biggest warships the Alliance could call its own, and the fleet almost never used them. They stayed in reserve even when the strategically critical bases at Atollon, Yavin, and Hoth came under siege. Capital ships were considered too costly to build, maintain, and crew. The Rebellion had too few people and too little equipment to pour so much of both into one huge target. Most of its vessels were mothballed, improvised, repurposed, or stolen civilian ships from dozens of manufacturers. It had no shipyards for anything better. Bases moved constantly, and carriers often had to jump to hyperspace before they could recover their fighters.

  The Alliance fought through starfighters instead. Its warships carried expensive fighters equipped with hyperdrives and deflector shields, which traveled alongside the fleet. Imperial TIE fighters were lightly armored and had no hyperdrives. That choice lowered their cost and discouraged pilots from defecting. Rebel gunships and corvettes screened against the TIE craft, and the fast CR90 corvettes came from Alderaan. Carrier groups with strike fighters let the Alliance avoid pitched battles, frontal assaults, and wars of attrition. The Imperial leadership treated collateral damage as an acceptable margin when rooting out insurgents. The Alliance aimed for surgical precision to spare civilians.

  Jan Dodonna believed that unsupported, hyperspace-capable starfighters could undermine the Empire's control of space. He proved it with victories over Star Destroyers, shipyards, local fleets, and the Death Star. The doctrine was to raid a target before it could mount a defense, then leave. The Starfighter Corps was chronically understaffed, and it was short of engineers and veteran pilots. Seventy percent of its sorties were reconnaissance, because finding targets for raids was the top priority of Alliance intelligence. The A-wing, B-wing, and X-wing sharpened its edge, and former Imperial officers flew some of them.

  The ground forces told a weaker story. The Alliance could never decisively win a land war against the Empire. Infantry quality varied widely by unit, and many units operated with little oversight and little discipline. They were often made up of convicts, street thugs, pirates, and outlaws. Command tolerated them because they were willing to fight and expendable. The mission-critical work went to a few standardized special forces called pathfinders. They had infiltration training and experience in asymmetrical warfare, and they could operate indefinitely without resupply. Pathfinders volunteered at Scarif under Cassian Andor, and they spearheaded the ground assault at Endor.

  Gold Squadron, under Jon Vander, flew BTL-A4 Y-wing light bombers. Darth Vader nearly wiped it out at Yavin, and under Lando Calrissian it later destroyed the second Death Star's reactor. Green Squadron, commanded by Arvel Crynyd, flew RZ-1 A-wing interceptors. Crynyd crashed his A-wing into the bridge of the Executor and disabled the ship. Red Squadron, under Garven Dreis, flew T-65B X-wings at Scarif, Vrogas Vas, Hoth, and Endor. Blue Squadron, under Antoc Merrick, fought at Scarif, Tureen VII, Hoth, and Endor.

  Rogue Squadron, commanded by Wedge Antilles, appears in The Empire Strikes Back in 1980 as "Rogue Group." Antilles is the only combatant to survive two separate attack runs on the Death Stars. The name echoes the Rogue One fighters of the 2016 film, who died on the mission to steal the Death Star plans. To honor Rogue One, the squadron did not use it as a callsign, so Rogue Leader came before Rogue Two.

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• 7. Victories and Defeats

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  In the Rebels episode "Zero Hour," the Empire trapped the Phoenix Fleet at the Battle of Atollon and forced it into an even fight. The result was a decisive Imperial victory, and the rebel fleet was nearly annihilated. The Alliance had learned the cost of meeting the Empire on equal terms.

  The first major conventional engagement came at Scarif. The Alliance had learned of the Death Star, a superweapon capable of obliterating entire planets. Intelligence suggested that an engineer who opposed the Empire had deliberately built a fatal flaw into its design. Rogue One, led by Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor, helped the rebels assault the heavily defended planet and capture the schematics. It was a pyrrhic victory. Every member of Rogue One was killed and the rebel fleet was decimated.

  Alderaanian soldiers aboard a Mon Calamari flagship barely escaped with the stolen plans. Right after Scarif, the Alderaanian corvette Tantive IV was captured by Vader's flagship, the Star Destroyer Devastator, while carrying Princess Leia Organa to deliver the plans to Bail Organa. Vader held her hostage. To punish her and her home world's central role in the Rebellion, the Empire forced her to watch the Death Star destroy Alderaan. Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Chewbacca, and Obi-Wan Kenobi rescued her and delivered the schematics. Analysis revealed the critical weakness, an exhaust port leading to the station's reactor core. The Empire found the main rebel headquarters on a moon of Yavin through a tracking device planted on Han Solo's vessel. In the film A New Hope in 1977, the rebel squadrons took heavy losses, but Luke guided torpedoes down the exhaust port. The Death Star was obliterated in a decisive rebel victory.

  In 1 ABY, fresh recruits and the glow of Yavin sent the Alliance into the Mid Rim Offensive. Its ferocity forced the Empire to withdraw from several worlds, because the Imperial military had been built to oppress civilians rather than to fight a determined conventional enemy. Momentum faded for lack of sector-level coordination. The fleet could not protect the advance of the ground forces or their stretched supply lines. By the third year the rebel logistical system was nearly collapsing, and the operation was renamed the Mid Rim Retreat.

  The comics tell of a stronger start. The rebels destroyed a major weapons factory on Cymoon 1 and broke an Imperial blockade of Tureen VII by stealing the Star Destroyer Harbinger. They then recruited the Mon Calamari trading fleet as an assault fleet. Queen Trios of Shu-Torun, whose world's technology was fitted into the new ships, turned out to be an Imperial agent sent by Vader. Her sabotage paralyzed the ships, and half of them were destroyed before Leia found a way around it. Generals Jan Dodonna and Davits Draven died in the battle. Mothma ordered all cells to regroup, and the whole Rebellion would not be united in one place again until the Battle of Endor.

  In The Empire Strikes Back, the Alliance suffered a crushing defeat in 3 ABY. Vader's Death Squadron and the 501st Legion overran Echo Base on Hoth. The survivors had to stay mobile, using Admiral Ackbar's flagship Home One as their headquarters. Vader kept dismantling rebel assets and hunting Luke, forcing the Alliance to abandon its static bases.

  By Return of the Jedi in 1983, four years of defeats had cost the Alliance entire units. It then learned that a second, more powerful Death Star was rising under Palpatine's personal supervision. Mothma put Ackbar and Calrissian in command of the fleet. Han Solo and Leia led special forces to disable the station's defenses while Luke distracted Vader. The Alliance won the Battle of Endor, and Palpatine, Vader, and much of the Imperial hierarchy were killed.

  The criminal syndicate Crimson Dawn, once led by the former Sith Lord Maul, resurfaced in 3 ABY under Qi'ra. Her plan to wage war on the Sith collapsed after the Knights of Ren betrayed her. Before that, she had revealed the second Death Star's existence to the Alliance, which let it regroup.

  After Endor, Alliance members formed a provisional New Republic. Operation Cinder, Palpatine's post-mortem scorched earth plan, destroyed countless Imperial worlds. Thousands of inhabited planets declared independence or defected. Even Iden Versio, who commanded Inferno Squad, defected after the destruction of her homeworld Vardos. The Alliance's decentralized structure became a liability, and the New Republic was described as "a ragtag force strategically ill-fed and cobbled together of incompatible ships and squadrons." Its fleet de-emphasized guerrilla tactics, and conventional forces took over the war. The fleet was reorganized into the New Republic Military. About a year after Endor, the Battle of Jakku ended the Galactic Civil War, and offensive operations were suspended.

  Three decades later, by The Force Awakens, the New Republic was divided over the First Order, a power formed by hardline Imperial remnants. It tolerated the Resistance but disregarded the Order as a minor threat until Starkiller Base destroyed the Hosnian system.

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• 8. Other Origins

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  In 2014, Lucasfilm announced that earlier Star Wars works outside the theatrical films and The Clone Wars would no longer be considered canon. They began to be republished under the Legends banner, and the Alliance has a different founding story there.

  The Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game places the Cantham House Meetings of Coruscant at the start, with Senators Mon Mothma and Bail Organa among the participants. They discuss forming a Galactic Alliance against Palpatine's Empire. The game dates the Ghorman incident to 18 years before the Battle of Yavin. Captain Wilhuff Tarkin's cruiser was blocked by peaceful protesters on a landing pad. With implied permission from the Emperor, he landed anyway, injuring and killing many. The game also describes a Doctrine of Space Denial, with hit-and-run raids on Imperial shipping frigates. The raids disrupted supplies and looted needed materials, and hyperdrive-equipped rebel fighters could escape along prearranged routes before the Empire reacted.

  The video game The Force Unleashed offers the strangest version. Palpatine secretly pushed for the Alliance to form, intending another war to consolidate power, as he had done earlier with the Confederacy of Independent Systems. He ordered Darth Vader to use his own secret apprentice, Galen Marek, called "Starkiller," as a pawn to gather the Empire's enemies. At the supposedly secret Corellian Treaty meeting, Mothma, Organa, Garm Bel Iblis, and Jedi-General Rahm Kota met to create the Rebellion. Vader ambushed them on the Emperor's orders, since Palpatine had orchestrated the meeting to eliminate the rebel leaders. Starkiller, by then aligned with the rebels, saved the principal founders at the cost of his life. On Kashyyyk the Senators proclaimed an open Declaration of Rebellion, and Leia chose Galen Marek's family crest as the Alliance's symbol. In this telling, Vader and Palpatine effectively founded the Rebel Alliance, though neither imagined it would become a serious threat.

  The game Empire at War shows allies secretly strengthening the Alliance. The most notable gift was the defection of Incom Corporation staff, along with all the material for the X-wing. A Declaration of Rebellion also appears in the 1990 book The Star Wars Rebel Alliance Sourcebook. After its victory at Endor, the Rebellion was temporarily stationed there and renamed the "Alliance of Free Planets."

  Legends also lists a different group of founders. Bana Breemu was a co-founder and early constituting member, and she is deceased. Garm Bel Iblis financed a private army to fight the Empire, and he rejoined the Alliance during the Thrawn campaign.

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