So, among a litany of questions I have about the setting's realism, I wonder how warfare would realistically look in the Star Wars universe? For one, I assume it'd have long outgrown the WW2-style tactics we see throughout the franchise as is. Never mind dealing with far larger figures than the Empire boasting just 25,000 Star Destroyers or the Republic fielding only a few million Clone Trooper units. Granted, maybe those numbers are imprecise or misleading when taken at face value; but again, we're working on a galactic scale in which throwing around numbers like thousand or million means pretty much nothing. I'd have also liked to see some more megastructures somehow involved in that too, though I'm not sure how applicable they'd be to space warfare (considering what a waste the Death Star was, at least insofar as its single exhaust port being a deadly choke-point).
Honestly I'd expect it to go back further than Napoleonic... to medieval siege warfare. Essentially shields replace the castles, which were largely impregnable and required massive amounts of power to breach.
We know there's theater and planetary shields available that can withstand ludicrous amounts of bombardment. They work to such an extent that Vader's personal task force including a Super Star Destroyer needed to actually send walkers down to Hoth to blow the shield generator rather than try to bombard it. Scarif also showed how much of a beating a planetary shield can take. Also for some reason walkers could waltz through the Hoth shield while the Scarif one appeared to block all physical matter.
Consequently there's basically three options for warfare against any enemy with a shield, and given that even the Gungans, who's cavalry were mounted on giant chickens and appeared to have a "grand army" of maybe 200 troops, were able to deploy such a shield
everybody above a single platoon should have one.
- Send in ground forces to walk through the shield and then attack the generator directly. This happens on Naboo and Hoth.
- Blockade and starve the location. This won't work on a habitable planet capable of growing it's own food and will take forever, although given The Phantom Menace it appears that Naboo was in dire straits after only a few days of this, despite their planet being remarkably lush and surely loaded with farmland.
- Apply sufficient firepower to actually blow through the shield. This appears to require a Death Star, even the biggest ships simply won't cut it given what happened on Hoth. Scarif with it's trick of ramming a Star Destroyer into the generator would appear to be a one-off event that wouldn't be normal tactics.
In some ways Star Wars warfare actually reflects what you'd expect from these conditions. There's a heavy emphasis on stealthy, small teams which could infiltrate an installation and blow the shield generator (this also supports the heroic main characters being the most important). There's massive ships to lay siege to shielded areas. Finally blockades to prevent travel and intercept ships are a staple across multiple movies.
The main things that argue against said warfare is that inexplicably, such shields appear to be very rare in the scenes we actually see. There's also large armies of infantry when those really wouldn't be needed. If the shield is up you're going to need to send in either a stealth team to sabotage the shield generator or an armored division to blow it up. If the shield is down you can threaten it to surrender via bombardment/ortillery and need a relatively small garrison force to take control rather than huge numbers of infantry to actually fight.
One interesting aspect of medieval siege warfare was how much diplomacy and deal making played a role in taking a castle. It was quite common for a an army laying siege and the castle rulers to come to an agreement of surrender, in which the castle would automatically surrender to the enemy army after X days if no army allied with the castle arrived.
