Star Wars: Episode X - The Rescue Mission

Chapter Sixteen: Strategy

Once Rey awoke, she and Ben re-entered the hotel grounds at the same moment they'd left. The first strategy session was held with only the core team, wherein they worked on the development of a plausible cover story for Rey and Ben's part of the mission.

On the record, the official explanation of what was about to take place was that the Resistance had managed to glean the location of the First Order's ships by using information from defectors and hacking into the First Order's communication network.

The destruction of the hyperdrives and hyperspace trackers was going to be a lot harder to explain plausibly, but the cover story they came up with stated the Republic had developed small bots that they would release in the vicinity of the First Order ships. These covert bots would, like buzz droids, cut into the First Order ships and then carry thermal detonators to the hyperdrives and hyperspace trackers. However, even this story would remain classified, as they didn't want to give anyone any ideas about developing such bots for real.

After a very long planning session with the entire team, a sweeping plan was formed. Each time Ben and Rey disabled a ship on the list, the Republic would send a detachment of ships large enough to overwhelm not only the ship in question but any others that might be traveling with it. They wanted the size of each Republic battle group alone to be a good reason in and of itself for the First Order commanders to decide to stand down, but if they were not persuaded to do so, the Republic needed to be able to win any battles that might result, especially if the First Order called in reinforcements. Their educated guesses about the compositions of the First Order formations were based on intel from First Order defectors and Ben, who described typical First Order fleet configurations to Rey.

If the First Order ships fired on the strike force, the main objective would be to knock out their weapons systems and simply leave them helpless and forced to listen. The Republic forces would broadcast messages put together by Finn, Jannah, and the other defectors, encouraging the soldiers to surrender and accept their offer to try to reunite them with their families. The hacking team was going to breach the First Order communications network so that the broadcasts would be heard by everyone, and the team would also work to get messages onto the soldiers' communicators, comm stations, and the like.

There were forty-five ships on the list, so the coordination needed to pull off this operation was going to be massive, but fortunately a great deal of the galaxy was on their side now, so they had many resources to draw on. The Republic needed to prepare facilities for holding defectors and prisoners. They would need to assemble battalions of soldiers willing to board each ship and take the risk that the surrender was a ruse and that they might be met with deadly force by First Order soldiers desirous of taking down as many enemy fighters as they could before succumbing. They needed many, many droids who would sweep the interiors of the ships for booby traps and hidden weapons. They would need to bring along repair teams who would get the hyperdrives back into working order—or replace them—so the Republic could claim the ships.

They would need to assemble as many single light starfighters as they could possibly scrape up in order not only to counteract the enemies' fighters, but to penetrate enemy shields and take out their weapons systems. The defectors' knowledge of their ships was going to be very useful when giving briefings to the Republic commanders, pilots, and soldiers.

The Republic would send out nine battle groups at a time in order to be able to maintain dominant fleet sizes. Rey would check in with Poe after hitting nine ships and coordinate with him on when to start the next nine. This would continue until the all the ships were either captured or destroyed. As soon as a battle group reported victory, a follow-up force would be called in. This force would transport defectors and prisoners as well as secure and repair First Order ships before taking them to Republic impound yards.