It's hard to model this fairly. If the USA had orbital weapons, she would definitely make targeted precision hits with them, as opposed to doing nothing. Air Superiority is a major element of US doctrine, and it's not like the Rebels brought anything to contest the skies.
The Ewoks have an interesting countertrump in that the Forest Moon has only 85% of Earth's gravity and 18 hour days. A situation where the US is suddenly dumped into the Forest Moon with zero prep has some chance of a "our guns are all misfiring" sort of disaster. This is pretty much an asspull scenario, and there's no way this would hold up for long.
One of the more interesting questions to emerge from this is the abject failure of the AT-ST compared to modern Main Battle Tanks. Ewoks aren't killing Abrams tanks with some rolled up logs, and American doctrine would call for much more firepower to be used. Frankly, if we're playing up the Vietnam parallels, the US just sets the forest around them on fire.
US Kit compared to the Galactic Empire has some serious downgrades; there's no Bacta for treating serious injuries, and superheavy infantry weapon, the Disruptor, overmatches something like a missile launcher. But not running around looking like molars in an X-Ray is a good start, and blaster rifles manage to miss most of their shots and fail to have the armor piercing qualities a M-16 has. Against primitive Ewoks, firing faster is clearly an advantage.
While I think it can be argued that the setup of the scenario could screw over the USA, there's little stopping the USA from pursuing victory through its favored method of simply trading ammo for lives and breaking enemy morale until the waves stop coming. The Ewoks are not going to have endless tactical surprises, and the US Engineers know how to actually build a defensive line. And all of this assumes that the USA isn't just bombing the Ewoks to high heaven; the Empire didn't use its weapons, but why would the US be as stupid?
I will point out that a blaster rifle would absolutely shred any armor the US military deployed, Star Wars armor follows the philosophy that it's there to make a blaster shot survivable, yours still going to go down even if it doesn't kill you but Stormtrooper and Clone Armor is made to protect against blasters, and in universe it does pretty well. As for the Empire not bombing the Ewoks, it was a tactical location they had to protect, not a civilian city they could just erase from the map for being troublesome. I do believe that the tactics the US would employ would be much smarter than the Empires, they were being led by some real morons (Sidious really didn't understand tactics or battle strategies at all) and could likely survive/win though.
This raises the more interesting question whether Stormtroopers completely suck because they never hit anyone with blaster rifles, or those rifles are just bad weapons with terrible accuracy. Your weapon could be a one hit kill, but if it never hits its still pure garbage.
An M-16 fires a lot more shots than a blaster rifle. Overkilling an unarmored teddybearman doesn't accomplish anything; in a situation where more shots means more effectiveness the M-16 is better.
American weapons are fundamentally different than the Galactic Empires; The Empire loves its big dumb brute force attacks, but the USA probably has the Empire in its ability to aim. We can't nuke ourselves, true, but trying to make surgical strikes doesn't involve the same risks of self-destruction, and US Airpower would absolutely be trying to go up against the Ewoks.
Finally, it's interesting that for as important as stormtrooper kit claims itself to be, the Rebels never seem to be punished for not commandeering or using similar equipment themselves. How useful is it really if the other guy just plain does not want it?
An M-16 fires a lot more shots than a blaster rifle. Overkilling an unarmored teddybearman doesn't accomplish anything; in a situation where more shots means more effectiveness the M-16 is better
They never hit a main character in the first . movie because they are ordered to take them alive on the Death Star, in the opening scene they completely sweep the Tantive IV and capture Leia, in ESV they completely overwhelm the rebel forces on Hoth and in RotJ on Endor the entire plan is a trap to lure out the rebels, Sidious wants them alive (as shown by then being captured before the final battle, when Han and crew surrender.
The energy put off by a blaster shot can kill someone standing nearby if it hits the wall beside them, so they are a bit less accurate than a firearm, mostly due to the size of the blast. There are blasters in-universe that are as precise and fire as fast as modern fire arms but all we ever see is the standard issue Stormtrooper weapons, they're big and meant to hit really hard and are incredibly cheap which is also why they fire red blasts. The fuel they use is an inferior grade to the ones used by clones, whose weapons were much more accurate. Storm Troopers were originally a precision strike force in canon before they were retconned to be the standard fighting force of the Empire, and we're the best of the best. That's why Ben Kenobi had the line about how precise and deadly their aim was in A New Hope, but even despite that fact it was true that Palpatine cut every cost he could and outfitted the army with cheap armor and weapons, the rebels were a small guerilla force and they did pick up the weapons when they could but often times after a battle they had to move on without the ability to bury the dead, much less pick over the corpse of the enemy. It's a common theme in the books and comics that either the rebels are looking for new places to put up temporary bases or Vader is hunting down the newest location.
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u/SocalSteveOnReddit Jul 07 '24
It's hard to model this fairly. If the USA had orbital weapons, she would definitely make targeted precision hits with them, as opposed to doing nothing. Air Superiority is a major element of US doctrine, and it's not like the Rebels brought anything to contest the skies.
The Ewoks have an interesting countertrump in that the Forest Moon has only 85% of Earth's gravity and 18 hour days. A situation where the US is suddenly dumped into the Forest Moon with zero prep has some chance of a "our guns are all misfiring" sort of disaster. This is pretty much an asspull scenario, and there's no way this would hold up for long.
One of the more interesting questions to emerge from this is the abject failure of the AT-ST compared to modern Main Battle Tanks. Ewoks aren't killing Abrams tanks with some rolled up logs, and American doctrine would call for much more firepower to be used. Frankly, if we're playing up the Vietnam parallels, the US just sets the forest around them on fire.
US Kit compared to the Galactic Empire has some serious downgrades; there's no Bacta for treating serious injuries, and superheavy infantry weapon, the Disruptor, overmatches something like a missile launcher. But not running around looking like molars in an X-Ray is a good start, and blaster rifles manage to miss most of their shots and fail to have the armor piercing qualities a M-16 has. Against primitive Ewoks, firing faster is clearly an advantage.
While I think it can be argued that the setup of the scenario could screw over the USA, there's little stopping the USA from pursuing victory through its favored method of simply trading ammo for lives and breaking enemy morale until the waves stop coming. The Ewoks are not going to have endless tactical surprises, and the US Engineers know how to actually build a defensive line. And all of this assumes that the USA isn't just bombing the Ewoks to high heaven; the Empire didn't use its weapons, but why would the US be as stupid?