We won a victory and nothing else. —Gillard Perine, Marshal of the Galactic Empire, Memoirs of War, Imperial Calendar 22.
War... war never changed.
In fact, if someone were to look back over humanity's history of warfare, they would find that the development of war had always followed a wave-like pattern.
When primitive humans learned to tie stones to branches, the first thing they did was smash their fellow humans over the head with those stone hammers. Back then, war was simple: whoever was stronger, whoever could swing the bigger stone hammer.
In the years that followed, humanity learned to use bows and arrows, learned to wear wood and leather for better protection, and learned to tame horses, camels, and elephants, bringing them into war as well.
War gradually became more complicated. Humans began studying how to fight more efficiently. Once they had horses and elephants, how could they make those animals unleash their greatest power? Once they had bows, arrows, and armor, how could they make that equipment serve its purpose better?
Yet as the ages progressed, the emergence of firearms drove bows and arrows off the stage and rendered armor useless. Trenches turned cavalry into mere decoration, while the invention of machine guns and artillery reduced every strategy to the simplest arithmetic.
Thus, during this stage, war began doing subtraction. One weapon after another that had once dominated warfare left the battlefield, while machine guns, artillery, and trenches became the absolute protagonists of war.
But human ingenuity was limitless. Countless brilliant military scientists once again brought more weapons onto the battlefield. Tanks restrained machine guns, aircraft made artillery unable to roar with impunity, and rockets and missiles expanded the scope of war to an unprecedented breadth.
War returned to the path of addition. More and more weapons appeared