Mechamorph said:
The thing is the Interwar Period had seen new governments rise and fall in Germany. First the Weimar Republic and then Nazi Germany. While Germany rearmed there was no guarantee that there would be war, there was no guarantee the current regime would even survive the 1940s. The same with Japan, Imperial Japan was prosecuting a war with China so military build up would not be all that unusual.
The difference is that the First Order is a direct successor to the Galactic Empire, the kind of resources required to build Star Destroyers is massive let alone something akin to a Death Star superlaser. To keep with the analogy, it is less Germany rearming as suddenly the Nazis reappearing, declaring the Fifth Reich and starting to churn out panzers and fokkers by the gross lot in 1950 and everyone pretending that nope, nothing to see here.
Japan had been actively expansionist ever since WW1, first invading Korea and later on Manchuria in the 30's. Their invasion of China in 1937 faced very little repercussions, apart from the US oil embargo after the sinking of the Panay, because the Imperial powers of the time preferred not to go to war, even if it meant letting Japan fuck over all of non-colonized Asia. There was never any doubt that Japan had ambitions of becoming a superpower, the Western powers simply preferred not to think too hard about it.
As for the Nazis, this is a pet topic of mine: They rose to power in 1933 and almost immediately set out on a massive military expansion that went against the Versailles Treaty. For the first few years this could be concealed by clever naming, such as calling the first tank prototypes Heavy Tractors and calling conscription "labor creation measures". By 1937 and the German intervention in the Spanish Civil War it was obvious that Germany was in flagrant disregard for the Versailles Treaty (if Hitler's constant denouncing of it hadn't clued everyone in already) and with the Anschluss and Sudetenland Crisis in 1938 it was increasingly obvious that Germany was intending to seek confrontation with its' neighbors. Yet, they could break up Czechoslovakia and annex half of it before France and England went into full scale rearmament in September 1939, after the invasion of Poland. At that point, the full extent of the Luftwaffe's numbers as well as the number of Armored Divisions that Germany fielded shocked everyone.
The Nazis re-armed and militarized German society in plain sight. It turns out that it is rather easy to conceal an armament effort if the enemy lacks spy satellites and desperately wants to avoid a war and thinks you are thinking the same.
Mechamorph said:
This is even more egregious because in the universe of Star Wars, the New Republic is the only (supposedly) functional polity. It requires a fleet capable of policing the spaceways, combating pirates and protecting planets at a (semi) galactic scale. They inherited a Star Destroyer fleet from the Galactic Empire so they might as well put them to some use. Sure they would disarm to some degree but the fall of the Empire was not brought about by a contesting state military, it was due to a Rebellion overthrowing a tyrannical regime. Would the Americans have disarmed after the American Revolution? When you fight a civil war, a revolutionary war, a polity tends to remain armed to prevent another military dictatorship from rising. A galaxy is large and far-flung, like the Legends continuity, there were likely warlords who took whatever Star Destroyers were loyal to them to carve out their own little fiefdoms. Even if there were no such thing, the sheer possibility and probability of such a thing happening would require a minimum of military force for the New Republic. In current Star Wars history, there were people alive during the founding of the Empire who personally experienced the Separatist Threat during the Clone Wars. No way would even a war weary polity disarm that much when a recent secessionist war is in living memory. You might as well write a blank cheque for the New Republic to crumble overnight.
First, the US did de-mobilize post-revolution. That's one of the chief reasons they performed so atrociously in the War of 1812, where they couldn't even stage incursions into lightly defended Canada. Everything the Continental Army learned in the Revolutionary War was largely forgotten 20 years later.
The US and England retained large ass fleets post-WW1. Like, several hundred ships each huge. Turns out that keeping some odd 20 Battleships around plus all the hundreds of ships needed to support them is really expensive, which is why the London and Washington Naval Treaties came about, as a way to ensure Anglo-American naval supremacy without them having to blow ridiculous amounts of money on building new warships. The Republic supposedly keeps a fleet about, there's just the slight problem that, as you say, the Galaxy is huge and posting sizable fleets on a remote border in case those guys you soundly trounced and who haven't been causing problems for 20 years suddenly show up fully re-armed is sort of silly and grossly economically negligent. For comparison, the UK kept the majority of its' fleet around the Home Isles, with a significant minority in the Med to balance out Italy's naval expansion. In the Pacific, they had a few aged cruisers and escort ships, because Japan was not an imminent threat. Nobody expected Starkiller base, and without that the First Order would have had to take their new Star Destroyers on a long slog through Republic space to Hosnian, which would have allowed the Republic time to get their fleet together for some traditional curb stomping.
As for all the wars in the Star Wars universe: It took exactly one world war to have everyone except Japan disarm to insanely low levels (10,000 active UK soldiers in the 1920's). War weariness and war expenses are serious things and politicians (and common people) tend to like the whole "rebuilding phase" where money once more goes into stuff that actually improves civil society as opposed to getting blown up.
Mechamorph said:
Even if you want to say that war weariness, wistful thinking and excellent counter-espionage all dovetailed to let the First Order build up a military capable of fighting the New Republic's, what about the fact that they even exist in the sequel? That is the equivalent of Poland being conquered and the Wehrmacht marching through Paris but the British Prime Minister still insists that there is no war in the European Continent and even if there was, they could not conceivably want to attack the United Kingdom. Even if the First Order was not seen as a threat before, they certainly should be now.
Let's be clear with one thing: The lack of a First Order or equivalent would be more stupid. There are very few wars in history were one belligerent has been completely wiped out and all traces of them eradicated and those cases that exist tend to be in Ancient history. This is especially true when you don't factor in colonial wars. The First Order are the remnant of the Empire, the hold out that proved to bothersome to root out and which conceivably didn't threaten the Republic enough that their full eradication was a top priority. This is not a terribly uncommon situation after civil or revolutionary wars (note how England retained its' Canadian and Carribean holdings even after the US won the revolutionary war or how Serbia was a thing even after the dissolution of Yugoslavia). For all intents and purposes, the Empire was beaten when the Emperor was toppled. If some guys wants to hang out on the fringes of space, pretending as if they still follow his ideals and faff about, why not let them if the cost of removing them would be too high. With most of the galaxy and its resources at your disposal, what threat does a dozen (or however many) worlds on the fringes constitute?
As I mentioned earlier, the kicker for the First Order is Starkiller. It allows them an unprecedented Alpha Strike that allows their inferior navy to stand a chance by causing disarray and confusion in the Republic. Without it, they'd be a bunch of militarist nutjobs that only the Resistance seemed to care about.
Also, as a caveat here: All this sort of assumes that the Republic has gotten its' stuff together in TLJ. If it turns out they really have no fleet at all and the First Order has an equally sized fleet, then my entire argument can just be discarded.
