How to fix naval fighter doctrine.

The Galactic Empire was brought down low by not allowing for a greater emphasis in starfighters in the Imperial battle doctrine.  Now I can defiantly argue that some of these instances are just the will of the force like when the Skywalker boys use their space wizardry to make impossible shot.  But without that knowledge we can only go by the fact that Rebel fighter doctrine was superior to Imperial and much of it had to do with the fact that Rebel Alliance fighters were aggressively engaging the Empire where ever they were weak. 

I propose that this new era of Imperial fighter doctrine places a greater emphasis on Imperial starfighters.  Now as we have seen, and I will be doing an analysis of each and every Imperial craft as time goes on, but the Empire does have the proper fighter craft but has no emphasis on their use.  Imperial Fighter Doctrine states that Fighter crafts job is to protect their mother ship while the mother ship breaks through an enemies shields.  When the enemy crafts shields are worn down exploit weaknesses and assist in destruction of enemy ship.  This explains why Imperial fighter doctrine has  no emphasis on hyperdrives because the Imperial navies fighter doctrine assumes most of the fighting is being done by the capitol ships.  Now the Rebel Alliance was able to hit the Empire where it was weak by dropping starfighters on lightly guarded targets or by swarming heavier Imperial units and bugging out before Imperial fighters were able to be deployed.  I think we can analyze and break down the three areas to improve the Imperial Navies fighter forces.

ARC-170

1.) First of all we can break down fighters into 3 weight classes of light, medium, and heavy.  Light fighters like the TIE/LN use agility and swarm tactics to overwhelm and destroy enemy targets using strafing runs to overwhelm their targets, attacking like a wolf pack where its less the individual fighter and more about the mass of fighters chewing up a target.  Light fighters are great at fighting large strike craft like heavy fighters and bombers but with their light weaponry can only do limited damage to a shielded capitol ship.  They must work in concert with heavier units to bring down capitol ships.

Medium fighters are just that mid sized with heavy enough weapons to kill targets on their own yet maneuverable enough to tangle with light fighters much like the T-65B X-Wing.  These fighters can generally do some real damage to heavy units while being nimble enough to evade some point defense fire.

Alpha Wing Medium Assault Fighter

Heavy fighters like the ARC-170 are meant to bring damage to heavy targets like capitol ships and bombers as well as having heavy enough weapons to shred medium sized fighters on head on attack runs.  Heavy fighters use heavy shields to protect them from light laser fire and turreted lasers can shoot down pursuers.  Light Fighters are generally effective against heavy fighters because of the swarm tactics used as the light fighter is never behind the heavy fighter long enough to be shot down by the defensive laser turrets.  

Old Imperial doctrine focused on a nearly pure focus on light fighter craft.  The best way to improve the fighter doctrine is to have fighter wings become far more flexible by having a greater variety in fighter craft carried within an air group.  This means that an imperial fighter wing would consist of light fighters medium fighters and heavy fighters all trained to work together.

2.) Second we would need to improve the number of strike craft carried and deployed by the Imperial Navy.  In the grand scheme of things strike craft are going to be your best bang for your buck when it comes to cost to benefit in weapon and crew costs vs overall use.  So firstly we would need to be sure that more fighters a deployed with light units such as corvettes by modifying external carrying racks so that even the lightest of task forces have some anti fighter capabilities.  These craft would most likely only carry easy to maintain TIE craft like the TIE/LN or the TIE/IN as these craft would need little maintenance and could be carried and refueled externally. 

Imperator with its fighter wing

For larger carrier craft such as Imperator Star Destroyers we would need to remove large portions of their ground compliment.  The standard Imperator carries 20 AT AT walkers and 30 AT ST walkers which would need landing craft to go along with the deployment of such a large ground force not to even mention the 9000 storm troopers who would need to be deployed.  I propose the removal of this ground compliment on most Imperators except for those being deployed with planetary assault fleets.  For regular space patrol squadrons there would be little need for such a large ground detachment which would find very little use.  It would be far better to strip down most of the Storm Trooper detachment and perhaps allow it to carry a dozen AT ST and a dozen AT TE walkers which would take up far less space for both walkers and drop ships as well.  This newly freed up space could be used to expand the Imperators fighter wing with the Likes of ARC-170 fighters, Scimitar bombers, TIE Defenders, and TIE Avenger squadrons giving the Imperator more flexibility in its primary mission of space superiority.  

I used the Imperator as my focal point but we could go down the line for different ship classes to modify fighter compliments.  

3.)  Lastly we would need to completely retrain both strike craft pilots and staff as well as the officers and ship commanders of the Imperial Navy.  

Disaster at Scarif

Clearly as seen at battles like Scarif, the Lothal campaign, or the battle of the Archeon Nebula, where inferior training led imperial forces to defeat.  We saw time and time again Imperial commanders engaging enemy forces with little coordination with their own air wings.  The strength of the TIE fighters is its ability to swarm its enemies and the implementation of such tactics must take skill and coordination by command and control.  The Imperial Navy will have to go through a hard restructuring where commanders are selected by merit instead of nepotism like in the past under Emperor Palpatine. 

With these changes we will be able to see a great improvement in combat effectiveness in naval operations.  The Imperial fighter corp has been made a secondary component of Imperial war machine and because of this we have seen several critical defeats to rebel forces.  By enacting these reforms and increasing the importance on the fighter corp the Empire will be able to reassert itself as the preeminent fighting force in the galaxy.