Perhaps the most decorated soldier among the senior naval officers of the Old Republic during the Clone Wars, Galen Veich was already an established military commander before the conflict broke out. Close to retirement, he had taken up a position on Coruscant training the next generation of naval officers, before the outbreak of the great conflict brought him back into service.

In fact, he was not initially interested in returning to captain a military warship, having seen what he considered to be his fair share of interstellar combat. As the fighting between the Jedi factions began to spill out into civilian worlds, several Republic admirals made grave errors of judgement, and Veich became a vocal critic of their particular strategic methodologies. However, the degree of his outcry only increased the pressure on him to return. His sense of duty was certainly one component, but many historians suggest that it was primarily his pride, and the stench of hypocrisy which might stain his otherwise impressive military record, which drove him back to the admiralty of a Republic fleet.

It was not long before Veich showed himself to be an able proponent of a number of tactics which protected important Core Worlds from Jedi incursions. He was granted the rank of Grand Admiral and quickly became the face of the Old Republic’s war machine. It was at this time that he first came into contact with the only other individual who might later be seen as a more influential military leader across the scope of the conflict: General Leia Lydendara. While history would see Veich attempt to assume a great deal of credit for her inception of the Mass Assault Doctrine, and in later years the two would become bitter ideological rivals, for the majority of the Clone Wars proper, the two worked together in almost perfect unison.

While Veich never attained the Master Grand Admiral rank—the naval equivalent of Lydendara’s army rank—he was nevertheless considered the senior of the two (as both Republican and Imperial militaries have always granted naval operations primacy), leading the main Republic Fleet against the most serious conflicts within the Core Worlds. Once the fighting was pushed back to the Outer Rim, Veich was content to let it remain there, much to the irritation of several members of the Republic Senate, most notably Caius Palpatine. However, Veich’s standing in the public eye immunised him from most political criticism, which largely fell on deaf ears.

Veich and Lydendara began to go their separate ways during a now largely forgotten phase of the war which coincided with what has become known as the “intrabellum” Mandalorian War, which Veich saw as a pointless waste of manpower. Lydendara, however, viewed the situation differently, and so Veich—already well within his advanced years and well beyond the usual retirement age for even the most senior naval officers—left her to trudge across Mandalore while he largely minimised his military adventures and instead focused on a burgeoning political career. In a move which all but assured his ineligibility for future command roles, he usurped the position of one of the Senators from his home planet of Alderaan and joined the political fray.

Initially, he opposed the dominant faction led by Senator Palpatine and instead worked toward a more moderate road. In this, he came into conflict again with the now Grand Marshal Lydendara, who, whilst not exactly an ally of Palpatine, clearly gravitated to his charisma. She would even, later in the conflict, openly support Palpatine’s move to replace the Jedi with a civilian judiciary. By that time, even the now retired Grand Admiral Veich was also a part of the movement to ensure security in the staggering Republic, through any means necessary.

In fact, Veich became a critical component in the means by which Palpatine’s early power would be stymied. Whether by inspiration or tactical nous, he shackled himself to the creation of the New Order Corporation and made himself a public face of its inception. In doing so he ensured that Senator Palpatine had very limited personal influence over the bureaucracy of the new corporation. He allowed Palpatine to revel in his seat at the head of the corporate hierarchy, whilst simultaneously undermining his actual influence outside of the executive. By doing so, he would later possess the means to squeeze the Senator out and bring former military allies of his in to do his bidding.

While Palpatine was the one whose activism had seen him recognised as the ‘saviour’ of the Core Worlds, and so was the one to take the throne as Emperor once the New Order was established as the controlling entity of what had been the Old Republic, it was in fact Veich who assumed the most control of the corporation itself. With the backing of powerful admirals and even some notable generals, there was little Palpatine could do to practically resist this trend. Whilst Veich struggled to hold off his own many contemporary and historical political enemies, Palpatine himself had failed to counter Veich’s influence when it mattered most.

Even in his final years, the elderly warhorse continued to dominate the Senate and maintain control of the real power behind the Galactic Empire—the NOC. However, before he could properly solidify, or codify, his power, he died. Whilst rumours have continued to swirl around the circumstance, his advanced age is simply the most logical conclusion to draw. Unfortunately for his allies, no single successor seemed apparent, and so the military investors—a mixture of naval and army officers, planetary governors, and various intelligence agents—squabbled among one another for control, with none of them able to topple enough of their rivals to come out on top.

Galen Veich’s legacy is a complex one. As a military leader, he was unquestionable effective, and yet he was dogged throughout his career with suggestions that he leaned too heavily on his subordinates and took credit for their initiatives. This became especially apparent when he attempted to appropriate the strategies of the brilliant Grand Marshal Lydendara as his own. And yet, despite that reputation he was invariably successful in almost every campaign he ever undertook. Later, as a politician, he was a critical voice of moderation just as some of the most shrill reactionaries began to take hold in the Galactic Senate. Yet even in the political sphere, he soon came to dominate those around him with his powerful personality, and was a ruthless political opponent.

Ultimately, he was an integral cog in the machine which became the New Order, and he was active in aiding Palpatine’s ascent to the new throne which would replace the instability of the Senate Presidency and bring security to the galaxy and an end to the war. That he engineered his own control of the actual mechanism of such a shift is to his credit; though as always with Veich it is difficult to say just how much was his own idea, and how much was simply a matter of taking what he needed from those around him and turning it to his own advantage.