I saw somewhere in a video that the clone army only had 1.5 million soldiers, but how is that even remotely accurate if they had to fight over an entire galaxy and then the separatists had quadrillions of droids? How is that even a fair fight?
I saw somewhere in a video that the clone army only had 1.5 million soldiers, but how is that even remotely accurate if they had to fight over an entire galaxy and then the separatists had quadrillions of droids? How is that even a fair fight?
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Well, see, that’s the problem – it wasn’t an army that was designed to win. It was an army that was specifically designed to create a hideous stalemate between the Republic and the Trade Federation – one which would ensure not only ongoing investment in militarization as Papa Palps moved the Republic towards the Empire, but one that would lead to high casualties among the Jedi. By the time Order 66 came down the Jedi Order had been so depleted by years of stagnant warfare it was almost trivial for the Clones, Vader & The Inquisition to wipe out what was left.
The galaxy is actually pretty sparsely populated. The number of represented systems in the Senate is in the low thousands. If you pare those down to the planets or systems that provide vital resources to the galaxy as a whole, or are major trade hubs, we’re looking at one or two hundred crucial worlds.
That said, the clone troops were elite auxilleries. Many systems fielded their own forces against the seperatists. One destroyer stationed above a planet was often enough to dissuade an invasion. It was only in the most hotly contested regions that clone troopers were sent to ground.
I cannot vouch for that number but the Republic had no army because there were no wars for at least 1000 years. There was small conflicts, the occasional bandit/warlord faction but those were dealt with via local defense group, sometimes a small coalition of defense forces, or paramilitary groups like the Jedi. There simply wasn’t a demand for large standing armies. By nature when the CIA attempted to breakaway from the Republic it didn’t have an extremely large army compared to the size of its territory – there was no need for a large army nor did galactic civilization facilitate mobilizing massive militaries. The infrastructure simply wasn’t in place. They also weren’t fighting over the entire galaxy. The Republic (and CIS) was only 1/3 of the galaxy, and that’s being generous. Oh that that territory your only going to put boots on the ground on a handful. The rest is controlling the space around planets and systems from thousands of miles away.
The GAR was made up of various militias, citizen armies, and hired mercenaries. The clone portion of the army is around 1.5 million units with nobody exactly knowing if a unit is 1 soldier or a group of ten to hundreds. The clones acted as a spearhead facing the hardest combat and the strongest resistance against the CIS. The bulk of the actual holding territory and clean up operations were managed by the various security forces and home defense forces of Republic held worlds. In essence the clones would deploy against the CIS knock out the leadership and main strongholds before moving onto the next system, the militias would come in behind them to secure territory and finish off any stragglers. This allowed Palpatine and the GAR to concentrate their Jedi generals on clone units and against the worst fighting while less capable or less trained units of volunteers could focus on secondary targets that weren’t as heavily defended.
TLDR: clones weren’t the only part of the Grand Army of the Republic, and only served on the Frontline similar to modern day Marines versus general Army soldiers.
It’s not 1.5 million soldiers, it’s 1.5 million units
It’s purposefully never specified how many men are in a unit (although I’ve heard that apparently some old Legends book doubled down on “1 unit = 1 soldier”) so that they avoid writing themselves into a corner, but the clone army likely had far more than 1.5 million people.
One novel said it’s 1.2 million.
Personally it should be at least 500x that.
1.5 million units. We don’t know what a unit is though. Is that a squad? Platoon? Legion?
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A more accurate comparison would be to the size of the United States Marine Corps. The clone troopers weren’t the only ground forces being deployed on the Republic’s side. It’s just that the other soldiers belonged to planets belonging to the Republic, and were being used to defend those planets rather than to take secessionist held worlds. The combat role of the clone troopers to play the role of “space marines”, a mobile force which would handle the invasions of enemy held-worlds and in that role, spearheaded by Jedi they were fully capable of defeating droid armies a hundred times their number because droids were very low quality troops except for a few specialized and expensive Jedi killers.
Even so the fact that the vast majority of the Republics ground forces were sedentary was a recipe for stagnation on the strategic level. Which of course was exactly what we saw and exactly what Palpatine wanted in order for a frustrated Senate and public to support his acquisition of dictatorial power after which he would bring the war to a speedy end by decapitating an enemy leadership who actually had limited popular support which was the reason they were relying massively on droid troops.
We don’t see it featured as heavily in TCW as it’s stated to be in lore (though there are several prominent examples from TCW) but the war was not fought only between the Clones and Droids. It’s not as if a planet under attack by the droids just wouldn’t defend itself with its own forces. The galaxy leading up to the Clone Wars was demilitarized but this left planetary defense largely up to each individual world or sector. In a sense Alderaan protected Alderaan with its own forces and the same goes for every other world in the Republic. So each planet to varying degrees had it owns military and upon the Clone Wars breaking out they fell under the control of the Republics military.
So while the Clones are spread out across the galaxy they’re fighting in the biggest battles or most important battles where their elite training and equipment can make the difference. Meanwhile local forces will fight and defend their own planets even occasionally being sent to defend planets that aren’t their own worlds.
Notably we see the Twi’leks defending their own world fiercely aiding Republic Clones and on the CIS side we see the Umbarens defend their world by themselves without much ground assistance from the Droid army.
We also see during the civil war on Mon Calamari the Gungans a non-Mon Calamari military intervening on behalf of the Republic to fight the CIS backed Quarrens.
Pretty much imagine anytime you see Clones than the battles very important because theirs only so many of them to go around and they’re the galaxies greatest soldiers.
The Republic is spectacularly dysfunctional by the standards of modern Earth governments. It is not the United States, it is not NATO- not even nearly as functional as the 2024 versions of those things that are threatening to come apart at the seams. It’s not even modern Italy, India, or Turkey. Take all the structural and political woes of the late Ottoman or Holy Roman Empire, or the U.S. during the Articles of Confederation period immediately after the Revolutionary War and before the Constitution, and you will have only just started to realize what a titanic clusterfuck it is.
Their legislature is corrupt and sclerotic, their bureaucracy impenetrable and ineffective, the authority of the central government extremely weak compared to the local authority of its member systems. Its capital, at the core of its most densely-populated, wealthiest, most well-governed sector, has a functionally ungoverned undercity with more people in it than have ever lived on Earth.
There’s a reason the Trade Federation’s separatist movement had genuine and substantial popular support, a reason the Chancellor was so able to convince people to cast down the old system and declare him Emperor: the Republic just does not work very well at all. Its army is what it can afford from scraping up change from the hovercouch cushions, because that’s all anyone can convince the Senators to vote to provide them in a moment of genuinely dire galactic emergency. The Jedi Order is the only thing holding the whole mess together.
I believe that the actual size of the clone army is still a debated topic among fans. What do the cloners actually say? “One million units, with a million more on the way”.
What is a unit? One trooper? A group? It’s never made clear, at least not as far as I know.
Still…a single clone trooper is considerably more capable and intelligent than a droid. The CIS relies purely on numbers.
The separatists did not have quadrillions of droids there’s no confirmed number, that’sjust seperatist propagandain legends. The galactic population is also probably pretty low. There other non clones fighting for the republic
You have to remember who was actually responsible for ordering and funding their creation: Dooku (and by extension Palpatine). The Clones were never meant to beat the Separatists or win the war. They were meant to execute Order 66. It was never a matter of Seperatists vs the Republic, it was Palpatine vs the Jedi.
The cannon answer, that we don’t really see in media, is the majority of the fighting was done by normal republic citizens and the clones were just like the best soldiers.
I believe that when Kaminoians were talking about 200 thousand units ready, that they meant unit as formation of 91 clones each, that were moments after walking into ship. Unit = cloning batch.
That would make over 18.2 million clones at first wave, with 91 million clones to be released later.
Sci-fi writers are notoriously bad about scaling. I can’t really blame them for that, shit gets into absurd numbers.
The novel Shatterpoint by Matthew Stover goes into detail about this. Mace Windu in the novel points out that the Clone army has only 1.5 million soldiers, barely enough to station a single trooper on every planet in the Republic.
The clone army in the Legends continuity at least was meant to be an elite quick-reaction force, designed to reinforce critical sieges and battles. Most of the fighting was done by sector and planetary defence forces.
That was the first batches. IIRC there’s no specific final number given. For all we know there were other batches reasy to br griwn and the Kaminoans became more and more effective.
There’s also the fact that clones, for the most part are all fighting troops. Modern armies have around 70% of troops in non-combat roles.
Lastly, consider that the more advanced the technology, the less men you need to accomplish an objective. They weren’t trying to conquer the Galaxy, they just needed to secure key planets in strategic locations.