Talk:Grand Army of the Republic

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Contents 1 Phonetic alphabet 2 Grand Army Structure 3 Army size 4 Dooku's quote 5 Protection? 6 Regarding Army numbers 7 numbers 8 me

[edit] Phonetic alphabet

I've just been reading Labyrinth of Evil, and I've noticed that Clone troopers seem to have their own version of the NATO phonetic alphabet. So far I've identified three letters:

• B:Bacta
• I:Ion
• J:Jenth

If anyone can expand on this, please let me know. We could be on our way to a new article.--The All-knowing Sith'ari 16:28, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

Jenth is Basic for J in the Aurebesh, and not part of another alphabet. As to the rest, I don't think the writers have a uniform system that they all use. Astro Droid 21:08, September 14, 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Grand Army Structure

I was thinking that in addition to the basic command structure shown on the page, it might be useful to try to compile a structure of the actual army itself, along with their respective clone commanders and Jedi generals. A rought example being: (All information taken from Third Systems Army page)

 *Third System Army (Led by Obi-Wan Kenobi)
   *7th Sky Corps
     *212th Attack Battalion
     *442nd Siege Battalion
   *501st Legion
etc...  
 Any thoughts?

--Shadowxander 23:20, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

I've taken a crack at putting together an ORG chart. Keep in mind this is just a rough. It would be nice to be able to fill some of the holes in but alas much just simply does not exist. I built out the entire structure down to the squad and it's expectedly massive. Just the few top levels on one Systems Army gets you off the screen quick.

GAR ORG Chart

It would be cool to lay out the rest of the organization, but they don't follow any clear pattern and anything else would clearly be fan-made. Although we could have some fun speculating on those. For example, you have Systems Army Alpha and then the Third Systems Army so it's not clear which naming convention should be applied to the other eight - letter/phonetic or numerical.

The sector armies seem to be numerical. With the 2nd Sector Army in Systems Army Alpha, one could assume the other Sector Army is the 1st. So would it follow that 3rd/4th are in Systems Army Bravo/Two? By that convention, the 7th Sky Corp would be in either the 5th or 6th Sector Army if it fall s under the Third Systems Army.

The numbering for the Corps are all over the board. They don't really fit sequentially, as in there are 8 Corps in System Army Alpha but since the 327th Star Corps falls under Alpha clearly they aren't getting numbered 1,2 3, ...8. Add to that that there are only 80 Corps in the whole GAR, throws the 327th out of whack. Granted they don't have to follow numerically and we see evidence of this within our own military ORGs within the Army. A lot of times those gaps/exceptions exist for historical reasons where units get restructured under a different command or their sequential counterparts get disbanded. But an Army like the GAR which is essential stood up overnight wouldn't have those kinds of historical impacts. One would think they would have been laid out somewhat coherently (unless they were named after some ancient Old Republic unit).

Also the Corps have one, two and three digit designations (7th Sky, 9th Assault, 21st Nova, 91st Recon, 327th Star) which makes it complicated to lay out systematically. One way would be to align them to a corresponding Army (i.e. 91st in the 9th System/Sector Army, 21st in the 2nd System/Sector Army, 327th in the 3rd System/Sector Army) but clearly that doesn't follow given what we currently have (21st in the 4th Sector & 327th in the Alpha/2nd Sector).

It's a shame that when Karen Traviss et al. started putting this to paper that they didn't sit down before hard and map out some realistic numbers/sizes and organization to keep everything straight. They should have expected any info they put out to be highly scrutinized by SW fans. Ob1anakin 18:43, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Army size

RC novel series is pretty explicit about the amount of CLONE troopers, that is, 3 million Kaminoan clone troopers, not units like brigades or even platoons. But it's implied that Spaarti Cloning employed by the Republic would've produced MILLIONS of (poorly trained) troopers... I don't believe that unit would've meant a brigade or any other unit, just single troopers. I think the size needs to be worked out really Woorloog 14:43, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

• Any novel doesn't usurp what is said in the movies, and in the movies, units are units, with no ulterior explanation. As it goes, the war is too large for simply 3 million individual clones to fight, since they are not only the main ground force, but also the pilots, crew and gunners on board the Republic's larger ships, like assault ships and destroyers, and in addition to that, have units patrolling most Republic worlds, even filling up space on city planets like Coruscant. All that at the same time, and with the amount of Republic space available, means they're not 3 million in total. If anything, a recent preview clip of the new tv show, has Dooku saying the battle droids outnumber the clones, 100 to 1. We know the droid numbers have been in the quintillions, which means the clone numbers would be in their tens of quadrillions. If they're meant to both pilot and serve in millions of various warships and on millions of planets, moons and asteroids spread throughout Republic space, that's how it's gotta be. :) VT-16 14:59, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
  • Well i don't belive there were really quintillions of battle droids. Hundreds of millions is more realistic (even for space fantasy :), maybe even billions (BTW, are we using short or long scale anyway?) Have to admit that 3 million is not enough. in neither case really, no matter how good soldiers they're... One thing i don't like on SW is inconsistent stuff. How many people there are in the Republic anyway? Kal Skirata and Nulls got trillion credits by stealing half a cred from bank accounts (2 trillion). Maybe the war's effectivly so large that we cannot comprehend it... Woorloog 10:50, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
    • Face it. The droid armys would have had at least 100 million droids to hold out, and still have some left for the numerous rebellions against the empire and the droid guards. The Republic would have needed around 75 million clones to do properly fight. Not all of these are clones. Factor in, lets say 15 million non-clones and you have 60 million clones. That's 20 times the amount the RC novels provide. (Note that all the numbers are approximations and are therefore non-canon) 203.123.89.166 11:03, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
    • I think we're using shortscale, if it's an English story, then that is the most likely scale used. The amount of droids being in the quintillions isn't hard to grasp with a galaxy of millions of planetary systems, and each system usually having multiple worlds and countless asteroids. Even gas giants can be used as staging grounds, with the use of repulsor platforms, so there's even more choices available to societies like the ones in SW. That the clones are somewhat less, is logical, given the more complex task of keeping alive and supporting biological organisms than mechanical ones. Even in the first 100 years of hyperdrive development, there were quintillions of engineers and technicians working on perfecting the designs, so scales of biological creatures can go that high in other areas. If the Republic can afford enough clones to guard Coruscant so extensively that there's a clone patrol "on every corner", this alone would be far in excess of just 3 million individuals, given they have to watch over trillions on that planet, alone. And that's not counting the clones working on the defense ships in orbit. VT-16 11:49, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
      • Yeah, all true. It's just frustrating that GAR's true size is not told (IMO, Clone Wars is THE event for me in SW, i wanna know all about it :) ). BTW where was 3 million first mentioned anyway? AotC? Can't remember... Woorloog 16:38, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
        • An article made by Karen Traviss in 2005, I believe. It was hinted at in her blog that she was basically making fun of people who debate technical stuff in SW, since it was advertized as containing the "true size" of the entire army, and she was "expecting reactions". All she did was barely double the size from the initial batch mentioned in the AOTC novel (1.2 million ready to go). Thankfully, the novel and the article and following novels have no authority over the films, where the number of individual clones in the entire army has never been pinned down. I only hope the series continues this vagueness. To give you a hint of the true silliness inherent in this low number, imagine the Battle of Berlin being fought with a pistol on each side. Not an entire soldier even, because that one soldier is busy fighting all fronts throughout the world at the same time, somehow. That's basically what it means to have 3 million individual clones fight ground battles, crew warships, and guard worlds, all throughout a galaxy of millions of habitable solar systems and even more worlds, moons and asteroids. If they want to have some amount of internal continuity, the best way is to never pin down any number that could later be ripped on. How many battles are there in this war now? Must be hundreds mentioned at least. And more will come as the show and comics and podcasts progress. How many clones got killed by the Malevolence? Dozens of task forces meaning a good percentage of "3 million clones", and that's at the start of the conflict, less than one year into it. VT-16 08:50, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

RE: Malevolence There had been a dozen raids on Republic task forces by the time the Republic finally pulled its head out of its shebs and sent poor ole Plo Koon after the Malevolence. At least one task force (that depicted in the online companion comic) has three VenStars. Koon's thirteenth task force had 5. Let's take a minimalist view: the 11 task forces we haven't seen consist of one Venator each. Assuming , reasonably, that each Venator Star Destroyer had a full crew then we have at least (11+3+5)*7,400 clone casualties.(As there were no survivors until Koon's little raid; even then there were fewer than a dozen). I'd say the Malevolence claimed at least 140,600 clone troops in crews alone. That's over a tenth of all troops in active duty according to Traviss's 1,200,000 in action figure. That is, unless we're going to assume that the Republic assigned half of its army at that point to patrols and that it was willing to take those losses. Also, it is the no survivors nature and deadliness of the weapon that is of concern to the Republic. If we assume the destroyed VenStars were fully loaded, that means that we have 178,600 casualties. And yet the Republic continued to wage war. RIP "Noble 3 Million"... --4.156.60.48 04:13, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

60,000 at the Republic medical center...but considering what a bad joke GAR medical care is, that isn't saying much. Besides, it seems to be for high ranking clones only...

I read a book a while back (I believe the second to last? RC book) and it states that Obi-Wan found numerous factories and that the only one he was able to visit said that it produced 900,000 Droids per day (BD's, SBD's, Destroyer Droids, etc..) which would equal out to a MASSIVE 961,200,000 Droids produced by this factory ALONE over the extent of the 3 year war... Now I am positive there were most likely hundred's of thousands to millions (maybe even billions) of factories spread throughout the separatist's thousands of planets so.. lets say the CIS have 100 *Factories* producing at this same extent (I know they have probably hundreds of millions of factories but just using this as a rough example), 961,200,000 * 100 = 96,120,000,000 Droids produced over the course of 3 years which i highly doubt would be able to be defeated by merely *3 million clones, x amount of poorly trained spaari clones, and a few million support/non-clone personnel* (22 BBY - 19 BBY).. I wish Mr. Lucas would actually clarify it sometime.. though I've been looking over the GAR thread and seem these are the two most promising explanations.. One last solution is to return to the vague term "unit" which Lama Su mentioned. If a "unit" were to be referring to one of the battalions of 576 troopers (seen on Coruscant), then 200,000 of these would render 115,200,000 clones and the 1,000,000 others spoken of as 576,000,000. This grand total of 691,200,000 would make be far more suitable for the core of a galactic army. However, the actual number of clone soldiers which can be seen standing in each formation at the end of Attack of the Clones amounts to 624 (26 per column and 24 per row), showing a disparity with the numbers presented in the Guide to the Grand Army. If a unit indeed amounts to one battalion, this would mean that the grand total of clones was 748,800,000. RC-1 6:47, 15 October 2008 (CST)

Has the idea that the 3 mil figure refers to combat troopers been floated? While it seems abysmally small for a fighting force, if you take out the ship crews & support personel, it'd be much closer. And the GAR had non-clone personel as early as the Battle of Geonosis, as there was a Duros loadmaster after Darman lost his squad. The clones were also often supplimented by local forces as you see on Gaftikar. Astro Droid 04:50, September 14, 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Dooku's quote

He says in Ambush they outnumber the Republic a hundred to one. At quintillions of battledroids doesn't that put clone numbers in the quadrillions

• Several tens of quadrillions, yes. Not too shabby, given their guard duties on city planets (where the number of civilians to watch over number in trillions), and doing gunnery and technical duties on capital ships (with the CIS having millions of capital ships, and I think the digest CW comic said the Republic had 1/4 the amount of ships, that would give the Republic at least half a million capital ships, with clones serving in their thousands on each one, giving us billions of clone crews). Excluding those two areas of service, that leaves the army itself, which has to station itself on multiple planetary/moon staging grounds, asteroid installations, fortress worlds, forward bases, etc. And do the actual fighting across a galaxy. With millions of worlds either loyal Republic members or colonies. In the recent plot of the other new CW comic from Dark Horse, the CIS and their slaver allies, move 80 million colonists from planet to planet, unnoticed before the Republic touches down on their former home world. With the amount of logistics needed for that, and with such a lowkey atmosphere around it, that tells us alot about how impressive the scale of each faction is, with this being a small operation on the side of the CIS. VT-16 20:32, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

The galalxy page lists the total population of the Star Wars galaxy at 100 quadrillion sentients, this apparently being taken from Dark Empire sourcebooks. That makes the concept of 1 quintillion battle droids somewhat difficult to grasp, as that would imply 10 battle droids for every sentient in the galaxy. To make some very cheap back of the envelop calculations: if Republic/CIS space encompassed 75% of the galactic populace (leaving space for the Unknown Regions, Wild Space, and autonomous areas such as Hutt Space), and the Republic had a 2:1 population advantage over the CIS (due to having more heavily populated Core Worlds and so forth), and the CIS military included a 10% military population ratio using 90% droids (since we know they had non-droid troops too) that would be...2.25 quadrillion battle droids in a 2.5 quadrillion being military. If they outnumber the Republic 100 to 1 then the Republic would have 25 trillion troops, clones or otherwise. However, it seems dubious that they outnumber the Republic 100 to 1 overall. The nature of Star Wars warfare is that the vast majority of battles will be fleet actions and ground conflict will be very rare, something the movies support. Obviously the Republic was not outnumbered 100 to 1 in space or they'd have been without hope Jedi or no Jedi, the 4 to 1 number you mentioned seems much more possible. That being so, perhaps the CIS simply had a 100 to 1 advantage in ground troops, a tiny fraction of their army, which would bring us back to quadrillions of troops. However, even given that base 100 quadrillion number to work with, the size of all armies can very massively simply by changing the percentages of the military to total populace, allowing you to generate almost any number you want. Mechalich 06:28, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

• • There's a lot of "ifs" in that reasoning. First of all, are you using the population of the Dark Empire period to measure the population before or during the CW? A galaxy-wide war that cost a percentage of the galaxy's civilian population? Even if they were at that level, the number of droids is not impossible, as they were said to be prolific (I think Lucas even mentions them being the equivilant of WMDs that were everywhere). The droids work best in large numbers, simply swamping enemy territory. The movies also show a relative large amount of ground warfare, as opposed to the fleet action in the original trilogy, with tactics such as BDZs said to be used "sparingly" (SOTGSE). VT-16 14:09, 20 December 2008 (UTC)
    • I actually don't think that the 100 quadrillion sentients figure comes from the DE sourcebook, as I was just looking through it to try to find it, and came up with nothing. I'm really not sure where that number comes from. Doluk 22:21, 20 December 2008 (UTC)
      • The new Clone Wars Campaign Guide has an interesting insight that might help solve the numbers disparity. It repeats the 3 million+ number for the GAR, but it strong implies that Clones serving in the Republic Navy are inside a seperate structure. Considering it explicitly states that Coruscant Shock Troopers and other specialists are not considered part of the GAR this seems very likely. The Republic Navy is stated as including several hundred fleets and a 'fleet' is defined as a unit of at least 100 vessels plus support. So, obviously you couldn't control the Republic Navy with 3 million clones. However, by dividing the Navy from the GAR and assuming, as I did above, that ground battles are extremely uncommon, the GAR could be interpretted only as a highly elite 'dedicated ground ops' force, and that might be small enough to consist of only 3 million. this seems to make more sense, especially is shipboard clone troopers are considered 'marines' who report to the Navy and not the army. This new definition method means you can have a 3 million Clone Trooper GAR, but they would be only a very small fraction of the total number of Clones produced, most of whom are considered Republic Navy. This seems to me to make the numbers estimations much more harmonius, but it relegates the GAR to a minor function of the overall Republic Military effort.Mechalich 03:28, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

I don't mean to offend anyone's ideas, especially seeing as I have probably done much less research than anyone else here, but from what I read and watch about the Clone Wars, the vast majority of battles were surface battles. If you flip through the known battles on Wookieepedia, I think you would agree. Some of these battles seem to involve far more troops than seems likely for a ground force of simply 3 million. My best example is probably the Battle of Muunilist, which hinted at numbers so large as to simply disprove the 3 million theory right out, regardless of any logical explanation. I'd use a real sig, but I keep forgetting my account. --75.72.197.45 09:38, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Protection?

Given the controvertial nature of the whole size of the clone army discussion, should this page maybe be semi-protected so that only registered users can edit it? Doluk^Talk 22:13, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

 I myself think that a unit is a block of formation that the clones march in as can be seen at the end of attack of the clones, if so than the number of clones was around 34,480,000,000,000 and if the droids outnumbered them 10 to 1 as is implied simply by the fact that the clones won the war when you observe that one clone private equals 10 battle droids as shown in the battle of Geonosis deployed /casualties ratio of clones and droids, with the assumption that Tyranus was trying to sway the king into joining the c.i.s with fudged numbers (You didn't think a sith would lie to get another planet and inhabitable moon?) in ambush, then the droids nubered around 344,800,000,000,000

[edit] Regarding Army numbers

I can't possibly be the only person with military experience reading the numbers of the GAR and feeling that something is not right. We should bear in mind that during World War 2, it is widely accepted that around 100 million men were mobilized to fight. Yes, that includes huge armies like the Chinese and Russians, but if one planet, with 1940's population levels, can arm up 100 million men when needed, then the idea that 3 million men can carry a war on a Galactic scale is difficult to imagine.

We can discuss ad nauseum that a "unit" is shorthand for a "battalion (about 500 to 1,000 guys, depending on it's type and mission) or even if "unit" was Kaminoan shorthand for a "production run" or a batch, lot number, etc. Maybe the first production run was limited to 3 million men, and following batches numbered far greater as the war was expected to expand. Maybe the Kaminoans only had facilities to make 3 million men at a time. But taking Ms. Traviss's number of 3 million, if indeed she openly admits she came up with that for no other reason than as a fit of pique at the number-crunching set, seems to be lazy reasoning at best.

I didn't come here to gripe about Ms. Traviss; I love Star Wars and I've contemplated making an account here for a long time. When I saw the 3-million number, though, my US Army brain said "does not compute", though, so I finally made my account. Would it be logical to say that the first run was 3 million men, created quickly, with follow-on batches being made as the war progressed so that there was no certain way to maintain exact numbers (by the time some of the clones were made, assigned, deployed, and killed they'd hardly had time to be fully registered in the pay system, for example. In Iraq we still got paperwork for guys that had been rotated home months before).

• Well, they weren't created "quickly" but Kamino did keep up production after the war began. FettClone1 19:26, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

Gotta agree with you on that, man. I'm willing to accept three million as the INITIAL deployment of clone troopers, with more (lots and lots more) to come later, but if our silly little planet of six billion can field almost SIXTY MILLION troops (active, reserve, paramilitary), then surely the Galactic Republic can field that many. China itself has 2.5 million active troops, with "only" a billion to draw from. 66.110.246.11 15:19, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

[edit] numbers

The Gar could not have been only three million clones even with non clone personnel. If you look at all the battles fought through the clone wars and consider that there were still clones left over after the war.
All the ideas so far around that number have been good but I have yet another solution to the problem.

Lama Su said a million more well on the way but what does that mean, does it mean they will be ready in a year from then, a month from then or three minutes from then, maybe the Kamino scientists cloned them so that one batch would go out a day after an earlier batch and a day before another batch.(I don't think they did it that fast month would be more likely, but units most likely were more than one clone.)

"Well on the way" also doesn't count the ones not quite "well on the way". Eg, if you consider clones who have completed combat training as "ready" and those in the final stages of training to be "well on the way", would this not mean that the ones just beginning or in the middle of training to not be included in the initial tally? I think it was 2 years into the Clone Wars that Kamino began worrying about current contracts running out. In that time, which is 4 clone-years, a lot of clones could have matured to fighting age. Also don't forget that Kaminoans grew clones in batches, as you see with the Nulls, Alphas, & Commandos. 200,000 could have just been the initial, semi-test batch for the stock clone, after which larger scale production would have commenced. Astro Droid 05:00, September 14, 2009 (UTC)

[edit] me

Sorry about the grammar in that last post and just to be clear I did not mean that the kaminoians started and finished training a clone in a day but that they had started each batch one day after the one before it.

You need to sign your changes man, or nobody would be able to tell what your last post was. Astro Droid 09:48, October 28, 2009 (UTC)