How many Stormtroopers Does It Take To Rule The Galaxy?

For many years I've assumed that the Galactic Empire had countless (Billions and Billions! as Carl Sagan would say) white-armored stormtroopers with which to terrorize the hapless citizens under the Emperor's rule. But after watching the movies over again, and reading through several EU sources, I've come to a different conclusion:

The stormtroopers are a tiny, elite unit and they only play a prominent role in the movies and EU because the most important Imperial officials (Palpatine, Tarkin, Vader) would be the ones to command these elite troops.

For example, how many stormtroopers do we see in ANH? A dozen or so on the Blockade Runner. Maybe a dozen or so on Tattooine and a like number on the Death Star -all of whom could have been the exact same soldiers! After all, Vader sent them to Tattooine and could have brought them back to the Death Star later to chase the heroes around the battle station. So Vader and Tarkin between them may have only had (if you factor out casualties) twenty or thirty Imperial Stormtroopers at most.

[image=http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/thumb/7/71/StormtrooperCorps_anh1080p.jpg/250px-StormtrooperCorps_anh1080p.jpg]

Of course it would be silly to think that the Galactic Empire could only muster one platoon of soldiers to fight the Rebellion. True, the Civil War was little more than a brush fire conflict, and there's no evidence Vader and Tarkin's troops survived the Battle of Yavin, but lack of evidence isn't evidence of lack. Let's assume these stormtroopers were in fact blown up with the Death Star.

In The Empire Strikes Back, you only see a small number of Imperial troops on Hoth or at Bespin. Again, there's no reason to believe that these aren't the same stormtroopers being used for one mission after another. After the shoot-out on Bespin, it appears that Vader is down to just a few of his elite soldiers:

[image=http://www.id-wall.com/images/large/270-c.jpg]

However, in Return of the Jedi, the Emperor himself is setting a trap and presumably will have gathered all the forces at his disposal to finish the Rebellion once and for all. You can tell he means business because this time he has way more stormtroopers than Vader and Tarkin combined!

[image=http://www.theforce.net/swtc/Pix/dvd/zs/rotj/ebay12.jpg]

That's eighty-five Imperial Stormtroopers. Surely the Rebellion in DOOMED! That's not how it played out though, because the Ewoks, Han Solo, Chewbacca, Princess Leia and the Rebel Commandos killed quite a few stormtroopers, crippling the Emperor's ability to not only wage war, but even to terrorize the people of his Empire.

I have looked through many EU sources (including Marvel Comics, the Zahn series, the Thracken Sal-Solo book, the Play-Doh set, my own collection of seven Stormtrooper action figures), and like the movies, they only depict a handful of Imperial Stormtroopers in any given gunfight. I know I'm going to be accused of "minimalism", but isn't it safe to say that there were only at most a few hundred Imperial Stormtroopers in the entire Original Trilogy? This would explain why Princess Leia was so confident the Rebels would win when she told off Governor Tarkin. Her confidence filtered down to the rank-and-file Rebel pilots, when Dack said he could take on the whole Empire by himself. He was right! All he needed to do was chuck a grenade or two at their next drill and it's curtains for the Empire.

Can someone point to real EU evidence of the Empire having more than a few hundred stormtroopers?

I see what you did there.

 

3 million oughta do it.

 

...this won't end well.

 

I think Palps just uses most of them for Force lightning target practice when he's feeling bored.

[image=http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/4/48/Betrayal_Electric_Death.jpg]

The (un)lucky who manage to get assigned to Vader/Tarkin get used as fodder for the Rebels.

 

I count 24 stormtroopers in that picture -a figure in line with my theory. So far that leads to fewer than 300. You miscalculated by a factor of 10,000!

 

2. One to rule the galaxy, one to bang his head into the palace door.

 

And one to make the Wilhelm scream as he falls off the balcony at Chewie's house...

 

Remember, the Clone Wars were only a series of small skirmishes where a few commandos could thrash millions of enemy troops. The Rebellion was MUCH smaller, so Palps would have only needed a few hundred men, each with six or seven apostrophes in his name, to keep order in the new Empire.

 

This is silly....

"A Stormtrooper battalion has 820 men, just like any ther battalion" -ISB

"At the Empire's height, the core stormtrooper forces were said to outnumber the regular army" - HTTESB

There are many, many sources which give an idea of Stormtrooper numbers and it isn't a couple hundred.

 

I can't give an exact figure, but there are many Stormies in the OT era considering that the Empire is still cloning some along with recruiting regular humans to fill their ranks.

 

It's called satire...

I say that there weren't any stormtroopers at all, and the whole thing was a figment of a spice-addict's imagination.

 

Well, technically, the police throughout a lot of the Imperial Core are a paramilitary wing of the stormtrooper corps:

[image=http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/7/76/Femcorguard.jpg]

A typical stormtrooper. They're armed with stun blasters and tasers. Coruscant alone could easily have two billion of them, which would outnumber the Imperial Army twice over.

And, of course, calling this massive cadre of non-combat troops "Elite Stormtroopers" gives the impression that they're just the top troops of a far larger corps...

This is pure Tarkin Doctrine stuff, creating the sense of a massive military machine that can swing in and kick ass...

... when in fact, for practical purposes, the "non-élite" corps of actual casualty-taking front-line assault infantry could be much smaller.

All of this would further explain the enigmatic nature of the stormies and the utter confusion over their actual unit composition...

... but even within the "real" stormtroopers, the elements of the corps who aren't simply civilian police, we need to differentiate between the security troops assigned to protect the Moffs and keep order in their capitals, who could simply be another form of riot police, and the actual name-taking élite soldiers serving on the front line with the Sector Group or Sector Army...

It's hard to analyse the numbers with any stability, but you can probably push actual "combat" stormtrooper numbers as low as around... um, three million for the entire Empire...?

After all, what do you use these guys for?

And why do you need more of them than you did for the GAR?

- The Imperial Ewok

 

For what it's worth, the Rebellion Era Sourcebook mentions that the Empire possesses "tens of trillions of regular Army troopers, trillions of fleet personnel, and a vast number of stormtroopers" (or something to that effect... can't remember it verbatim).

 

Then the Clone Wars must have been BRUTAL since there are only 300 or so left by the time of ANH.

 

It's more that they died of old age by then.

 

Three MILLION?

Where do you guys get such astronomical numbers? How do you figure that many when at MOST you only see 300 in the entire trilogy? Look, there are only thirty or so Star Destroyers because that's all we see in ROTJ. Why should anyone think there are more? I mean, we only see one Emperor. Why should we believe there are 10,000 spare Emperors in the Galaxies? Yet we're supposed to believe there are 10,000 times as many stormtroopers as were ever seen in the OT? Talk about big fish stories!

 

- The Imperial Ewok

 

I can understand this...and if we went purely by the films and "big three" EU, we could probably be making smaller assumptions.

But when Stormies start to appear in secondary and relatively insignificant moments, you have to wonder about the coincidences of such things vs. there just being that many.

I've always seen the Stormies as a significantly smaller faction of the Empire's military, but even so, it's considerable.

I'd say 3 million wouldn't be out of the question (you don't need as many as you needed Clone Troops for the GAR), but that number is severely tainted.

5-10 million perhaps? On the galactic scale, it's minute...but if you truly want it to be a specialized force...see it as the successor to an ever shrinking clone force...then I could be comfortable there.

Even if you just wanted to extrapolate how many graduates Carida could push out during it's operational years...you might get a good idea.

 

Oh, so clever.

 

Well, seeing as how the Empire lost, I'd say to properly rule the galaxy you'd need at least one more than whatever number they had

 

naw...funny thing about that galaxy...the odds are screwy...never let someone tell you the odds...

 

A single Stormtrooper Division consists of approximately 8400 soldiers, backed up by the armour battalions.


But the reason that you see so few stormtroopers during the OT has already got an explanation courtesy of Battlefront 2.
The troops seen in the film are members of the 501st Stormtrooper Legion. They operate as small detachments of much larger forces.

 

The answer is 42

 

Yes, but we do see two Darth Vaders (including that one that showed up on Dagobah that Luke killed). So I don't think it's out of the question that we have at least two Emperors running around.