Saga What if the troopers were not clones?.

Now you lost me

 

Sounds like every fantasy/scifi/adventure out there starting with the Illiad Who cares about strategy, we wanna see the heroes kicking ass.

That said, there's usually some plausible explanation for various heroics. For example, no one questions in The Lord of the Rings why the Last Alliance's leaders (Elendil and Gil-galad) personally fought Sauron at the siege of Barad-Dur. It's simple: they were the most powerful beings who could have stopped Sauron. And they knew that without his will to control them, his troops (mostly orcs or slaves) would scatter.

The Jedi are better qualified to take out the Sith (or the multi-armed supercyborg).

Admittedly, not one of the Order's finest hours . But they arrived before the clones and didn't have any prior experience in being their commanders. Mace at least tried to get Dooku (don't know why he didn't bring more Jedi with him).

Why not, if he knows what's he doing? It's all about delegation. Cody does his job so that Obi can go on one of his adventures

We don't get to see most of the Clone Wars in the movies. You get the feeling they personally lead the troops in battle, but it happened a lot in history. The Jedi are a cross between medieval knights and samurai, after all.

Also, the Jedi are amateurs because of the circumstances, but what's the Imperial Officers' excuse? Or even Vader's, for that matter? (well, ok, I know the answer to that one).

 

I'll go with realism when it comes to wars, thanks.

Watching Luke, a relative newb to the Rebel military, actually issue orders and come up with tactics in TESB makes the prequel Jedi look very bad indeed. Either you're an officer (which Luke definitely embodies very well in TESB) or you're not.

 

TESB comes the closes to realism. However, the Jabba Palace stuff doesn't make much sense.

Becoming a fighter pilot right away in ANH wasn't exactly realistic either.

 

The Jabba's Palace footage in TESB?

Eh, I can handwave Luke being able to fly an X-Wing in ANH-he's a crazy bush pilot per Biggs, after all. I can't handwave Obi-Wan apparently having no idea how to lead a battle after years of doing so.

 

Napoelon was brigadier general at 24.

 

Had the benefit of going to officer school, didn't he? The Jedi are rank amateurs and were never trained in soldiery-y things to begin with.

 

I am pretty sure they teach miltary tactics at the jedi academy. Skywalker probably took some exams offscreen.

 

In official canon, the Grand Army of the Republic numbers only 3,2 million clonetroopers which served as an elite force under Jedi command. The majority of the Republic ground forces (GAR, Judicial Forces and Planetary Militaries) was made up by billions of recruted soldiers.

 

The Essential Guide to Warfare clarifies that the 3 million-odd clone troopers were just Sifo-Dyas's original order- and that the number of clones serving rapidly reached this and grew way beyond, as the war went on. It does also say that both sides had armies of ordinary people, and that many battles had neither clones nor droids.

 

Yeah, the "only 3 million" is a fanon. Wasn't true even years ago.

 

How exactly did the idea that the 3 million clone "Order of Battle" was as big as the Grand Army ever got, come about in the first place? Traviss usually gets the blame- but did she in fact say or write something like that?

 

Well, she did-but it was pretty quickly clarified to not include everything. Although it being Traviss I'm not surprised it got blown out of proportion; out of all the various things she said/wrote that made people spazz out here, that's the one that actually should not have been controversial at all.

 

My guess is that at the time, the "million on the way" was assumed to be a year-batch, with a total of 3 year-batches coming into service during the war.

 

Actually...there should have been 3 to 4 such batches a year, unless my math is totally off.

The clones we see on Geonosis are about 20, which is a shade old for the minimum requirement most militaries have (the youngest you can join with permission from your parents for the US military is 17, for example); so let's say that the Kaminoans manage to compress the training cycle to 8.5 years to increase the number of soldiers available at a time. Assuming they've been starting a new batch every 4.5 months (with the whole accelerated growth cycle), that comes out to 3 or so batches that would be between 17/18 and 20 at the start of the war.

Plus of course it seems reasonable that there's not just one city on Kamino; we see at least one other off in the distance in AOTC.

 

Lama Su said "units" in the movie. In real life, a "unit" always is a group of two or more soldiers. Treating the 1,2 million units from the movie as 1,2 million clonetroopers in the Expanded Universe was just a misinterpretation. As far as I know, the official number is 3,2 million clonetroopers, supported by billions of recruited soldiers.

 

You really ought to get around to reading the Essential Guide to Warfare, because that last sentence isn't accurate.

 

The 10 year old (20 in appearance) clones might have been the "200,000 now" ones.

I don't know how it does work- I'm guessing at how Traviss thought it worked- and my guess is that she thought 1 million clones would enter service each year- which is how she got 3 million.

In sci-fi though- "unit" can refer to beings, when used by very dispassionate entities. Like the "carbon-based units infesting the Enterprise" in Star Trek The Motion Picture.
The novelization had Obi-Wan and Mace interpret "million more on the way" as "a million clone warriors".

 

Probably. Although iirc Stover got directed that 1 unit=1 clone per Lucas. Of course, Stover when he still posted here was a much more demanding target than Traviss.

 

Was there as much outcry that it's "way too few to fight a galactic war" when Shatterpoint came out?

 

No, because Shatterpoint was awesome.

 

I think the point when the numbers controversy really kicked off was when Saxton, and others, wrote of "quadrillions" and "quintillions" of battle droids.

 

Probably.

 

Which never really made sense in the context of Mace's reaction in Labyrinth of Evil to Grievous's attack "They can't be trying to occupy Coruscant- there aren't enough battle droids in the galaxy for that."

As for Luke- I'm guessing that 3 years of being in the Rebellion played a part in building up his command skills. Wasn't he promoted to "Commander Skywalker" and given charge of Rogue Squadron?

 

Yeah, he was. Obi-Wan, on the other hand, had 3 years of being a Jedi General and apparently never learned anything.