PT The Clone Army numbers...

I've brought this up once before, but it was kind of lightly touched on and I never did get a clear answer

Lama Su had stated that 200,000 were ready with a million more on the way. Seeing as how the clones took about half a life time to mature into adults, that would mean that in 9 more years they'd have a lot more, but Ep 3 takes place about 4 years after Ep 2.

Meaning the entire galaxy was protected by 1,200,000 clones, which would have meant easy pickings for the CIS. Yet it seemed there were more during the war. Anyone know if there was a different clone number and if so, where did all these numbers come from since the next batch would've taken about 9 years?

 

The size of the clone-army is a hot mess.

I have seen this debate rage across different forums, let alone threads. LFL has stated that there never has been an "all-encompassing" number of clone troopers. Cestus Deception put the death toll at over a million clones within the first two years of the war. Hot mess indeed.

I think the highest estimate that I can recall was around 20 million clones, but even THAT number STILL seems SMALL given the scale of the galaxy-wide conflict.

 

Three years, actually ( though I've been seeing speculation that this might be changed ).

 

Lamu Su said there were "a million more well on the way" (i.e., almost ready/completed). Taun We later told Obi-Wan to remember that if he needed more troops, it would take time to grow them. *Those* ones would have taken their sweet time to reach maturity, but they weren't necessarily ordered. So, the final figure appears to be 1.2 million units, but it could be more or less than that, depending on other variables (is it 1:1? -- one unit is one clone?; were there growth or training problems? etc.).

The real discrepancy seems to lie in Taun We's claim that a full clone would take "a lifetime" to grow, but they found a way, through "growth acceleration", to do it in "half" the time. Are we meant to believe, then, that if the order was placed around ten years prior to AOTC, these clones we see collecting their helmets and marching in file, with the face of a 40-something actor, are a mere twenty years old? If so, there was apparently no attempt made to make the Temuera Morrison clones look any younger than Temuera Morrison himself, but maybe the clones are meant to have unnaturally aged faces or something.

 

It only makes sense, especially now that TCW will likely run for a decade.

 

I do hope a number and explanation will come, because it doesn't make sense that a clone army of 2 million or so could beat the CIS who probably could prop millions of battle droids in days with their mass producing factories. Even if the Clone army had 10,000,000 that's still probably an insignificant to how many planets there are and how spread out they'd have to be to maintain them all.

 

It also doesn't help that when we see the clones battling in the Movies/Cartoons/Comic Books/TV Showyou see entire star destroyers or walkers blown up, of which I highly doubt they had only 1 or 2 clone troopers in each...

 

In addition, it's pretty much essential to Palpatine's schemes to ensure that the Republic military is staffed almost entirely by clones. If there are non-clones present in vast numbers (which a small number of clones would necessitate), then there is no guarantee that they would execute Order 66 when the time comes.

Outside the films, in a recent arc of TCW, the staff of a Coruscant prison consists entirely of clones - guards, support staff, the whole lot. In other episodes, we see clones on patrol on Coruscant's streets as a sort of gendarmerie. If there is a tiny number of clones in the galaxy, how could the Republic afford to keep clones on law enforcement and prison duties when the Clone Wars are supposedly so vicious?

 

Here is the Wookiepedia analysis: Clone Trooper Numbers

Besides that, from Kamino they only, supposedly, got a few million, because it is well known that Palpatine during the first year of the war ended up making his own seperate cloning facility on one of Coruscants moons which chewed out clones in like weeks, months and even years. Kamino and Coruscant were not the only places where Clones were created, just the main places.

 

Doesn't Lama Su refer to "units" rathan than individual clones? A military unit is never one man, so if they're talking about a million units, I'd wager that's several million actual soldiers.

You couldn't invade Texas with a million men, let alone fight trillions of battle droids across thousands of planets and moons.

 

LOL... I was just going to post that!

Great minds think alike...

It dawns on me a 'unit' might mean a thousand troops, which would be 200,000 thousand, or, 2,000,000,000 troops...

With 10,000,000,000 more on the way.


That makes a lot more sense to me when one considers there's 10,000 systems to fight off.

That makes about 10,000,000 per system ~ not an unreasonable amount when one considers the size of armies these days in wars on just parts of this planet.

 

Taken from the section in the GAR numbers

The only other thing i wish to bring up is that Kamino is a rather large planet. I mean ,are we to logically assume that Tipoca City is the only city on the planet at all, and the only city which Obi-wan visits only has 200000-1200000 clone troopers practically ready and waiting. As we see, all of these troops fit inside this one city. I mean, if we figure that There are actually more than one city then it would be logical to assume that several cities besides Tipoca have similar numbers of clones ready and waiting.

 

That's actually quite under what you'd need for a system of planets, I think. I dislike using WW2 to compare to the Clone Wars because the level of technology is vastly different, but 8 million men was the size of the United States military for that, and that was just for Europe, parts of North Africa, and some islands in the Pacific. The Clone Army could get away with smaller numbers if it maintained the momentum gained by the victory at Geonosis (and for the most part it seems like it did; outside of the surprise attack at Coruscant and needing to defend the Wookies, ROTS seems to portray a Republic that is largely defining the pace and tempo of the war) but given the non-linear nature of space warfare (there really is no such thing as a 'rear area' or 'front line' possible with faster than light travel and a 4-dimensional battlefield) having to play defense is an inevitable event, and a successful defense requires mass & depth. This can be mitigated somewhat by advanced technology, but ultimately a defensive (or occupational, which would be a requirement on alot of worlds the Republic took) force needs size. This could be managed somewhat by using spaceships instead of soldiers, but you also need the ships to maintain that offensive.

 

It's been established for some time that 1 unit = 1 clone.

 

Yeah, since Shatterpoint came out.

I think most attempts at clone numbers are probably wrong; sure, we can (sorta...) guess* at how many the war started with, but ultimately none of the (official or otherwise) numbers take into account that the war continues for three years. Assuming that eighteen is the bare minimum age for the clones to be considered battle-ready, that's about an additional million to two million troopers coming into the war each year.

A further problem is that Kamino's industrial capacity is a complete unknown. We know there's at least two stilt-cities on Kamino (Tipoca City, and one we see in the background when Obi-Wan arrives); but there is no reason to assume that two cities is all that there is. It seems that Kaminoans are a pretty obscure species as Obi-Wan has never heard of them, which implies that they are not exactly numerous, but from what we see Tipoca is highly, highly automated, and we know that at least some clones are trained by combat instructors from other worlds.

You can accurately say a galactic war would requires a whole pile of soldiers, but barring an official announcement of exactly how many clones were produced or exactly how many cities are on Kamino, it's probably not possible to arrive at an accurate number.

 

Actually, 16,000,000 was the total number of servicemen in the US Armed Forces during WWII according to The World Almanac.

 

I like the fact they're limited numbers and they were hard pressed to make more. It explains why they decided to conscript after the war instead, which would be cheaper and faster. Besides, they weren't the only ones fighting the droid army. Let's not forget the Jedi Knights and the people of their worlds who joined in the fighting.

 

Yeah, I should have specified that I was speaking about the US Army, not the total size of the military when the USAAC and the USN are included. Either way it shows that 10 million is small for a system.

Iraq is probably a good model for a garrison of clones; 160,000 men for one average-sized state with only one really large city and a large number of small to medium-sized villages and towns. That is assuming a non-peaceful scenario; Bosnia required 39,000 to enforce a cease-fire.

 

In the end, it's just a movie & if we put a microscope on any movie, it falls apart...

Enjoy it & escape for a few hours...

No biggie.

I mean, Casablanca has a fake airplane flying overhead at the beginning & The Wizard of Oz has painted scenery all over the place, but I don't hear anybody obsessing over that.

Heck, The Godfather has a baseball game from October 3, 1951 playing when Sonny gets killed at the toll booth when it's 1947 (The famous Bobby Thompson shot heard 'round the world; Giants victory over the Dodgers)...

I hope I didn't just ruin that movie for y'all.

 

Yeah, I tend to think that it's not very relevant to the story; Star Wars has never been a numbers/technology-based story beyond window dressing.

We all knew where this series was heading when Cronkite asked Lucas where the 'retro-rockets' on a Star Destroyer are, and Lucas replied with a blank look and "I don't know."

 

The films never say that 1 unit = 1 clone, so I'll go with my theory.

Just another example of bad EU. Military cloners wouldn't dabble in individual numbers. Who wants that? They would deal in batches.

 

...Except that 1 unit=1 clone came from the Bearded Flannel himself.

 

Not in the film, though.

 

Just pick a number you like and think is reasonable and go with it. There is no clear answer at this point.