Lit The Size and Strength of the Confederacy

This is kind of branching off the Contingency thread, because there was some great discussion going on in there but it was unfortunately off-topic.

I can list something that we know about the Confederacy that gives at least an inkling of their strength: throughout arguably the first half of the Clone Wars, they had the Republic vastly outnumbered and outgunned as per TCW. Paying attention to the opening narration paints a picture of the Republic on the ropes for at least half of the show, maybe more. Also, as the war went on it seemed like Dooku had to rely less and less on a droid army in his conquering--as the series goes on we see more and more of Planetary forces clashing against Republic troopers or other entities: The Umbarans, the Quarren, Zygerrians. Perhaps this was always the case from the beginning, who knows.

 

I always felt like there were way more planetary forces duking it out in the Clone Wars than we have seen.

 

Agree, which would have left them vulnerable to the Imperial forces seizing control in the immediate post-Clone Wars days, all in the name of "security and stability," of course.

 

While local military forces existed (on both sides), they probably paled in comparison to size of the Droid army. Without the financial support of the corporations I don't think the CIS would have been an actual threat to the Republic, maybe even without the clone army. However, with the Droid army and its affiliated ships, vehicles, etc. the Confederacy heavily outnumbered the Republic forces, if Kalani's statements in Rebels can be taken as accurate. But once the Droids were deactivated and Dooku, Grievous, and the corporate backers were gone the CIS collapsed seemingly overnight. There seems to have never been any sort of Empire-CIS conflict after RotS, just the hunting down of smaller pockets of Confederacy-loyalists.

 

Well, from the Essential Atlas:

 

The essential guide to warfare mentions that a lot of clone wars battles had nary a droid or clone present.

In my imagination this means the clone wars were a far more localized/proxy affair-with republic or CIS support for their particular faction.

With clone/droid conflicts being in the central strategic theatres.

While organic and local CIS auxiliaries existed-the overwhelming bulk of their forces was the droid army.

Strength wise-it likely outnumbered the republic's clone army though was overall inferior in a qualitative sense.

 

My view of the Confederacy is that it was always a paper tiger. Interestingly, canon has actually increased this view rather than decreased it. Origianlly, the view of the Confederacy was that it was basically, AYN RAND: THE SPACE WAR. The megacorporations and super-rich wanted to leave the Republic and set up their own Jackson's Hole libertarian paradise. Sort of like those ridiculous artificial islands that exist for the purposes of bilking investors (and got defeated by the Tonga army at one point).

THE CLONE WARS realized, perhaps, this is an incredibly bad idea for "heroes on both sides" since I don't think we have many dedicated soldiers on the side of evil megacorporations outside of CYBERPUNK STAR WARS. As such, the Clone Wars has retconned the megacorporations into being neutral during the Galactic Civil War. The Banking Clan episodes more or less confirming this while Padme is established as trying to make peace with the Separatist Senate.

I.e. the REAL suckers in all this.

This is because we saw the megacorporation heads as knowing about Darth Sidious. They were in on the whole thing. How much they knew is anyone's guess but they clearly were aware a lot more was going on than John Q. Republic did. The Confederacy is basically an invention of Darth Sidious for three purposes.

1. To get his political enemies to leave the democratic system.
2. To militarize and radicalize the Republic.
3. To kill Jedi.

It's the the Reichstag Fire PlotTM. The Confederacy was never meant to win and my idea is that it had vast droid armies but no actual resources for a sustianable conflict. I think the Confederacy was probably on its last legs by ROTS but could have continued the war longer because Palpatine was keeping the Republic from delivering a smashing blow.

 

Recall in legends the CIS developed a super battle droid variant that was apparently so effective palpatine had the factory destroyed.

So in numerical terms and perhaps even quality the CIS could have won the war.

It was never intended to of course.

The CIS's organic auxiliaries have been discussed earlier-this tells me the CIS did have "on the ground" support as it were,

Though whatever populist, democratic aspects of the CIS existed-the megacorps wielded far more power and local pro CIS organics were just auxiliaries and local proxies.

 

Yes. I believe if they commercialized the B3’s and built cortosis droids; they would’ve won.

 

The Republic Commando novels gave a pretty good idea of how the war went. The sides were pretty evenly matched. Before the Battle of Coruscant neither side was getting anywhere. At Coruscant the Republic got a massive amount of reinforcements and the Separatists suffered a huge defeat. After that the CIS didn't have much of a chance in the Outer Rim Sieges and the Republic kept advancing.

 

I think in Legends and possibly canon it went like this:

* The Battle of Geonosis
* The Separatist Battle Droids pour out of the Outer Rim to strategic targets.
* Operation: Durge's Lance takes the Confederacy right to the Core Worlds
* General Grevious reveals himself.
* The Republic counter-attacks.
* The Republic and Separatists start arming locals
* A balance of power is established as Dooku and Palpatine exchange meaningless victories.
* Coruscant is lost and Count Dooku dies
* Palpatine declares the war is over.

And 120,000 star systems means it's about 10% of the galaxy

 

I think the big issue in this debate is the fact that Confederacy was never supposed to win according to Palpatine's plan, so its difficult to discuss its real strength or actual chances of winning the conflict.

But we know for a fact that the droid armies heavily outnumbered the clones and as long as they had droid factories running, the CIS had an unlimited supply of cheap soldiers. Your average B1 battle droid is not very effective, but if you deploy millions of them, they'll do the a job and even manage to kill the Jedi. As the Battle of Geonosis in the arena showed, it doesn't take that many droids to kill dozens of Jedi, unless they're one of the high tier ones.

However the main hidden purpose of the droid army wasn't to actually win the war, but to cause as much terror and damage as possible, so people in the Republic would be okay with Palpatine getting more and more emergency powers. That's why they had Grievous as the supreme commander of the droid armies, who's obviously mentally unstable and basically just a terror weapon to be disposed of after the war. The CIS war strategy was very chaotic and without any overall plan. Grievous and his generals were just attacking in all directions and trying to cause as much havoc as possible.

The CIS Parliament seems to be genuinely idealistic and trying to work for the good of the people of the CIS, however they were just puppets to be used by the Sith and after the war, the Empire probably executed all of them as "war criminals". That's something the entire CIS leadership had in common, including Grievous and all the corporate bosses. They all existed just to be used and then gotten rid of.

The entire Clone Wars were an absolute master plan of the Sith and also the greatest tragedy in the GFFA. There would not be any CW without the Sith and the Republic would have been able to solve its issues through diplomacy and negotiations.

 

Taking Palpatine's machinations and the actual purpose of the Confederacy out of the picture for a moment, I believe Kalani about his analysis of the Clone War. He had a long time to compute the millions of possibilities and he concluded that the Confederacy WOULD have won were it not for Palpatine. Ironically, a tactical droid is kind of an impartial party, being programmed to be, well, tactical. It's his main function to analyze the way he did and his data should be considered highly reliable.

I can imagine a scenario wherein Dooku isn't as conciliatory an apprentice and acts upon the will of his own Separatist movement to conquer the Republic. He probably could've done it.

 

A tactical droid is probably the worst thing to judge the military effectiveness of an army led by wizards.

Also, if he conquered the Republic, they would never be able to hold it because the Confederacy was utterly villified by the end outside of their own territory.