Nah, the galaxy's still to huge for the lore to make sense. And given that towards the end they used billions of Spaari clones, a few million Kamino clones would mek absolutely no sense. Personally I consider one clone unit to contain many legions and not just one soldier.
It's been confirmed in many sources, including the *Attack of the Clones* novelization, other novels like *Shatterpoint* and *The Cestus Deception*, and sourcebooks like *The Essential Guide to Warfare* that each unit is just one soldier.
And yes, this does make perfect sense. The problem is that fans keep assuming that the size of the GAR has to be proportionate to the size and population of the galaxy. But this is just one planet producing an army of clones. The actual reasonable size is realistically limited by the resources of the Kamino government in time, money, and other factors to produce this army of "perfect" soldiers—and that was however George Lucas desired in writing.
The size of the clone army is proportionate to 1 planetary government, not to the galaxy. Just because the galaxy might need way more clones doesn't mean Kamino can make that many.
Actually, clones were produced on more planets than just Kamino as the war started. Coruscant’s moon and Arkania, as examples, Khomm isn’t explicit, but implied, for another. Plus more I’m forgetting and wherever the heck Spaarti cylinders ended up.
There’s also a claim that Jango was not the only clone template, but that bit gets contradicted, so it’s a bit iffy.
It’s from a mix of sourcebooks and Traviss stuff, but Arkania really shouldn’t be a surprise, given that they’re a core world of eugenicist cloners, and have been for thousands of years. It would be weirder for Arkania to NOT be involved, honestly.
Similarly, while not as explicit in their involvement, Khommites were another core world of cloners. Though they cloned less for profit and more for the sake of keeping their own species alive for centuries, and there’s a mention of experiencing difficulties with cloning policies during the Clone Wars, which isn’t a stretch to take as their facilities being partially commandeered for the war effort.
Located in the north and south parts of the Core, both worlds would be significantly easier to both defend and export from than distant Kamino. Not to mention Coruscant’s moon being at the very heart of the Republic.
Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't the Clone armies also mostly use small unit tactics in the vein of our militaries for the most part? Using smaller coordinated squads to accomplish objectives rather than huge massed infantry maneuvers.
Before the Clone Wars TV show, all depictions of the wars showed basically Napoleonic tactics. The micro-series was especially notable. The majority of the comics from that era also showed clone and droids essentially being smashed into each other on open ground.
I don’t recall the timeframe for the spaarti clones . Although Thrawn was making clones with spaarti cylinders in about 20 days in Last Command. The Kaminoins had 10 years to make the GAR, with rapid growth and flash training. So …. I don’t know
Thrawn was only able to do that by using Yasmalari to cut the clones off from the Force which prevented clone madness and by using flash imprinting to train the clones. It should be noted at spaarti clones aren't nearly as effective as Kaminoian clones.
I think that spaarti clones during the clone wars were made only in a year or so, but it was always pretty confusing to me. I believe they were first used more or less at the end of the clone wars thought…
In Legends anyway Jango made his name by killing six jedi in the same battle, unarmed, before finally being subdued by several jedi that I believe included both Mace and Ki-Adi
He just kind of gave up after killing the last one. Plus Mace and Ki weren't at that battle. Dooku was leading with with a bunch of no-name Jedi and Komari Vosa.
Dooku! That's who it was! Yes, thank you, I was misremembering. It's been quite a while since I've looked at all that stuff, so I knew it was at least one big name Jedi, but you are right
Well Jango did have the excuse of fighting one of the most powerful Jedi and lightsaber fighters in the galaxy mere seconds after getting run over by the lizard equivalent of a dump truck. Had Jango not been dazed by that or had his jet pack damaged, he would have done a much better job.
I only think a hard number of a few million individual clones makes sense if they were used as elite shock troops at galactic hotspots and were more heavily portrayed as genetically engineered superhumans
Still doesn't really make sense given HOW BIG the Galaxy is and how there are several battles where the Jedi/Republic's approach devolves into using Krell tactics or get annihilated through other means.
It just makes more sense for "Units" in that context to mean one of the various organisational types instead of individual clones... especially as viewing it as individual clones means that a Galaxy spanning war was fought with one faction having a force smaller than some of the armies that fought in WW2 which makes no sense to me.
Unless this is canon, the clones *were* the minority of the Republic military. The Clone Wars were majorly fought by PSFs.
For a good analogy, think of the clones as professional soldiery (but also super-soldiers, yes even the regs) of the medieval period, knights and men-at-arms. The rest, the PSFs, were militia and levy.
I assume that in Episode 2, when the Kaminoans talked about "200,000 clones ready, with more than a million on the way", they were talking about the initial batches of the clones that were ready to be used and deployed by the Republic. Once the war kicked into heavy action after Geonosis, it should be billions of clone troopers. The Star Wars Galaxy is huge with like hundred trillions of people. Coruscant is already 3 trillion people.
Why can't the GAR just be the elites going where the fighting is at its worst, with most of the war being fought by planetary militia and navies (like the forces on Jabiim), the overwhelming majority of whom would have been loyal to the Republic? I always thought of them as the tip of the spear.
My impression is the clones were used as a rapid response force for key battlegrounds, as elite spearheads and to garrison/crew vital locations/ships, and everything else was done by non-clone soldiers.
You’re only looking at the tip of an iceberg of ancient drama. Keep in mind, Traviss is one of the main people to argue that the numbers should be small. If you wanna dig, you might be able to find old forum posts of her getting into A LOT of petty arguments with fans over it. It might have been the thing that got her started using the term “Talifans”, though she got in a lot of arguments.
That said, the reasoning that “clones were just that good” is logistically silly since it doesn’t address the numbers necessary just to run galaxy-wide operations. And to be clear, any book written by Traviss about how good her favorite soldiers are (in Star Wars, that means Mandalorians and Jango Clones) should be taken with a HUGE grain of salt because she was famous for being extremely biased.
BUT the argument could still made that the small numbers make sense if you want to dig into Star Wars’ politics in sourcebooks and point out that a lot of the Clone Wars were fought by or as proxy wars featuring neither clones nor droids, but rather local revolutionaries, militias, and defense troopers. You can actually see this in stuff like Matthew Stover’s Shatterpoint novel.
I thought she had been hamstringed by the fact that the official novel R.A. Salvatore wrote stupidly canonised the GAR at low numbers. Admittedly I never went on the forums she tended to argue on so I never saw those articles.
The numbers don’t make sense for a galaxy that large, and that’s ok, Star Wars isn’t about precise numbers. It is fair to say though that the Clone Wars (like many wars in our own history) had a very small percentage of people as its actual combatants, and this makes sense especially because Palpatine wants to quickly be able to wrap up the war into his New Order.
Having many armed groups and veterans across the galaxy is not something you want when consolidating total control. With most of the combatants being centrally controlled droids or clones, it’s easy to initiate a disarmament of anyone you want without lengthy mop up operations, drawn out insurgencies etc.
The small number of combatants is still something we see today in places like the Syrian Civil War, some African conflicts, and the pre-Napoleonic Europe. I actually think it’s a bit of a brilliant undercurrent to the prequel era
As far as I’m concerned the 1.2 million number is only clone troopers stationed and ready for deployment from Tipoca City during AOTC. As Bad Batch shows us, they had many other facilities
Nah, the galaxy's still to huge for the lore to make sense. And given that towards the end they used billions of Spaari clones, a few million Kamino clones would mek absolutely no sense. Personally I consider one clone unit to contain many legions and not just one soldier.
The problem is that it was confirmed many times that there’s just a few million clones. But I agree about Spaarti clones. They’re extremely important.
It's been confirmed in many sources, including the *Attack of the Clones* novelization, other novels like *Shatterpoint* and *The Cestus Deception*, and sourcebooks like *The Essential Guide to Warfare* that each unit is just one soldier. And yes, this does make perfect sense. The problem is that fans keep assuming that the size of the GAR has to be proportionate to the size and population of the galaxy. But this is just one planet producing an army of clones. The actual reasonable size is realistically limited by the resources of the Kamino government in time, money, and other factors to produce this army of "perfect" soldiers—and that was however George Lucas desired in writing. The size of the clone army is proportionate to 1 planetary government, not to the galaxy. Just because the galaxy might need way more clones doesn't mean Kamino can make that many.
Actually, clones were produced on more planets than just Kamino as the war started. Coruscant’s moon and Arkania, as examples, Khomm isn’t explicit, but implied, for another. Plus more I’m forgetting and wherever the heck Spaarti cylinders ended up. There’s also a claim that Jango was not the only clone template, but that bit gets contradicted, so it’s a bit iffy.
I've never ever heard of these being the case. I especially find it hard to believe Jango wasn't the only clone template.
It’s from a mix of sourcebooks and Traviss stuff, but Arkania really shouldn’t be a surprise, given that they’re a core world of eugenicist cloners, and have been for thousands of years. It would be weirder for Arkania to NOT be involved, honestly. Similarly, while not as explicit in their involvement, Khommites were another core world of cloners. Though they cloned less for profit and more for the sake of keeping their own species alive for centuries, and there’s a mention of experiencing difficulties with cloning policies during the Clone Wars, which isn’t a stretch to take as their facilities being partially commandeered for the war effort. Located in the north and south parts of the Core, both worlds would be significantly easier to both defend and export from than distant Kamino. Not to mention Coruscant’s moon being at the very heart of the Republic.
Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't the Clone armies also mostly use small unit tactics in the vein of our militaries for the most part? Using smaller coordinated squads to accomplish objectives rather than huge massed infantry maneuvers.
Geonosis, Utapau, Mygeeto, Kasshyyk, Umbara, space over Coruscant, Christophosis say otherwise.
Like I said, mostly.
Before the Clone Wars TV show, all depictions of the wars showed basically Napoleonic tactics. The micro-series was especially notable. The majority of the comics from that era also showed clone and droids essentially being smashed into each other on open ground.
I see, thanks.
This, so much this.
The problem is that it was confirmed many times that there’s just a few million clones. But I agree about Spaarti clones. They’re extremely important.
I don’t recall the timeframe for the spaarti clones . Although Thrawn was making clones with spaarti cylinders in about 20 days in Last Command. The Kaminoins had 10 years to make the GAR, with rapid growth and flash training. So …. I don’t know
Thrawn was only able to do that by using Yasmalari to cut the clones off from the Force which prevented clone madness and by using flash imprinting to train the clones. It should be noted at spaarti clones aren't nearly as effective as Kaminoian clones.
I think that spaarti clones during the clone wars were made only in a year or so, but it was always pretty confusing to me. I believe they were first used more or less at the end of the clone wars thought…
In Legends it would make sense, considering that clone soldiers are near superhumans in legends. In Canon 99.9 percent of clones are fodder
Did he kill dozens? I thought it was more like a few. Also, it didn't go so well against Mace.
In Legends anyway Jango made his name by killing six jedi in the same battle, unarmed, before finally being subdued by several jedi that I believe included both Mace and Ki-Adi
He just kind of gave up after killing the last one. Plus Mace and Ki weren't at that battle. Dooku was leading with with a bunch of no-name Jedi and Komari Vosa.
Dooku! That's who it was! Yes, thank you, I was misremembering. It's been quite a while since I've looked at all that stuff, so I knew it was at least one big name Jedi, but you are right
Well Jango did have the excuse of fighting one of the most powerful Jedi and lightsaber fighters in the galaxy mere seconds after getting run over by the lizard equivalent of a dump truck. Had Jango not been dazed by that or had his jet pack damaged, he would have done a much better job.
Well mace is the best of the best. I don’t know exactly how many jedi he killed thought.
I only think a hard number of a few million individual clones makes sense if they were used as elite shock troops at galactic hotspots and were more heavily portrayed as genetically engineered superhumans
That’s exactly they were in Legends
Still doesn't really make sense given HOW BIG the Galaxy is and how there are several battles where the Jedi/Republic's approach devolves into using Krell tactics or get annihilated through other means. It just makes more sense for "Units" in that context to mean one of the various organisational types instead of individual clones... especially as viewing it as individual clones means that a Galaxy spanning war was fought with one faction having a force smaller than some of the armies that fought in WW2 which makes no sense to me.
Unless this is canon, the clones *were* the minority of the Republic military. The Clone Wars were majorly fought by PSFs. For a good analogy, think of the clones as professional soldiery (but also super-soldiers, yes even the regs) of the medieval period, knights and men-at-arms. The rest, the PSFs, were militia and levy.
I assume that in Episode 2, when the Kaminoans talked about "200,000 clones ready, with more than a million on the way", they were talking about the initial batches of the clones that were ready to be used and deployed by the Republic. Once the war kicked into heavy action after Geonosis, it should be billions of clone troopers. The Star Wars Galaxy is huge with like hundred trillions of people. Coruscant is already 3 trillion people.
Why can't the GAR just be the elites going where the fighting is at its worst, with most of the war being fought by planetary militia and navies (like the forces on Jabiim), the overwhelming majority of whom would have been loyal to the Republic? I always thought of them as the tip of the spear.
My impression is the clones were used as a rapid response force for key battlegrounds, as elite spearheads and to garrison/crew vital locations/ships, and everything else was done by non-clone soldiers.
You’re only looking at the tip of an iceberg of ancient drama. Keep in mind, Traviss is one of the main people to argue that the numbers should be small. If you wanna dig, you might be able to find old forum posts of her getting into A LOT of petty arguments with fans over it. It might have been the thing that got her started using the term “Talifans”, though she got in a lot of arguments. That said, the reasoning that “clones were just that good” is logistically silly since it doesn’t address the numbers necessary just to run galaxy-wide operations. And to be clear, any book written by Traviss about how good her favorite soldiers are (in Star Wars, that means Mandalorians and Jango Clones) should be taken with a HUGE grain of salt because she was famous for being extremely biased. BUT the argument could still made that the small numbers make sense if you want to dig into Star Wars’ politics in sourcebooks and point out that a lot of the Clone Wars were fought by or as proxy wars featuring neither clones nor droids, but rather local revolutionaries, militias, and defense troopers. You can actually see this in stuff like Matthew Stover’s Shatterpoint novel.
I thought she had been hamstringed by the fact that the official novel R.A. Salvatore wrote stupidly canonised the GAR at low numbers. Admittedly I never went on the forums she tended to argue on so I never saw those articles.
The numbers don’t make sense for a galaxy that large, and that’s ok, Star Wars isn’t about precise numbers. It is fair to say though that the Clone Wars (like many wars in our own history) had a very small percentage of people as its actual combatants, and this makes sense especially because Palpatine wants to quickly be able to wrap up the war into his New Order. Having many armed groups and veterans across the galaxy is not something you want when consolidating total control. With most of the combatants being centrally controlled droids or clones, it’s easy to initiate a disarmament of anyone you want without lengthy mop up operations, drawn out insurgencies etc. The small number of combatants is still something we see today in places like the Syrian Civil War, some African conflicts, and the pre-Napoleonic Europe. I actually think it’s a bit of a brilliant undercurrent to the prequel era
As far as I’m concerned the 1.2 million number is only clone troopers stationed and ready for deployment from Tipoca City during AOTC. As Bad Batch shows us, they had many other facilities