Military Doctrines of the Clone Wars

[Metahive]

You guys are confusing the concept of modern day tactics and best possible for ever and ever. We're dealing with technology that is vastly different than modern day armies, and quite frankly modern day tactics and doctrine should not or would not apply except in specialized or general ways.

Well, they do take massive losses whenever there's an engagement, so different or not, their tactics could definitely require some refinement. On Malastare the CIS lost an entire army due to marching them in victory parade formation after all, to one single bomb no less. A bomb with about the same effect of a small nuke (complete with EMP). Firepower which should be easily available to both sides.

A giant robot army with shields, who cares if they march in a big block formation. Kill off a couple hundred still leaves you a reserve of quintillion. Lose a planet to stupid tactics, you still have thousands, tens of thousands of planets left. Hell, those same tactics could have picked you up a couple dozen while losing you one.

Well, my opinion is that battledroids are simply too stupid to be used effectively in any other way than in giant formations. While the CIS can deploy way more troops than the Republic, even Count Dooku acknowledges that battledroids are "expensive" and shouldn't be wasted willy-nilly in Rise of Malevolence, so I think if they could use better tactics they defintely would, it's just they can't.

Here is where I think the Clone Wars have something right, in that you can have computer/droid perfection in tactics. Do everything right by the book, as it is explained and researched by the experts. Analyze correctly the situation and deploy your troops to the 'T', and still lose an engagement. You can win every battle, and still lose the war. That is something the movies and the cartoon do very well at. Obi-Wan and Anakin can win every single battle of the cartoons, and we all know the Jedi, the Republic, lose big fucking time at the end of it all.

The Republic wins the war. The CIS and the Jedi lose it. And freedom and democracy. Also, I am not so sure the former is ever applied in the series. While talent for improvisation is shown to pay off, it seems that both sides are prone to make things up as they go along from the start.
The battle of Muunilinst also shows the benefits of infiltration tactics, something that was invented (or re-invented) at the tail-end of WWI. The CIS has droids capable of such as well, like Commando Droids and Magnaguards, so it's somewhat puzzling they aren't used more often.

Keep in mind that in RotS this idea of marching in massive perfect formations never happened.

Well, not in ROTS. The first battle of Geonosis however shows it and its downsides. Like when the Republic shoots down the Coreship with artillery and it devastates plenty of troops on the CIS half of the battlefield.

[Metahive]

Then again we've got Muunilinst, where both sides essentially just throw down everything they have and hope for the opposing side to fall over. Which, when you've got expendable troops, is actually not that unreasonable.

The CIS can however replace its expendable troops way easier. It takes 1-10 years for the Republic to grow another clone trooper and they can't very well use attritional tactics with the local militias that make up the rest of the republican army since unlike droids, morale is a decisive factor for them and that's a pretty big liability. That's also why the Republic employs healing facilities for its troops while the CIS simply writes off all fallen droids. Contrary to what Karen Traviss writes, the Jedi do care a great lot about the well-being of their troops, something which even Count Dooku admits at one point (and tries to use against them).

[Adam Reynolds]

The CIS can however replace its expendable troops way easier. It takes 1-10 years for the Republic to grow another clone trooper and they can't very well use attritional tactics with the local militias that make up the rest of the republican army since unlike droids, morale is a decisive factor for them and that's a pretty big liability. That's also why the Republic employs healing facilities for its troops while the CIS simply writes off all fallen droids. Contrary to what Karen Traviss writes, the Jedi do care a great lot about the well-being of their troops, something which even Count Dooku admits at one point (and tries to use against them).

It really doesn't take that long for each new batch of clones to be available. While it takes ten years initially, once the first batch is finished new clones are produced as quickly as the length between the first and second batch, however long that was.

[Metahive]

It really doesn't take that long for each new batch of clones to be available. While it takes ten years initially, once the first batch is finished new clones are produced as quickly as the length between the first and second batch, however long that was.

These are the informations we are given in AOTC:

LAMA SU: Please... (gestures to chair) And now to business.
You will be delighted to hear we are on schedule. Two
hundred thousand units are ready, with another million well
on the way.
[...]
LAMA SU: We take great pride in our combat education and
training programs. This group was created about five years
ago.
[...]
LAMA SU: Tell your Council the first battalions are ready.
And remind them that if they need more troops, we will need
time to grow them.

Two hundred thousand "units" combat ready, another million nearing completion and at least one other batch which has still five years to go. One could argue they were creating a new batch every year, but that would still mean at least one more year before the Republic can reinforce its clone troops. Lama Su explicetely points out at the end that new orders would take time to complete. That mashes with my 1-10 year estimation. Spaarti clones which I think haven't gone into production before the outbreak of the war would also still need one year to mature. Battledroids are thrown together in under a week and are combat ready right from the assembly line. Cloning just can't beat the speed of this.

If you have evidence from any official source that batches of clone troopers were created with a smaller interval than a year (or in fact in what intervals at all since the movies aren't too clear on that), let me know.

[Metahive]

On the topic of weapon accuracy, I just rewatched Destroy Malevolence and there I saw three Venators firing upon a crippled, limping Malevolence (an 8-11km long monster of a massive warship) at close range who still managed to miss the ship entirely with some shots. That...kinda' blew my mind.

You can see how close the Venators are to the Malevolence by the tip of one being visible to the right. The shots missing completely are marked with a crude, red circle, and they're not the only ones that go astray.



Is there any explanation for this? Boy, I hope there were some demotions going around after that battle for such a shoddy performance.

[Vympel]

Honestly? Retarded cartoon crap. I simply ignore it. We don't observe any such egregious misses in RotS at the Battle of Coruscant. You'd literally have to be blind to miss that shot. Seriously, there are so many problems with treating TCW as documentary footage - its cartoon caricature. Lots of shit happens that is just impossible to take seriously. Case in point, Clone accuracy - they're either fucking awful or they're godlike. What does it depend on? The needs of the plot. There's one instance where a clone fires three shots at close range one after the other at a super battle droid - and misses every single time - hitting the exact same spot on the wall. Which is literally impossible. Why do it? Because its easier to loop the animation that way.

[Metahive]

Seems to be the easiest choice. Then we can also stop contemplating how the Malevolence manages to shrink and grow between scenes. As for the Malevolence itself, it's actually an awesome design. Too bad we haven't seen one in action since that arc. The CIS should simply dismount the ion cannons and put on additional turbolaser batteries because when that ship has proven one thing, it's that it simply won't die. Seriously, the entire midsection is blown up by the misfire of the ion cannon, three Venators pound on the ship for quite some time and the ship still manages to almost escape. OK, the Venators stopped firing for a moment, but still. The CIS should have used them for every frontal assault because the Republic had virtually nothing to counter it and without the ion cannons there also wouldn't have been a potential achilles heel.

[Srelex]

Honestly? Retarded cartoon crap. I simply ignore it. We don't observe any such egregious misses in RotS at the Battle of Coruscant. You'd literally have to be blind to miss that shot. Seriously, there are so many problems with treating TCW as documentary footage - its cartoon caricature. Lots of shit happens that is just impossible to take seriously. Case in point, Clone accuracy - they're either fucking awful or they're godlike. What does it depend on? The needs of the plot. There's one instance where a clone fires three shots at close range one after the other at a super battle droid - and misses every single time - hitting the exact same spot on the wall. Which is literally impossible. Why do it? Because its easier to loop the animation that way.

Should the fact that explosions sometimes result in no debris or (early on) kamikaze Vulture droids leaving no mark whatsoever against VenStar hull also count?

Seems to be the easiest choice. Then we can also stop contemplating how the Malevolence manages to shrink and grow between scenes. As for the Malevolence itself, it's actually an awesome design. Too bad we haven't seen one in action since that arc. The CIS should simply dismount the ion cannons and put on additional turbolaser batteries because when that ship has proven one thing, it's that it simply won't die. Seriously, the entire midsection is blown up by the misfire of the ion cannon, three Venators pound on the ship for quite some time and the ship still manages to almost escape. OK, the Venators stopped firing for a moment, but still. The CIS should have used them for every frontal assault because the Republic had virtually nothing to counter it and without the ion cannons there also wouldn't have been a potential achilles heel.

For what it's worth, in a spinoff game, they did build another. http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Devastation

[Metahive]

Nice. But they again couldn't resist the temptation and put another "superweapon" on it. An Eclipse-lite so to speak, very creative not. That reminds me to ask, presuming they use a similar naming schemes as we do here on Earth, why the ship class isn't called "Malevolence" class if that was supposedly the first one out of the shipyard. What happened to the pathfinder, the "Subjugator"?

[Connor MacLeod]

You guys are confusing the concept of modern day tactics and best possible for ever and ever. We're dealing with technology that is vastly different than modern day armies, and quite frankly modern day tactics and doctrine should not or would not apply except in specialized or general ways.

A giant robot army with shields, who cares if they march in a big block formation. Kill off a couple hundred still leaves you a reserve of quintillion. Lose a planet to stupid tactics, you still have thousands, tens of thousands of planets left. Hell, those same tactics could have picked you up a couple dozen while losing you one.

Here is where I think the Clone Wars have something right, in that you can have computer/droid perfection in tactics. Do everything right by the book, as it is explained and researched by the experts. Analyze correctly the situation and deploy your troops to the 'T', and still lose an engagement. You can win every battle, and still lose the war. That is something the movies and the cartoon do very well at. Obi-Wan and Anakin can win every single battle of the cartoons, and we all know the Jedi, the Republic, lose big fucking time at the end of it all.

Isn't tactics/doctrine or even strategy going to be alot more complicated than "what the foot soliders, tanks, etc." do on the ground or in the air? I mean logisitcs is going to be a huge factor, but you rarely see that covered in the visual media.

Also, what tactics/doctrine would exist would tend to vary according to many factors like who they fight, tech levels, where you fight, and so on. After all, if you don't know (at a minimum) what you and your enemy can and can't do, you can't really do much planning, can you? And that doesn't add in human factors (religion, politics, economics, etc., which an often skew or outright fuck up a purely military situation.)

[Sea Skimmer]

At the most basic level it’d come down to what your concept of projecting military power even is. In the modern day we take it for take it for granted that this means sending divisions, air wings and warships, supplied by ships and air from factories in the home country. In the Clone Wars pretty clearly a totally difference concept is being used, in which the droid armies are built largely if not entirely out of captured territory and deployed with extremely high mobility. At that point you ability to mobilize local resources out of specific planets is going to dictate what you can build and where you attack. On broad terms that dictates tactics and strategies.

Once you get down to the level of specific planets though everything is going to be variable, particularly since you can simply blow away the industrial potential of planets from space without bothering with any ground operations at all. You also don’t need to care as much about defending a droid army, since the actual loss of droids has no social price attached like loosing human troops and inhabited cities would.

[Metahive]

In the Clone Wars pretty clearly a totally difference concept is being used, in which the droid armies are built largely if not entirely out of captured territory and deployed with extremely high mobility.

The Command and Conquer principle in action. Most interesting. Do you have any examples of conquered planets that had droid forges put upon by the CIS? Right now I don't recall any.
How can the Republic ever hope to realistically deal with such an enemy, given their comparatively rather limited military resources? How do you deal with an enemy whose troops exponentially grow with every conquered planet? Well, as the series show, go for the head. It would only be nice if all those leaders they manage to capture over the course of the war, like San Hill, Nute Gunray and Watt Tambor didn't also all manage to flee, setting the republican war efforts back considerably. This makes me think that the Republic should enforce a shoot on sight order for enemy commanders but then that "mole" Palpatine would probably sabotage that too.

[Purple]

He would not have to.
It's against the almighty truth, justice and the Jedi way.

I mean, the Jedi are renowned for being merciful to a fault. If anything, they would resist such an order.

[Metahive]

Then what was that about Anakin's plan to specifically target the bridge of the Malevolence just to get Grievous? None other Jedi objected to that. Obi Wan later gave orders to target the bridge too. That sounds suspiciously close to a shoot on sight order since SW capships don't go immediately down when the bridge is hit (with one exception).

[Srelex]

Then what was that about Anakin's plan to specifically target the bridge of the Malevolence just to get Grievous? None other Jedi objected to that. Obi Wan later gave orders to target the bridge too. That sounds suspiciously close to a shoot on sight order since SW capships don't go immediately down when the bridge is hit (with one exception).

Well, what other option was there? Grievous was targeting thousands of wounded clones and capture wasn't exactly practical at that time.

[Metahive]

Umm, they should have targeted the Ion Cannon from the start? They only changed plans because the bridge was too well defended and the Malevolence about to fire on a hospital. They were trying to assassinate Grievous by making the bridge the priority, which would not have prevented the cannon from firing. Obi Wan also orders his ships to target the bridge when the Malevolence is clearly defenseless. In a later episode, Fall of a Droid, Anakin is quite eager to shoot a fleeing Grievous down, for me it's the equivalent of trying to throw a lightsaber in a fleeing opponent's back.
But maybe that's just because Grievous is more droid than flesh and those do not get any consideration in the SW universe anyway.

[PainRack]

It would be interesting to know why the Imperial shifted away from the Clone War doctrine of using large number of space fighters to assist in securing space supremacy to the snubfighters are no threat to capital ships of Dodonna Rebellion era.

Is this anti-jedi propangda, given that the Clone war pilots exploits were idolised by the presence of Jedi?(Heir to the Empire "Clone wars were won by Jedi and pilot jockies" sentiment)

Or is this based on analysis of battles from the Clone wars era, such as noting how the Naboo starfighters were impotent against Federation battleships and the Vulture swarm of the CIS were largely ineffective against the Venators, but TF battleship fire were?

[PainRack]

The Command and Conquer principle in action. Most interesting. Do you have any examples of conquered planets that had droid forges put upon by the CIS? Right now I don't recall any.
How can the Republic ever hope to realistically deal with such an enemy, given their comparatively rather limited military resources? How do you deal with an enemy whose troops exponentially grow with every conquered planet? Well, as the series show, go for the head. It would only be nice if all those leaders they manage to capture over the course of the war, like San Hill, Nute Gunray and Watt Tambor didn't also all manage to flee, setting the republican war efforts back considerably. This makes me think that the Republic should enforce a shoot on sight order for enemy commanders but then that "mole" Palpatine would probably sabotage that too.

Utapau in ROTS guide?

Beside, regarding Jedi, anyone remembers the ROTJ novelisation? When in doubt, attack is a good Jedi rule of Thumb according to Luke Skywalker research into the Jedi.

[Metahive]

It would be interesting to know why the Imperial shifted away from the Clone War doctrine of using large number of space fighters to assist in securing space supremacy to the snubfighters are no threat to capital ships of Dodonna Rebellion era.

Didn't they reverse this doctrine after losing the first Death Star to fighters and started churning out dedicated anti-fighter ships like the Lancer frigate? I darkly remember once having read something to that effect. EDIT: Whoops, that would be the post-Dodonna era. Never mind.

Or is this based on analysis of battles from the Clone wars era, such as noting how the Naboo starfighters were impotent against Federation battleships and the Vulture swarm of the CIS were largely ineffective against the Venators, but TF battleship fire were?

Those special kamikaze mode Vultures were quite effective against the Venators and Anakin's squad managed to decisively cripple the Malevolence. The end of the space battle over Ryloth also showed several Munificients getting destroyed by BTL-Bs (I blame the weird weapon placement of the Munificients however). I wouldn't say clone wars era fighter swarms were completely ineffective against capships, they needed however special conditions to be so.

[PainRack]

Those special kamikaze mode Vultures were quite effective against the Venators and Anakin's squad managed to decisively cripple the Malevolence. The end of the space battle over Ryloth also showed several Munificients getting destroyed by BTL-Bs (I blame the weird weapon placement of the Munificients however). I wouldn't say clone wars era fighter swarms were completely ineffective against capships, they needed however special conditions to be so.

We certainly see many cases of starfighters effectiveness in the EU and Clone Wars. Perhaps the Empire believes that the increased capabilities of ISDs and other capital warships would mean that the primary threat would be capships and snubfighters should be specialised against other starfighters....

But then again, the Rebellion rapidly shows how false this was when Y-wings raided Imperial convoys.

[Metahive]

But why would they then give ISDs such a high standard loadout of starfighters? Or did that too only come after the Battle of Yavin? I'm not quite sure about that. Wouldn't it also be cheaper to deploy squadrons of starfighters instead of their equivalent in capships? The Rebellion doesn't have all that much capships itself and does rely mostly on lightning strikes with hyperspace capable starfighters instead. Also, weren't Tie Bombers and Starwings deployed before the Battle of Yavin? That would be evidence that the empire hasn't quite given up on using starfighters even then.

[PainRack]

Meta, you seem to be confusing their doctrine with equipment. Imperial doctrine is that snubfighters are a threat only to other snubfighters, hence, the "comparatively" loose defence screen of the Death Star.

The ISDs loadout of starfighters and the like are used as a screen against other starfighters and light spacecraft, with TIE bombers being used to provide ordinance in TESB. The problem is the TIE and X-wing games, which placed other more significant roles/tactics on Imperial TIE bombers and assault gunboats.

Even so, the EU description of those vessels suggest that the Empire doesn't rely on TIE bombers or assault gunboats to take out major vessels or capital warships.


The question is, why the shift towards this doctrine as opposed to the starfighter heavy doctrine of the Clone Wars?

[Wing Commander MAD]

Could it have something to do with attrition rates inherent with strike craft heavy doctrines and a shift away from using clones for everything? It would certainly make sense to switch over to a largly volunteer military after the Empire is established for purposes of building up loyalty to the state, and heavy casualties amoung the sons and daughters of the populace tend to have negative influences on thier opinion of the government (especially I'd imagine following the devastation of the Clone Wars). IIRC only the Stormtrooper Corps. seems to contain clones in significant numbers by the time of the OT and we don't hear much if anything about conscription until Zahn's writing.

[Darth Fanboy]

The question is, why the shift towards this doctrine as opposed to the starfighter heavy doctrine of the Clone Wars?

Perhaps the fact that the size of engagements between Rebel and Imperial pilots decreased on average away from the big battles between clone pilots and their droid counterparts? Granted the Rebellion did have access to an unknown number of ships like the Lucrehulk that could carry a large number of fighters, but the large scale battles of the Clone Wars were not quite as commonplace between the Rebels and the Empire.

[Thanas]

If we are talking about larger strategies here, the new essential atlas had a nice section on that.