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I've been thinking about this on and off a little; and I think unlike prior attempts at establishing a Sith Empire (or whatever); Palpatine didn't focus on having a small army of force-users to battle the Jedi, as was Traditional (TM).

Yes, he had an apprentice (Maul and then Dooku), but that was it. He used his apprentice as a foil to draw Jedi attention away from himself and his plan(s) before discarding them when appropriate (Dooku). (SEE EXAMPLE A)

Meanwhile, his real plan (tm) was to use the masses against the Jedi; in both the Grand Army of the Republic, and somehow turning the people against the Jedi. (I'm sure that Palpatine was constantly changing his ultimate plan as events occurred, rather than rigidly sticking to it.)

The plan that Palpatine ultimately went with was massively helped by Mace Windu deciding on a Jedi-led coup d'etat, along with the crippling damage he suffered to his visage. This allowed him to unleash the Jedigruppen to kill any Jedi who had escaped the initial Order 66 slaughter and Temple massacre without too much opposition from the "traditional" allies that the Jedi had amongst the social classes of the Republic.

The Jedi basically got outmaneuvered -- they were expecting a "classical" Sith approach of force-using elites, e.g. some secret planet full of Sith acolytes that they could just jump over to and engage in saber-to-saber combat and triumph due to their much larger and more organized Jedi Order. Instead, they got slaughtered by the faceless masses and the loss of public support for their Order.

In fact, considering the scope of the SW Galaxy and the number of alien races inhabiting it, the Imperial Period should be one of near continuous combat involving beings being oppressed on a constant basis. Instead, the Galactic Empire is seriously undermilitarized -- only 25,000 Star Destroyers on the rolls of the Imperial Navy, as opposed to the 128,000 Star Destroyers that the Imperial OBAT could support along with just one Death Star under construction at any one specific time, when a super-laserless Death Star would be an immensely cost-effective weapons system.

EDIT: Example A: The Naboo Crisis. Everything he did in Naboo in TPM was engineered to precipitate a crisis to depose Valorium and elevate himself to Supreme Chancellor. Everything else, including everything Maul did was Bonus (TM). The loss of Maul for just one Jedi fatality was...regrettable, but acceptable as Maul's actions and then death diverted the Jedi onto the path of finding the Sith Boogeyman (TM), instead of investigating too deeply into the Trade Federation and why they did what they did.

Indeed. This is why I want to see the failed Sith Empire that ruled the galaxy a thousand years before Palpatine resurrected it. They probably made the mistake of a) allowing the Jedi Order to survive and b) fighting amongst themselves for supremacy.

Both Order 66 and the Rule of Two would have been devised in order to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.

This is gone into in some detail in the RotS novellization but, basically that.

The clone wars were an almost perfect Jedi trap; no matter which way the Jedi responded they would become unpopular, and when the time came to spring the trap the Jedi were isolated and without much recourse or means of escape.

Palpatine's original plan likely was to use Anakin as GENERAL SKYWALKER, hero of the CLONE WARS as a public foil to keep popular support high for his policies.

But when Anakin got turned into a crispy critter, he had to modify it.

Perhaps the official story for Darth Vader was that he was a Jedi who refused to go along with the Coup D'etat and was nearly slaughtered as a result (10 against one saber fight?), explaining why he wears the entire outfit and has to have mechanical assistance to breathe, rallying public support behind the mysterious man in black addressed only as Lord Vader.

The List of Jedi in the Jedi Archives would have been destroyed and fragmentary -- and likely a closely held secret by the Jedi themselves to protect the Jedi from corruption -- if you found out who the real family of a Jedi was, you could place pressure on them by threatening their birth family due to their deep "good guy" status, so there wouldn't have been anyone going "Vader? There's no Vader in the Jedi Order for the last 40 generations."

And when you look at his actions in the original trilogy, Vader's actually pretty laid back, compared to the ruthless mass-murderer persona he's been given in almost all the bad EU and DisneyU stuff. The only person he chokes who might not have had it coming is Needa, but we never actually did see Needa's attempt at an apology before he died.

NecronLord wrote:The clone wars were an almost perfect Jedi trap; no matter which way the Jedi responded they would become unpopular, and when the time came to spring the trap the Jedi were isolated and without much recourse or means of escape.

Not just that, but the Clone Wars was a perfect testing grounds for anti-Jedi tactics and equipment under the guise of the CIS, enabling Order 66 to be so devastatingly lethal.

I don't recall that being specifically attributed; though it is possible. One of the most notable aspects you've not mentioned above but described in sources is that the clones themselves, being completely dispassionate about turning on the Jedi, generally caught them by surprise.

Mace pointed out in the novelization that in the war many of the youngest and best were killed off or corrupted. So the Jedi were already far from peak strength.

One thing I was just thinking of in this context that is rather ironic is the fact that in KOTOR, the Jedi did the exact opposite of what they did in the Clone Wars. They avoided getting involved in the Mandalorian Wars, leading Revan and Malak to do so instead. This led to Revan and Malak being converted to the Dark Side instead.

Though that is no longer canon(though it would be nice if it was redone for the new canon), it is still an interesting contrast.