Did the Imperial Army Have a Navy?

[Big Orange]

We all know that the Imperial Navy was the pride of the Galactic Empire's monumental armed forces with its miles long warships numbering in the many hundreds of thousands, but did the Imperial Army have its own dedicated fleet of interstella vessels?

This sort of mission creep or operational overlap is expected in any large multi-serviced military that excels at combined arms, with real life examples being the US Navy SEALs conducting operations in landlocked Afghanistan, the Luftwaffe having its own land army, and the US Army doing more marine landings than the actual Marine Corps. in WWII.

While I doubt the Imperial Army would have many capital warships like the Imperial Navy, they most likely had a sizable fleet of transportation barges, picket gunships, and medium sized cruisers, easily its own TIE fighter corps that is seperate from the Navy's more famous TIE squandrons. A mixture of Imperial Army pride and pragmatism in having a support fleet to give it more strategic flexibility and enable it to operate properly as a seperate branch.

[Lord Revan]

intresting question as alot of operations seemed to be joint ventures anyway (Stormtrooper Corps was seperate of the army IIRC)

[Knife]

Or did the Imperial Navy have a 'gator navy' for that purpose?

[Big Orange]

But the US Army had the Ghost Fleet.

And I always thought the Stormtroopers were a very flexible omnibranch that could come under the control of Imperial Army or Navy officers where ever the Empire needed shock troops to supplement the conventional enlisted infantry, either on a terrestrial battlefield or onboard starships.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Not sure about the novels, but the old game sourcebooks suggest that the only spacecraft the Imperial Army actually owned were, of all things, TIE Fighters.

Troopships were designed around the army's order of battle, but they themselves appear in the order of battle of the Navy, and are manned and tactically controlled by navy crews.

Space to surface dropships appear to be navy manned also, and are second or third pick at the academy- their pilots seem to be the guys who didn't make the grade to fly navy TIEs.

Army ground support wings were flown by army pilots, that is explicitly stated, but nothing larger.

As to why there isn't more mission creep or operational overlap, I don't have anything definite and unequivocal; all I can suggest is that both services are growing rapidly, fighting over their share of the glory and more importantly the funding, and the Navy simply won this round.

The text does point towards an increasingly 'joint' character to operations, political pressure forcing both to react to the circumstances of the rebellion by working increasingly closely together. Still in their own fields, although that may have been changing.

[Connor MacLeod]

They probably didnt have much of a navy, if at all. I might recall a few (Vague) references to Army ships, but by and large they were (like the stormtroopers) dependent upon the Navy for transporrt and deployment over galactic ranges. Stormies had big transports, so presumably the aRmy might too, ,but that's it.

This was all deliberate, mind. Palpatine loved playing different factions off of one another as other analysts such as Publius have noted. Rivalry betwen the Army and Navy, and the separate nature of the Stormtroopers from both (which created further friction) gave them other targets to focus on than say, plotting against Palpy.

[FOG3]

Why would it?

Unless you have a large organizational rift there's no need for the redundancy of the Army owning and operating major ships. In real life Department of the Navy ships are all operated by the USN although there is the divide between those for USMC purposes and USN purposes in terms of the *cough* cargo.

[Big Orange]

In A New Hope didn't Admiral Motti poo poo General Tagge's starfleet in that famous conference scene? If the Army had an extensive fleet, the biggest combat vessel they could feasibly have had would be the Venator-class Destroyers since they were phased out as frontline warships after the Clone Wars and geared towards landing many troops.

[Saxtonite]

it is possible-the Imperial Storm Commandoes have their personal fleet-see the 'Imperial Escort Carriers' in Rogue Squadron II: Rebel Strike.

[Publius]

The Imperial Sourcebook states that it was part of the Republic's defense doctrine that "the Navy was responsible for getting the Army to its destination and for picking up what was left," and "the Navy jealously guarded its starfighters, so the Army was denied any effective means of maintaining an orbit free of enemy spacecraft once the Navy departed." Despite the Empire's massive overhaul of Army training and doctrine, this aspect was not changed: "Imperial doctrine specified the Navy's mission to be support for surface forces during critical phases of an operation" and that "permanent garrisons or units expecting surface campaigns of significant duration would have significant Naval assets, such as TIE fighters, attached to the Army units for the whole of the mission."

The sourcebook goes on to refute the idea of independent Army aviation:

An auxiliary battlegroup has three CompForce regiments, and a ground support wing of TIE fighters. In the continuing struggle between the Army and the Navy, the ground support wing is one of the casualties. The Navy wanted to retain control of the TIEs. but the Army insisted upon its own starfighters so they could primarily be dedicated to ground support missions. The resulting wing has 40 TIE fighters rather than the 72 as is standard in the Navy.

The ground support wing has 40 TIE fighters organized into 10 flights. Three flights are organized into a TIE bomber squadron, six flights into two squadrons of TIE/In, and one flight of TIE/fc for use as spotters. A ground support wing has 40 pilots, 25 sensor techs, 25 controllers, and 60 ground crew personnel for a total of 110 men.

It also refutes independent Army space transportation:

The corps is one of the few instances of real cooperation between the Army and the Navy. Imperial military planners from each branch designed the transport ship to hold all corps types, building in the possibility for expansion into both the starship and the unit. The fact that the corps transport ships are among the newer model of ships in the fleet is perhaps a sign that the two branches are ready to cooperate more closely so that the New Order may expand.

and

A troop line consists of two Evakmar-KDY transport vessels and two escort vessels - frequently two strike cruisers. As a troop line’s function is intimately connected with that of the Army, troops lines vary less than other lines.

The Army considers consistency a virtue. A single transport is designed to carry a corps, but often carries less than a full corps as subordinate elements are assigned to other vessels. It is not unusual for a ranking admiral to oversee an important surface operation, as captains of the line are accused by Army officers of being far too concerned with just the safety of their line rather than with the success of the mission. There are other types of transports, most of them left over from the days of the Old Republic. Some, such as the Delta-class troop transport, have been converted from true transports to glorified attack shuttles, but many remain in service as intersystem transports as the Army grows.

The answer, then, is no. The Army did not maintain its own starfleet. While there may have been an equivalent to air cavalry or rotary-wing air support, the Army did not control its own transports, pickets, or equivalent to fixed-wing air support.

[Big Orange]

If the Imperial Navy has the monopoly on space lifting and interstellar logistics, then that must mean the Imperial Army is deemed by the Empire's leadership as a distrusted military service if can be easily stranded by Navy ships and has its terrestrial forces heavily steeled by the Stormtrooper legions or/and the paramilitary COMPForce.

[Publius]

If the Imperial Navy has the monopoly on space lifting and interstellar logistics, then that must mean the Imperial Army is deemed by the Empire's leadership as a distrusted military service if can be easily stranded by Navy ships and has its terrestrial forces heavily steeled by the Stormtrooper legions or/and the paramilitary COMPForce.

In the first place, your premise is flawed; the Imperial Navy does not have a monopoly on space transportation. The Star Wars Encyclopedia indicates that the Imperial Space Academy was used increasingly to train officers for the Imperial Navy, but this necessarily indicates that not all graduates became Galactic Emperor's commissioned officers; Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker makes quite clear that Luke Skywalker expected to attend the Space Academy but not to serve in the Imperial Navy, indicating that the Empire's merchant navy had not been militarized. Furthermore, there is evidence of the existence of an Imperial Space Ministry (Platt's Smugglers Guide) and an Imperial Ministry of InterGalactic Transit ("The Free-Trader's Guide to Sevarcos"), with far more important roles in the regulation of interstellar transport than the Imperial Navy's doctrinal raison d'être of space superiority.

The Imperial Navy was not the Empire's only space combat force, as Pirates & Privateers notes that the Imperial Customs Office "keeps watch over intersystem shipping, enforces trade and tariff regulations, and bedevils smugglers everywhere." It is explicit that "the Empire cannot afford to assign Naval ships to daily patrol duty," and "for simple light system patrol, it relies on the Imperial Customs Office, which maintains a force of light patrol vessels, completely outclassed by capital ships but able to overpower the average freighter based smugglers, pirates, and Rebel scum." The same source mentions three Rendili StarDrive-manufactured vessels frequently used in the Customs Office's fleet, the 180-meter light corvette, the 42-meter Guardian class 'light cruiser,' and the 35-meter customs 'frigate.' Though these are undeniably inferior to the vessels operated by their cousins in the Navy, Han Solo’s boast in A New Hope that he regularly outruns Imperial starships — "not the local bulk cruisers" but "the big Corellian kind" — hints at more formidable vessels at their disposal (empirical evidence shows that he was not referring to the Navy's ships, which routinely ran his ship down in straightaway chases). Whatever its composition, it is clear that the Customs Office has a fairly large fleet of cutters; Galaxy Guide 6: Tramp Freighters mentions that the most heavily used commercial space lanes are "often frequented by Imperial Customs agents," and "on popular routes, the risk of meeting an Imperial Customs ship is about one in 20; rather than risk it, Rebel ships commonly take longer but less-traveled routes."

By what reasoning do you interpret a rational division of responsibility as evidence of the Army's political weakness? The Army has no need for a starfleet of transports and pickets; that role is already performed by the Navy, which is far better suited for it (for the Army to do this, it would require the establishment of a completely new training pipeline to teach Army officers how to operate and maintain spaceships, something completely beyond the scope of surface operations training doctrine). You note that the Navy could abandon the Army on a surface, but the Imperial Sourcebook already states that this would be contrary to doctrine; to emulate Captain Gilad Pellaeon's abandonment of an entire army in "Bloodlines" would be heterodoxy for an Imperial naval officer (the Imperial Sourcebook also establishes that the Imperial armed forces are accustomed to the summary execution of heterodox officers). What's more, the Imperial Navy is also closely monitored by the Imperial Marines and CompForce Observation, leaving the Army no more and no less politically weak than its brother service.