How under militarised is the Galaxy pre-clone wars?

[The Disintegrator]

It's been my impression that the Republic was largely dependent on local militia forces, which is actually how the United States military operated for a large part of our nation's history. So I suspect that the Republic may have been able to defend a few of the wealthier and better defended worlds, and perhaps could have even negotiated for various worlds to band together and launch a joint operation for a limited expeditionary force. However against a large organized droid army this probably wouldn't have worked too well for any kind of offensive operations, and probably would have been useful for defending key territories at best. Without the clones the Republic probably would've had to implement a draft, which would've taken a while to get going, and would've been much less popular than letting the faceless clones do it.

[Darth Klingon]

I forgot where, but I remember reading somewhere that the Republic had a fleet, as a part of their military. So, it's possible that the galaxy was more militarized than we thought, prior to the Clone Wars.

[Batman]

You do know that statement is useless like nobody's business. There's been plenty of administrational fleets in the real world that had exactly zero actual ships attached to it.

[Darth Klingon]

You do know that statement is useless like nobody's business. There's been plenty of administrational fleets in the real world that had exactly zero actual ships attached to it.

I typed in "star wars republic fleet" in google, and it was an actual part of the Republic's military force. They had a military fleet with soldiers, in a navy. Just go look up "Republic Navy" on Wookipedia, and it tells you all about that. The Republic Navy defended the Republic for millennia.

[Patroklos]

The idea of a completely demilitarized Republic was always stupid. I can hand wave the idea of a idealogical brain bug taken to the extreme where peace is so peaceful that we need no military at all despite this being a very rare thing in real history. However, when you like to include within your all encompassing republics state like belligerent corporations with all their intrigue agains teach other, monarchies and various other despotic sub states in dynastic struggles and other conflicts involving sectors pitted against each other, pirate havens and other powerful star system spanning criminal organizations and any other number of similar discord producing situations it was simply stupid to say there was no military whatsoever at the Republic level.

That was always one of the the appeals of the Star Wars universe to me, that yes there was an overarching Republic everyone belonged to but inside that framework there were infininate varieties of sub states that had their own intrests from utopian democracies to despotic dystopias. It pretty much allowed you to have characters have adventures in any enviorment and have turly epic struggles that didn't even involve the majority of the galaxy (despite the unfortunate tendancy of authors to ignore this and use the same main characters).

The Republic, even at its most peacful, should have been a pretty dynamic and place with petty infighting throughout. I see no scenario where having a Republic military at least able to lock down a sector or two is not a prudent measure. If the place is so peaceful to where this is not the case its just lazy world building and boring to boot.

[Patroklos]

DP

[The Disintegrator]

Where it gets confusing is Attack of the Clones where the Senate is voting on creating a military. It seems like the Republic having a military prior contradicts the whole political plot of the movie.

[Darksider]

Note that they didn't say it was about the creation of a military specifically. In the Chancellor's office Mas Amedaa specifically states that once he has emergency powers, the chancellor can authorize the "creation of an army." It's possible that the Republic still maintains an (albeit weakened) Navy for protecting trade lanes and hunting pirates. It wouldn't be that powerful, but it would probably still match up well against the converted freighters the CIS was using during the lead-in to the war. The primary concern must have been that nobody had an organized army that could take and hold enemy planets if war broke out, and Obi-Wan's message from Geonosis indicated that the Separatists had a significant head-start in building one.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

It's also possible that the Navy was like the United States Revenue Cutter service and was formally under police jurisdiction without a specific act of the Senate transferring them to a code of military authority, and that in peacetime they were under civilian rules of order, i.e., following civilian laws, with strike authority for the members of the service and only subject to civilian courts, and that the vote was on implementation of the articles of war. This legal distinction seems less important to us, these days, where military and civilian acts have been senselessly blended together, but even a hundred years ago, there was a giant distinction between the body of law used in peacetime and wartime, and people under " military discipline" follow a completely different code of law with different punishments. In this sense, the creation of a military may have been a legal and administrative procedure required to place the existing Navy, which in peacetime functioned as a revenue cutter service, under the Republic's Articles of War, allow the administration of military discipline, implement stop-loss, remove the need to provide warnings before opening fire on hostile ships, and so on. Sort of an administration equivalent of Lincoln's suspension of Habeas Corpus during the Civil War.

The USRC was extremely large, and even had commissioned ironclads during the Civil War, so I think the idea has merit... Under this theory, the largest ships available in any numbers would have probably been Dreadnought-class, and in fact they were probably the standard heaviest peacetime ship before TPM, with a very limited number of Mandator-type ships for showing the flag and ceremonial duties kept around Coruscant (like the USRC's ironclads), with nothing in between the two. The force could have been enormously large, though, as I can't imagine it having less than on the order of six million patrol craft to properly enforce revenue, customs, "coastguard" lifesaving and so on in the whole Republic--there just wouldn't be any need for a vessel substantially larger than the Dreadnought-class.

Perhaps that's where the odd use of the word "cruiser" for ships between frigates and destroyers in size actually comes from. The Dreadnought-class was a "Republic Revenue Cruiser" , just they chose to use the word cruiser instead of cutter (and it was sometimes used historically with that sense, so it's valid enough), and the size category of ships called cruisers that are smaller than Star Destroyers is actually a legacy of the " Revenue Cruiser" designation, with vessels smaller than that being systems patrol vessels, the equivalent of Offshore Patrol Vessels today as a step down from our Coastguard Cutters.

[Stark]

Maybe we could even have scifi involving non-American parallels like the Republic having an Article 9 legal fiction and tolerated constitutional prohibition. Maybe they were really just creating a legal and political framework to acceptably do what they'd been doing for ages while it was illegal per se.

And not y'know 'like the civil war snore'.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Yeah, like the US is the only country with articles of war and a revenue cutter service. NOT. I just happen to live there, so it's the most convenient example. You really are just a goddamned troll.

[Connor MacLeod]

I always liked Homeworld Security. The Clone wars needed more 9/11 referneces lol.

[RogueIce]

Didn't Stargate beat 'em to the punch on that one?

[Jedipilot24]

Didn't Stargate beat 'em to the punch on that one?

Only by about five months, maybe.
The Star Wars Homeworld Security first appeared in the novel Labyrinth of Evil, which came out in January 2005. The Stargate Homeworld Security first appeared in New Order Part Two, which came out in July 2004. Not knowing how long Labyrinth of Evil was in the works, I'll say that both probably came up with the idea at about the same time.

[Darth Klingon]

Where it gets confusing is Attack of the Clones where the Senate is voting on creating a military. It seems like the Republic having a military prior contradicts the whole political plot of the movie.

The Senate voted on creating an army in AOTC, not on creating military. They already had a military, it just wasn't a strong army of soldiers. You can have a military without having an army. For example, in America, we have the Navy, Marines, Air Force, and the Army.

[Batman]

Yeah. Darksider totally didn't already comment on that issue. Oh wait.