Stravo wrote:Once again, I don't know what the fuss is all about...the clone troopers are SHOCKTROOPS....ELITE UNITS....Do we have a million SEALS, Green Berets, etc??? NO.
Ignorance. They're not that specialized. They're to the Republic's Sector Armies what the Iraqi Republican Guard is to the Iraqi Army.
In SW, 1.2 million unless you're JUST doing black-ops. 1.2 million isn't even enough to probably sieze and hold Geonosis. I can't believe that there were -only- 1.2 million troops in on the Geonosian invasion. Furthermore from the EU Clone War follow-up literature and games and whatnot, depict worlds occupied by clonetroopers and they're being at the general frontlines across the Republic.
The Republic clearly has a military and there will be a draft in place after all who is going to man the warships, supply lines, armor, air support, etc? Thats right, conscripts. Regular army. What we saw on Geonosis was an all out assault by ELITE TROOPS.
Actually, no. Official data, which trumps your assumptions and speculation, shows the clone troopers to be a frontline assault force. Again. They're the Republican Guard of the Galactic Republic.
WHERE does it say that this is it? That the million troops are ALL that the Republic has? Even if the Republic had ZERO troops (can anyone actually believe that?) it would take a matter of weeks to a few months to train a few hundred million men from the vast man power pool the Republic has at its disposal. Think about it, some of teh finest officers in teh EMpire served in teh clone wars and they are not clones.
That's silly. The
whole point of the Clone army. The clone army is a whole branch of the Republic military forces, the
Grand Army. The idea...the genius behind Palpatine's manuvering, is he can declare war with ease thanks to this secretly constructed military force. You see? Look at the New Jedi Order-era New Republic....the parliamentary system has many selfish and regional-minded Senators. The Old Republic was even worse. Those Senators are not going to want to tell their constituents they're going to have to increase taxes and begin mass-conscription, and worse, have body bags coming home by the billions. Worse yet, some of these Senators, like Amidala, and the Caamasi are philosophically pacifists. It's a political nightmare. Palpatine knows this. But with the Clone army he's made, he can simply nationalize the army and send it to fight on the front lines, while conscription and taxes are much lower and much more gradually instituted--and these conscripts generally are not on the frontlines. Unit has to equal divisions, IMHO, and there must be subcontractor cloning facilities and even later Spaarti-style facilities to amp up production.
Due to the banning of cloning technology and the fact that now the bill would be simply paid en masse by Palpatine, it is illogical and logistically and sociologically unjustifiable to conclude that a great percentage of the stormtroopers would've been clones.
And once again the Stormtroopers are not the be all and end all of the Imperial army...in fact they are only a branch of the Imperial army, a very special and unique branch, the very elite of the elite, SO once again what is the problem with the stormtroopers/clonetroopers being clones? They do not represent even a large number of the over all military.
The Army really seems to be little more then to man garrisons and hold territory. The stormies are in the trillions; they've been seen to handle virtually all the front-line work. A job they weren't designed for persay, but explains their depletion by Thrawn's emurgence.
Furthermore, because there are still trillions of stormies and no one would possibly find out that Palpatine was breaking the law? Because Palpatine is political genius, not a paranoid freak like Stalin and the suggestion he needs robot-like-brained docile troops is laughable. He could do basically as well with the cream recruits for far less cost. Keep in mind that the Senate and public opinion was still politically powerful enough to keep Palpatine keeping the Death Star project secret.
To reiterate: Clone troopers are the elite, the best of the best, tip of the sword, I say a million elite shock troops are more than enough.
Then you have no knowledge of scale or logistics or sheer size of the galaxy.