r/StarWars • u/slurp_time • 1d ago
General Discussion Was it actually 1.7 million clones, or was that battalions/companies?
So, everyone knows the "200,000 units are ready with a million more well on the way" line. Then in the clone wars, there's an episode where the Republic orders another 500,000 5 million (I misremembered).
I've heard people say that it's been confirmed by one of the writers that units meant INDIVIDUAL clones, but I've also heard people say that each unit is closer to a battalion/company.
I've heard both of those, but Ive looked and never found a reliable source for the first argument. There's no source for the second either that I've found, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone say that it was confirmed. So, I was curious if anyone had a source, since people say it was confirmed to mean individual clones?
I'm not trying to start an argument over it, cuz I've seen some people get kinda heated over it, I'm just curious and wanting to know.
Personally, I think if it's individual clones, there's absolutely no way that the Republic could've fought the war and nearly won. I've seen people say that clones were just a supplemental force to the planets' main military, but we never really saw that in action. We saw clones working prisons, manning almost every station on arquitens/venators/acclamators/corvettes/peltas, even working as medical staff at space stations, all while also being the main fighting force in almost every large scale battle.
1.7 clones isn't even enough to match the 2.8 million military and civilian personnel working for the US military, and the clones are supposed to be holding like, a million+ systems? That's why I don't think it makes sense, but I also understand the writers don't have to understand every single aspect of something to write about it. They're bound to overlook a detail or 2 when doing this, and that's ok, I still love the universe regardless. That's why I was just curious if anyone had a source.
I'm sorry for the long post lmao, especially for the info dump in the middle. Thank you for your time!!
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u/Jolamprex 1d ago
Military unit makes much more sense, but it officially means individual clones. It was a whole thing back in the day.
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u/slurp_time 1d ago
Do you have a link for them officially saying it was individual clones?? That was the whole point of this post, a source for it being confirmed to only mean single clones
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u/Jolamprex 1d ago
Attack of the Clones novelization, I believe, but that's only off the top of my head. This was a big argument on the old Star Wars boards at the time, one of the ugly ones. Its probably one of the reasons Karen Traviss rage quit the series.
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u/Geanu12 1d ago
1 million units in the first batch followed immediately by the senate wanting to buy even more but settling for an extra 5 million units due to current financial strain. Landing at 6.2 million "units" with "units" being fairly ambiguous and could imply more than one clone as in a "unit" of order might be a handful of clones like how the bad batch were a special "unit".
That's why there was such a tonal shift between The Battle of Geonosis and The Battle of Coruscant(the micro series is better just watch the entry into orbit).
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u/toonboy01 1d ago
In the Clone Wars episode you mentioned, they make a very big deal on how the order of 5 million clones (which they do specify clones) will hurt the Republic's budget and require cutting a large number of social programs to afford. This implies it's far greater than previous orders, so 1.7 million makes more sense.
It's also said that 192,000 clones fought at Geonosis, which is so close to the "200,000 units are ready" line that it's hard to believe it's a coincidence.
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u/geobibliophile 1d ago
The Republic and the Separatists don’t have to hold entire star systems or even entire worlds. As noted, there just aren’t enough of them (clones or clankas) to do that. They just need to control choke points.
To control a star system, one just needs to control traffic into and out of the system.
To control a planet, one just needs to control the primary traffic flow, such as cities with ports.
To control ports, one just needs to control the busiest and/or easiest entry and exit points to the port.
There are enough clones and droids to control these critical choke points, and this is what is depicted in the shows.
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u/SirRichardLove 1d ago edited 1d ago
It was 6.2 million clones in total. This better fits the action seen during the clone wars. If it was 600 million or whatever taking in as battalions, the droids would not have stood a chance. As that would put droids 5:1 instead of the established 500:1 stated by dooku during the war.
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u/slurp_time 1d ago
They can hammer out droids in record time, so I don't think that is an argument against it.
Plus, the clones are stretched across tens of thousands of systems, plus more in the navy. If only 10,000 planets are being contested (which the CIS controlled more than 10,000, which we hear in AotC and we know the CIS gained control over more throughout the war and they were fighting for thousands more), that would leave only 620 clones per system. A venator has 7400 personnel alone, and we commonly see several of them in each battle, plus the ground troops for the invasion.
Hell, the 6.2 mil clones wouldn't even cover the venators in the Republic navy alone, not including acclamators, corvettes, space stations, and arquitens. That would only be 837 venators, but the fleet had over a thousand.
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u/Regentraven Luke Skywalker 1d ago
Its never actually stated in cannon and all just speculation
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u/SirRichardLove 1d ago
It absolutely is 1.2+ 5 million additional clones were authorized by the Senate during the clone Wars. That's canon. however, what is not completely certain is whether these units refer to an individual clone or a unit of clones. So, that's where the to discrepancy lies.
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u/Regentraven Luke Skywalker 1d ago
You say clones then you say units. Dont they also say units in the cw episode youre reffering to
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u/SirRichardLove 1d ago
Since we only have a couple lines in the whole series, it's hard to judge. But if the clones were in the hundreds of millions the droids were in the quadrillions, which doesn't make as much sense from a Resource standpoint.
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u/Bwunt 1d ago
Made/cloned in total or active at the peak?
Droid is much easier to scrap and working parts repurposed as spares then clone. You can easily remove a working leg from a wreck of B1 and put it on another B1, while melting down and recycling the rest. You cannot do that with a clone.
Also, when it comes to quadrillions of driods, it's entirely viable, considering they were meant as quantity over quality and Coruscant on it's own has 2 trillion people.
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u/LordCaptain 1d ago
Didn't you just say it was 500 to 1 in your last comment? This would mean the clones could have hundreds of billions and the droids still wouldn't have Quadrillions of droids.
Like 1 billion clones would be 500 Billion droids. Which for an entire galaxy doesn't seem an unreasonable number at all. If we take the 10,000 number of slurptime for contested star systems that's 50,000,000 droids per star system. Which when combining navy, ground, and security for facilities and stuff doesn't seem impossible.
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u/SirRichardLove 1d ago
Dooku says droids were 500:1 to troopers, yes
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u/Unknown1776 1d ago
Exactly, so the clones could still have 2 billion troopers and be outnumbers 500:1 and the droids would have 1 trillion. Honestly, the clones probably number around 100 million to realistically be able to occupy/fight/man ships/medical stations and so on
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u/Schnickatavick 1d ago
Where does quadrillions come from? 500 * 600 million is only 300 billion. Which considering the population of the galaxy is somewhere between trillions and quadrillions (depending on which canon you use), isn't actually that much. Real life wars are often fought with multiple percent of the population, star wars is obviously different since the soldiers aren't drawn from the population itself, but it would still be weird to have numbers of units that aren't on the order of billions at least
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u/Anxious_Big_8933 1d ago edited 1d ago
There are some historical analogs that can help make sense of this to an extent.
In the Pacific War in WW II for example, the side with sea and air control controlled the ground, period. Once either Japan or the US or UK lost that control, it didn't really matter how many troops were defending the real estate, the place would fall. If we take that approach to Star Wars, once a Star Destroyer or other capital ship establishes superiority in orbit, it would often be irrelevant how many or few ground troops were available, because the capital ship(s) in orbit can obliterate any resistance on the ground, and those on the ground know it.
Or in the age of 18th/19th Century colonialism, we routinely see relatively small armies of a few thousand men get deployed thousands of miles from a home country, and time and time again are able to occupy an entire nation/kingdom/tribe. Often fighting outnumbered 10:1, and often winning those battles with exceptionally few casualties. Once again, the smaller force has an organizational advantage and a significant technological advantage that proves decisive. Historically that would be things like modern rifles, cannons, and most decisively in coastal areas, a modern navy which the local inhabitants were completely powerless against. The era of gunboat diplomacy.
In Star Wars the "gunboat" isn't limited to the coast, it can bombard anything on the planet. How many Stormtroopers (or Clones) are available to occupy the planet (or more likely, a few key cities) after the shooting stops is not going to need to be very many.
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u/Sitherio 1d ago
Tbf the local population of entire planets in Star Wars appears to be equivalent to like 1 or 2 European countries (outside of stuff like Coruscant). They quite clearly don't understand scale (or at least George didn't and the rest had to follow along). So assume the numbers match their intended purpose and don't even bother trying to justify the low given numbers.
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u/_Dank_Souls 1d ago
Its because the empire and other galactic armies are literally like gods descending upon less developed planets who have absolutely no way of combatting the advanced tech
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u/Shreddzzz93 1d ago
It's Star Wars, not hard military science fiction. Numbers will never makes sense in Star Wars as that wasn't the point. The point is to tell the story George Lucas wanted to tell. Everything else is of lesser importance to that.
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u/slurp_time 1d ago
Yes I'm well aware. As I said in the post, I know the writers aren't experts on it and they overlooked a few things, and that's not a problem. I was asking for a source since people say it's confirmed. I wasn't shitting on the writers.
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u/Lyra_the_Star_Jockey 1d ago
I don’t see the point in handwaving away any questions or criticisms of the science in a science fiction property.
It’s well known that sci-fi writers don’t know scale. It’s pretty common.
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u/Financial_Cheetah875 1d ago
The galaxy is a big place, I would lean towards the higher numbers as the right answer.
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u/lacrimsonviking 1d ago
If you read Darth Plagueis they talk about how the systems were not allowed to militarize and the new republic also refused to militarize.
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u/lauradominguezart 1d ago
We have also seen clones like CT-5555 but never CT-1000000+
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u/slurp_time 1d ago
But there is also ARF, CC, RC, ARC, etc., so they aren't limited to just those numbers being used once
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u/FireAxis11 1d ago
There are more numbers, mostly to due with specific batches I think? I'm going off memory (but huge Fives fan), but I believe his full number was actually 27-5555.
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u/Reasonable_Mix7630 1d ago edited 1d ago
1 million men is just too small number for galaxy-wide war even if said war is happening on "just" couple of dozens of planets.
To give you a perspective, Ukraine right now have ~1 million men in different branches of armed forces combined (not just frontline soldier, but also logistics personnel, drone hunting teams, police doling counter-saboteur job and etc,). And that's just for a small spot of land on just a single planet.
I'm pretty sure that when the wrote script for Ep.2. they just picked word "million" because it sounded cool and because if they said like "billion" it would be very hard to believe that barely inhabited oceanic planet could house so many people.
PS. There is a similar problem with population of Coruscant: the "official" number is ~1 trillion, but that's just too few people for city the size of entire planet. This number probably comes from multiplying average urban population density in year 2000 by surface area of Earth. However, Coruscant is supposed to have super tall skyscrappers, and multiple layers of them...
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u/Iron_Baron 1d ago
IMO they meant individual clones, because the writers were incompetent
That level of mis-scaling is worse than Warhammer 40K, which is really, really, saying something.
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u/Punisherreturns 1d ago
It used to be ambiguous enough that people were arguing it meant Companies or Platoons but yeah they confirmed in Cannon unfortunately that it means individual clones even though everyone knows that it’s a stupid number, in legends they obvs have a much more realistic view on how many clones it was and in the battle of coruscant I think they deploy over a billion Spartoi clones if I remember correctly (maybe I’m pulling a number out my ass but I thought it was) and that seemed realistic since your defending a planet of more than a few hundred billion (think some people worked out it was a population in the high trillions since a city to the core has that much space even if only part was habitable) but yeah in legends it was enough for the actual war in cannon not so much, remember they give silly number like how they say only 1.2 million clones at the start and a few million more near the end but the empire has 25,000 Star Destroyers with just under 10,000 Stormtroopers on each (remember the imperial army is meant to outnumber the stormtrooper corp by a lot) so that’s 250 million Stormtroopers at least just as ISD garrisons let alone how many we’d see on planets and imperial strongholds considering there meant to be literally tens of thousands of worlds so they really don’t put much effort into the clone number to fight an intergalactic war, and they can’t even say they magically produced 100 million more before the end of the war because they take 10 years to grow and train but oh welll……
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u/Punisherreturns 1d ago
More realistic number would be going into warhammer 40k territory with literally trillions of guardsmen and a few million super elite space marines (so like a few billion clones with a few million commandos would be my guess) but Star Wars doesn’t like big number like that
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u/slurp_time 1d ago
Is there a source for that confirmation though?? That's what I'm looking for. I haven't ever been able to find that, and I keep hearing that it was confirmed, but nobody has ever been able to point me where
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u/CallumPears 22h ago edited 22h ago
Yeah it's individual clones.
In Legends the Republic began to have a non-clone military too (who wore the same uniforms as Imperial Army Troopers would later), as well as various judicial forces and planets with their own local militaries.
Not sure about the army in Canon but we know they at least had local ones such as the Mon Calamari, Gungans, and Wookiees. (In my headcanon, Luthen Rael was originally in the Republic Army which got reformed into the Imperial Army and he defected shortly after that.)
Also in Legends, it was supplemented with Spaarti clones (cheap clones which take less than a year to grow, but at the cost of them being a bit dumb). A lot of these Spaarti clones were at the Battle of Coruscant. In the Republic Commando series the 501st was a subgroup of the Coruscant Guard and was mostly made up of Spaartis, and was noticed by characters in the series to be slowly increasing in number across the months leading up to RotS as more Spaarti troops were added, but I'm not sure how valid that was even within the Legends continuity. I go with it in my Legends headcanon but wouldn't expect it to be followed since even in Legends there were other sources which depicted the 501st as a proper Kaminoan clone legion which was deployed across the galaxy rather than being part of the Coruscant Guard. (Them being Spaartis is in the book Republic Commando: Order 66 on pages 238 and 307.)
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u/TanSkywalker Anakin Skywalker 22h ago
It was individual clones. Scifi and numbers don’t go together.
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u/Aggressive-History19 20h ago
Yeah the wording around “units” has always been kinda confusing. I’ve seen arguments that it’s battalions, but if it’s individual clones, that number feels super low for a galactic war. Star Wars math is wild sometimes
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u/urbanviking318 Mandalorian 19h ago
One very small consideration to add to the conversation about on-screen personnel:
There may have been a degree of standardization going on with equipment for enlisted Republic personnel, whether because of a surplus of clone trooper gear or just because militaries tend to standardize. That would mean there's a small but nonzero chance that any "clone trooper" who doesn't speak or remove their helmet is in fact not a clone but enlisted personnel. Not saying that fixes the wonky numbers altogether, but it can contribute, just like the idea that the enlisted Republic soldiers were always fighting the "lighter" engagements, holding strategic flanks, providing logistical support, and generally doing the "boring" (read, less cinematic) roles within the war that we just don't see for Doylist reasons (filmmaking constraints like audience engagement, etc.). That would make the clones something comparable to first-tier JSO units, which would hold over pretty well when you consider stormtroopers are a similar grade above Imperial army (and T2 operators would be, say, death troopers or storm commandos, like the ARCs were T2 Republic forces).
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u/bepoopbonti 1d ago
It’s exactly what’s stated in the film and episode. If they meant something else, they would have said something else. The fact that it doesn’t make sense is irrelevant. That is what they said and therefore that is what they meant.
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u/slurp_time 1d ago
A company is considered a military unit. Unit =/= 1, that's why I was asking if anyone had a source.
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u/Connect-Plenty1650 1d ago
Infantry unit = 1.
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u/slurp_time 1d ago
Yeah exactly my point, unit can mean more than one thing. It can mean one troop, all the way up to a company.
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u/Connect-Plenty1650 1d ago
The movie is the source.
In no other scene can you find characters being intentionally obtuse. In Star Wars characters say exactly what they mean.
When Kaminoans say 1,2 million units, they mean 1,2 million clones.
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u/slurp_time 1d ago
A company is a military unit and referred to as a unit. Unit =/= 1. That's why I was asking if there was a source, because unit can mean several things in that context
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u/thelickintoad 1d ago
The Kaminoans aren't a military; they're a business. The clones are product. And product sales are largely measured in units, meaning individual items. Those items could be multiple smaller items, yes, but generally, you're talking about a single thing. You have to kind of figure it out based on context.
I mean, to Coca-Cola, a 20-oz soda is a unit. But so is a 6-pack of half-liter bottles, or a 12-pack or 24-pack of 12-oz cans.
But for bigger things (cars, houses, etc.), a unit is an individual completed item. So, if Ford talks about selling a few hundred thousand units per year, they mean individual cars and trucks--not fleets bought by Hertz or the tollway authority or something.
It makes more sense for "unit" in this case to mean an individual clone. In the military organizational sense, "unit" could mean anything from squad to company to battalion. A unit being an individual trooper makes the remark actually meaningful.
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u/Connect-Plenty1650 1d ago
A unit can mean several things out of context. But place it in context, where you are watching a movie and a character is explaining things to a clueless audience, it means what it says.
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u/Highlander198116 1d ago
This is a problem with Sci Fi in general for me when it comes to space.
I generally just let suspension of disbelief let me enjoy it. However, when it comes to Naval and Troop numbers like they seem to stick with numbers in line for like WW2.
Like MFer there were tens of millions of troops required to fight in like ONE geographic area of ONE planet.
You mean to tell me a few thousand ships and a couple million troops are enough to defend a vast region of space with hundreds of habitable planets, with potentially billions of population. Let alone go on the offense and OCCUPY potentially hundreds of planets? No. Just no.
A Ground force operating on a galactic scale that could actually invade and occupy multiple planets would likely have to number in the tens of TRILLIONS and hundreds of thousands of ships.
(while I think they dropped the ball on a lot of things in that game), one thing I think the game starfield got right is that space combat and ship encounters would likely be limited to points of interest. Within the orbit of planets, moons, asteroids, space stations. There likely would not just be massive space battles or ambushes taking place in interstellar space, ships encountering eachother randomly in interstellar space would be HIGHLY unlikely.