#because there are 10 systems armies; each with 2 sector armies; each with 4 corps | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

kaasknot · 4 years

Text

GAR Organizational Structure (with bonus despair)

point the first: the structure tcw gives us for the GAR is nonsensical. captains are leading legions, a battalion is apparently sufficient for a marshal commander, and generals are, oh my god, leading troops out in the field—the way no general irl actually does, because they are a strategic target and if the enemy kills/captures them it would be a tremendous blow. not gonna lie: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) is a disaster and should be ashamed of itself.

i mostly ignore all of the above for my sanity, because 1) it’s more fun to watch jedi waving laser swords around amidst thickets of blasterfire, 2) the whole endgame is to kill them anyway, so who cares if a few jump the gun, and 3) maybe cody just really digs all those cool cats down in the 212th. maybe he runs ops with them whenever he can get away with it. whatever, it’s explainable.

(nothing will ever explain why rex, a junior officer, was leading a whole-ass legion. i cannot forgive. i will not forget.)

point the second: the only hard numbers we have for how big the GAR is are in the repcomm books, which put it at 3 million soldiers. this is. it’s. it's absolutely ludicrously small. to put it in perspective, the united states armed forces alone comprise about 1.4 million active duty personnel in its various branches. that’s ONE military on ONE planet. the GFFA has anywhere from 12 to 70 million inhabited planets. sure, most of them won't participate in the war, but even if you take the lower figure of 12 million, assume 10% are participants (whether as suppliers, victims, allies, or just re-supplied a star destroyer that one time), and take 10% of that as ACTIVE participants, then the number of planets the GAR needs to have a presence on is still 120 thousand. do a little math, and for the GAR to maintain a US-sized presence (which i think we can all agree is plenty large enough to bully a planet into submission) x 120k, the GAR would have to have 170 billion active duty personnel.

if the last number was too small, this one’s too huge. It’s beyond enormous. how do they feed everyone? but consider: the GAR wouldn't have to have the same presence on all planets. some of them might be small, like the rishi outpost. some might not need active policing at all, such as core planets like alderaan. i'll admit right now that i'm extremely lazy and don't feel like crunching the numbers to determine the size of the GAR presence on upwards of a million planets. i'm just gonna say "one billion active duty clones for the war." it’s still hysterically enormous, but it’s a lot more manageable.

my headcanon for the organizational structure of the GAR, using both wikipedia and wookieepedia for reference:

GAR: 1 billion active duty clones (broken down into 10 systems armies)—led by yoda, who is eisenhower

systems army: 100 million clones (2 sector armies)—led by a marshal commander, each of whom is attached to a jedi councilmember (so ponds, cody, wolffe, etc. our beloved cc-2224 is marshal commander of the 3rd systems army.)

sector army: 50 million (5 planetary armies)—led by a rear marshal commander, each attached to senior jedi masters who are not on the council (so gree, bly, fox, etc)

planetary army: 10 million (5 corps)—senior commander (note: given the unit mobility we see in the show, “planetary” is more a polite request than an actual rule, especially as attrition takes its toll. troops go where they needed.)

corps: 2 million (5 divisions)—corps commander

division: 400 thousand (5 legions)—division commander

legion: 80 thousand (5 brigades)—legion commander

brigade: 16 thousand (5 regiments)—brigadier commander

regiment: 3,200 (4 battalions)—regimental commander

battalion: 800 (4 companies)—major

company: 200 (4 platoons)—captain/1st sergeant

platoon: 50 (5 squads)—lieutenant/staff sergeant

squad: 10 (2 fire teams)—sergeant

(fire) team: 5 troopers

(“active duty” in this context (the context being slave soldiers) means all clones of age to deploy who are not on medical leave. the total number of cadets of all ages, who are not considered active duty, probably dwarfs this 1 billion figure by like a factor of 978645, which i’m not even going to think about because the sheer logistics of that is staggering. the only reason this army wasn’t discovered sooner is because of movie magic.)

the eagle-eyed among you may notice that several of the formations i’ve separated out (e.g. brigade and legion) are actually the same size irl. in my defense: it’s a billion fucking soldiers! there is no existing military structure on earth that can accommodate a command of that size!! something had to give!!

again, those keen-eyed among you may notice that there are no less than eight different ranks of commander, only three of which are supported by wookieepedia. in my defense: star wars gave us a crappy starting point, and i can only work with what i’m given. either i bump up NCOs to commanding platoons and companies and reinstall our beloved rex as captain of torrent brigade (my soul fucking shudders), or we have to deal with eight different unit sizes all led by officers addressed formally as “commander.”

(it is clone etiquette to address commanders by title and name in mixed company, save the highest-ranking officer, who is THE commander and may be addressed sans name. it is clone humor to fuck with non-clones by sending them on goose-chases in search of “the commander.”)

moving on.

according to wookiepedia, the ranks of jedi are thus:

grand high jedi general—yoda (actually i lied, i made this one up)

high jedi general—the other 11 councilmembers

senior jedi general—all jedi masters

jedi general—all jedi knights

jedi commander—all jedi padawans

as far as i’m concerned those ranks can stay as-is, with senior and regular generals getting scattered throughout the command structure wherever i feel like putting them. it’s not like they make sense as military leaders anyway; they’re last-minute pasties to cover up the GAR’s scandalous bits and make it fit for public propaganda.

of note, there are 12 jedi who sit on the jedi council, but only 10 sector armies. conveniently, yoda doesn’t need to command a sector army, because he commands all the armies. likewise, i headcanon shaak ti doesn’t actually have a command, as she stays on kamino for quality assurance purposes. gotta make sure there aren’t any ethics violations going on.

some may have noticed that fox, despite answering to the chancellor and not to a jedi, is in the “rear marshal” category. i did this (actually @countessofbiscuit did this and i shamelessly stole it) because i (we) headcanon fox not just as head of the coruscant guard, but the head of the CG, GAR military police, and penal battalions. he’s got a big command, too, even if he doesn’t have a jedi to show for it. plus, it makes for excellent intraservice beef if palpatine pushed for fox’s promotion against the prevailing cultural trends of the GAR. (poor fox.)

final notes on this already long-winded and horrific post: seniority within the ranks of the marshal commanders depends on the seniority of their attendant jedi and their own level of experience. e.g. mace windu is the senior-most jedi after yoda, so ponds commands the 1st systems army. however, ponds dies relatively early in the war, so bacara, despite being assigned to the 2nd systems army (i just made that up, i have no idea if ki-adi mundi has seniority after mace), outranks ponds’s replacement because he has more experience. most of this is tacit and doesn’t really affect anything except who sits where at mandatory formal dinners, but it’s also used to justify who’s allowed to eat the last donut—to mixed success.

how DO they feed everyone, though? like, seriously?

#gar organizational structure #coruscant guard #commander fox #clone intelligence #meta #tcw #eyayade #don't confuse your systems armies and sector armies #i just did and almost gave myself a fucking heart attack

510 notes · View notes

lillytalons · 3 years

Text

So, the GAR is a mess as we all know. It doesn’t really make sense but I untangled some of it so here ya go. Pictures of what I figured out are at the bottom.

So there are 10 systems armies, led by the Jedi council. Of the other 2 council members, Shaak ti is on Kamino overseeing the clones, and there is one other council member, possibly Yoda, who isn’t directly over a group. That one is up for debate though.

Each army has 2 sectors, likely one led again by a council member, (jedi high general) and the other led by a senior jedi master. Each sector has 4 corps (so 8 corps an army) with each corp being led by a Marshall commander and Jedi General. These generals are probably mostly masters, with some knights as needed. My personal thought is that the high jedi generals are in command of the system army, one half of the sector, and one corps. Then depending on the master, they may be in direct control of one legion, regiment, OR battalion. (We never hear of regiments but assume they are there). My argument for this is that Obi-wan, Mace, and Plo Koon seem to have smaller groups that they lead personally for stealth missions and they attach to the groups they are assisting, but seem to be outside of all other command structures.

Again, the show doesn’t quite make sense because we want to see characters we know which means we see council members working together more than we probably should, but whatever. Moving on.

Legions are generally the lowest grouping led directly by a Jedi (and a senior clone commander), probably mostly knights, but a good chunk of masters too. I gotta think that at first it was based on jedi rank, then the council started fine tuning based on actual skill level at leading soldiers. Regiments are led by junior clone commanders and Jedi commanders/padawans when possible. Padawans are much more outside the structure though, because they spend most of their time with their master. They are likely to not be in direct control day to day, but are placed in the needed command per battle or siege.

Battalions work the same way, but are technically led by battalion commanders, which are made of companies which are led by captains. I’m not going any smaller but you get the idea. Everything from sector army down is made of 4 of the lower thing, so in the whole GAR there are a grand total of 10 system armies, 80 corps, 320 legions, 1280 regiments, 5120 battalions, and 20480 companies.

Which brings me to naming. Honestly the numbers are probably arbitrary, and don’t repeat other than the 10 system armies. (The 7th sky Corps is in the 3rd system army). Everything smaller than a legion (possibly a battalion) probably has a name not number (torrent company) but if you did use numbers, repetition would no longer be a problem because you would divide by legion first, then the unit you are naming-at least on official records. The one caveat is Obi-wan’s battalion, which is probably special cause it’s hooked to a high general. Again, battalions probably have numbers, but since you aren’t going to be mixing system armies often (or ever except that the show does) repetition in numbers isn’t actually an issue, especially if any repetition is in different unit sizes, battalion to legion. Plus battalions will have a secondary name, like attack battalion, which could also help. If there are difference numbers may repeat within those.

There are 400-430 jedi generals at any given time, with extra jedi either floating to give assistance, do spy work (quinlan vos), or fill other needed roles like medical and keeping the temple running.

Unlike your average earth army, officers are in the thick of the fighting, meaning that the higher ranked officers will coordinate whatever they are leading, but will generally personally lead smaller units because Jedi are most effective in the center of the action. Senior padawans were probably almost all knighted within a few months of the clone wars starting because they needed more generals, which is how Anakin ended up with a legion.

For the most part jedi work alone or in pairs, so the high generals will give their units places to be and general objectives and then let them go. There is less oversight unless large planetary assaults like Umbara are needed. A system army will be spread out wide because there are only 10 armies to cover the galaxy, even taking into account separatist space. So corps or legions of the same sector might be spread out on different planets. Along with this, there are not other branches of the military. So each sector army is going to be made of ground units, space/pilot units, etc. Some units are clean up or occupation units that come in after the fact, though we really only see the attack units because of our main characters.

The title/rank Commander is used for multiple ranks, but Cody is the highest rank clone in the GAR, or at least one of them. He is a Marshall commander, over a corps, so there are likely 80 of them, but on top of that he works directly with a high general, making him even higher in the command structure even if not officially. He’s gotta help with the sector and system armies sometimes honestly. Cody seems to directly lead his battalion (no battalion commander) but deals with logistics for the whole corps.

High jedi generals are gonna pick a unit size that works for them like I mentioned above. Obi-wan often runs stealth or speed missions, unless he is working directly with Anakin. But even then they are the pair sent in to tricky situations with basically no back up. The GAR uses them when they need something done with the least amount of men. Some generals that are used in big assaults or blockades are going to use bigger units as their personal unit. We see Mace Windu have a battalion, but also lightning squadron within that for truly messy situations. Mace and Obi-wan also likely guide the other Jedi High Generals (the open circle armada fits in here somehow? Honestly idk) in battle strategy and keeping all the armies cohesive and out of each other’s way.

Oh and also the coruscant guard are outside the 10 system armies, led directly by palpatine (who is technically the commander and chief of the whole GAR which is why the council always has to listen to him) and led by 4 clone commanders, Fox seems to be the most senior, either by rank or self sacrifice, we aren’t really sure. They protect the planet and primarily the senators.

I pulled all this info from wookipedia, the couple of great GAR posts I have on my blog from other people, and puzzle work, or just personal headcanons.

#GAR #sw #my stuff #obi wan kenobi #clones

13 notes · View notes