Amongst the Empire’s many defining characteristics is the appearance of an anti-non-human sentiment amongst the military personal and its leadership. Now while it is easy to just label this as them being xenophobic and we certainly have a lot of proof of this, from the actions and opinions of Palpatine and many other higher ups in Imperial society, I think there is another underlying reason that the Empire became this way that is seldom talked about. Now to my knowledge what I am about to lay out has never been attributed to explaining this characteristic of the Empire in any primary sources from Expanded Universe, so this is of course all speculative but when analyzing the data and comparing it with what we know about real world events and warfare, it does start to make sense.
So for this analysis I will be focusing on probably the most iconic aspects of the Imperial Military, the Stormtrooper Corps. The other aspects of the Imperial Military can also be attributed to what I am about to talk about but it would take far too long to outline every aspect of the Imperial Army and Navy so I will just focus on the most well knows aspect.
As I am sure most of you already know the Stormtroopers origin comes from the Clone Wars. Prior to this war the Republic had not fought a major war in a millennium and as such had no standing army. Palpatine who due to his machinations know the war was coming and that the Republic needed an army to fight said war, orchestrated the creation of a clone army. These clones would be breed by the Kaminoans off the genetic template provided by a human Bounty Hunter Jango Fett. All of this you probably already know but what isn’t talked about is what else needed to happen as 1000 years without major conflict stunts military production and research considerably.
As such the Kaminoans partnered with Rothanan Heavy Engineering (a subsidiary of the Kuat Drive Yards or KDY) as well as KDY and Blastech to create equipment, weapons and vehicles for this clone army. Since the clones were all humans everything they made had to be compatible and specialized for human use. This process began in 32BBY or 10 years before the start of the clone wars, meaning that since the clones aged twice as fast as humans, the first batch of troops were ready for combat right at the outset of the war. Due to the harsh attrition of the war the Republic ordered for increased production of clones to fill the ranks and replace troops lost, expecting a long war. However this war ended after just a few years meaning that the clones grown during the war due to the need for increased production would not technically be needed. However due to the formation of the Galactic Empire and the needs for a large army these clones were not discarded and production of clones at the scale that was needed for the war, was kept constant for the next 7 years.
In the new age of the Empire the clone ranks became the Stormtroopers and lacking a major war were assigned for peacekeeping, defense and occupation roles across the galaxy. Because of the war ending the attrition rates fell significantly allowing the replacement troops to quickly fill the ranks needed to manage the territory that the Empire governed over. How much territory is that? Well at its height the Empire ruled over 69 million systems, 1.75 million of which were considered full member worlds, and over 100 quadrillion beings. Each Imperial Star Destroyer alone would carry around 9,700 infantry, most of which being Stormtroopers, and considering the Empire at its height had 25,000 Imperial Class Star destroyers that means that they needed around 262.5 million Stormtroopers for their Star Destroyers alone. That plus what was needed to other ships, planets battle stations etc. you start to get a number in the billions when it comes to how many Stormtroopers are needed in the galaxy.
So what does this have to do with humans? Well to keep this at a manageable length I think I am going to have to split this up into 2 parts. So stay tuned for that and in the meantime give me your thoughts so far and theories about where this is going.
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