Stormtrooper Corps

Inheriting the military forces of the Grand Army of the Republic, made up of millions of Kaminoan-made clone troopers, the Galactic Empire would immediately possess a large amount of highly trained infantry units, land and air assault vehicles as well as capital ships. These were used to support military excursions against forces opposed to the new Galactic Empire, among them remaining Separatist holdouts such as the one on Desix. Another use for the clones was to enforce the Empire's will in early occupations, missions, and secruity efforts.

In what clone troopers Ding and Kicker feared would be their future, clones were also dispatched to cleanup former Jedi or Separatist sites, including the late Count Dooku's Castle Serenno, whose war chest was extracted by a large operation supervised by a clone company. To Ding and Kicker, such missions were a sign that the clone army was to be phased out: while new recruits would become active soldiers, both feared their future would hold quiet cleanup missions. Finally, elite clone units such as Clone Force 99 and Purge Troopers were active. The former was tested by Grand Moff Wilhuff Tarkin while the latter was at the disposal of Darth Vader and his Inquisitors.

Immediately after the formation of the Empire, Navy and Army officers began actively recruiting ambitious civilians for a new generation of Imperial troopers. This project, code-named War-Mantle was kept secret from the Imperial Senate and the first conscript troopers were deployed on clandestine operations including the elimination of the Onderon rebels. On the meantime, clone commandos like SP-113, Captain Gregor and Scorch were tasked with training the first generation of stormtroopers, codenamed TK stormtroopers on a secret facility on the planet Daro. Gregor alleged that one of the reasons clone troopers were to be phased out of the Imperial Army was because they were created to be soldiers loyal to the disbanded Republic.

To fund this facility as well as the development of the troopers' new experimental armor, Vice Admiral Rampart, Kamino's new Imperial governor and a trustee of Tarkin started appropriating Senate-approved funds meant for Kamino by exploiting his influence in the Defense Finance Committee. Senator Halle Burtoni of Kamino discovered the transactions but was publicly disgraced by the Empire before she could act on her suspicions and forced to retire to living a private life on Coruscant. With funding for the project secured, all that remained to be done was for the clone army to be permanently decommissioned to give Galactic Emperor Palpatine a pretext to move publicly with the stormtrooper corps. To that end, Rampart began increasingly interfering with Kaminoan politics, demanding to be notified of all that occurred in the capital and making it known that the Empire considered clones too expensive to maintain. Sensing the danger, Prime Minister Lama Su attempted to organize an evacuation of Kamino's cloning and science personnel, only to be discovered, giving Rampart the pretext he needed to arrest him for treason. With Kamino's political leadership dealt with, Rampart had all remaining Imperial personnel evacuate the planet and ordered an atmospheric bombardment which destroyed the cloning and military facilities.

The destruction of Kamino's facilities was covered up as the results of a cataclysmic storm; with no survivors left to testify otherwise, the incident became known as "the storm" throughout the Empire. Rampart then moved to the final step on forming the new army and proposed a new legislation, the Imperial Defense Recruitment Bill, to the Imperial Senate. According to the Bill, due to the Empire's lack of means to sustain the clone army it was to be decommissioned and replaced with an army of conscripted volunteers, recruited from among the galaxy's civilians to serve their Emperor, even though in secret the Empire had already been training such recruits on Daro for the past year. While the ongoing recruitment was kept secret from the Imperial Senate, former Jedi Ahsoka Tano, who lived in hiding on the planet Thabeska before moving to the moon of Raada a little over a year into Imperial rule, came to know that clones were being phased out in favor of recruits. Even though the Bill was yet to be passed, non-clone recruits saw deployment in the place of clones to Thabeska, Raada, and Desix.

The Bill initially faced significant objections from the Senate and tabled multiple times, much to Palpatine's frustration. During one pre-voting session, Senators Bail Organa of Alderaan and Tynnra Pamlo of Taris publicly spoke against the need to create another army so soon after the end of the last great war, while Riyo Chuchi of Pantora expressed her frustration with the clones' lack of representation in a Bill that would affect them significantly. The bill proved divisive, as corporate Senators such as Gani Riduli of the InterGalactic Banking Clan and the Commerce Guild's representative passionately supported it, and the vote was postponed for the next session. Outside the Senate, clone troopers publicly and privately expressed their concerns for the government's decision to decommission them after their service during the war. Others like Slip and Cade were two of Rampart's crew members stationed on his Venator during Kamino's destruction. They attempted to reveal the incident to the Senate, but they were eliminated by a Clone X trooper, Clone X.

X had been dispatched by Rampart to silence them. Slip had, however, managed to notify former Clone Captain Rex, who along with the now rogue Clone Force 99 managed to retrieve the command log from Rampart's Venator and bring it to the Senate during the final voting session. This evidence, along with former Senator Burtoni's testimony proved to be enough to convince the Senate of the Admiral's treason, and caused Vice Chair Mas Amedda to order his arrest. Palpatine then appeared before the Senate and gave a speech in which he expressed his belief that the incident demonstrated the clones' inability to be trusted and their tendency to blindly follow orders; therefore he suggested that a conscript army would be the solution to the problem. With this development, the Senate finally voted for the Bill, and the new army, named "Stormtrooper Corps" by Palpatine himself, was officially formed.

Due to the difficulty to immediately halt the military buildup that had began during the Clone Wars, the Corps continued to rely on Republic-era clones for a few years after the Proclamation of the New Order. Nonetheless, the clone stormtroopers' fighting skills ultimately deteriorated due to their accelerated aging process. In response, the Corps continued to accept non-clone recruits into its ranks, with most remaining clones being disbanded four years before the Battle of Yavin. During the earlier years of the Galactic Empire, the Imperial army also deployed Imperial Army troopers on many worlds instead of stormtroopers. As the Empire continued, however, the army upgraded as these soldiers were phased out in favor of more stormtroopers. By the time of the Mimban Campaign, Imperial army soldiers had not been completely phased out and fought alongside stormtroopers, but the army's upgrade to increase stormtroopers had begun.

During the Galactic Civil War, the Corps underwent an accelerated training process to provide more soldiers at a faster rate in order to suit the Empire's needs. Members of the Stormtrooper Corps would see substantial military action on multiple against the Alliance to Restore the Republic and its successor state, the New Republic. Following the Battle of Jakku in 5 ABY, the defeated remnants of the Empire signed a peace treaty called the Galactic Concordance. One of the terms of the treaty prohibited the mobilization and training of stormtrooper forces.

The Imperial Remnants retreated to the Unknown Regions where they reconstituted themselves as the First Order. In violation of the Galactic Concordance, the First Order rebuilt the former Imperial military including a new generation of stormtroopers. In 34 ABY, these First Order stormtroopers saw action against the New Republic and the Resistance, a paramilitary organization led by General Leia Organa.

Although their ranks were numerous and possessed some of the finest weaponry, armor and training with much development spearheaded by the Imperial Department of Military Research, stormtroopers were generally less respected as soldiers in comparison to their genetically engineered clone predecessors by the Empire's adversaries and surviving veterans of the Clone Wars. Captain Rex noted the relative inferiority of the new stormtrooper ranks, believing in his subjective opinion that poor training and equipment was partly to blame for the Corps' decrease in operational effectiveness. Nevertheless, stormtroopers were trained to be fiercely loyal to Emperor Sheev Palpatine and were reputedly incapable of betraying him. In addition to their allegiance to the Emperor, they loyally followed his apprentice and enforcer, the Sith Lord Darth Vader.

According to Imperial records, the Corps never trained a trooper-turned-traitor, but that was not true. When they were not in armor, officers of the Stormtrooper Corps wore black dress tunics, caps, and boots. They also carried code cylinders, rank insignia plaques, and officer's disks that were conform to the standards of the Imperial Navy.

In the Stormtrooper Corps, one of the smallest units was a squad, which consisted of ten stormtroopers. A platoon was made up of five squads, and a company was made up of four platoons. Higher up, a battalion consisted of four companies, and a regiment had four battalions in it. A legion was made up of four regiments, giving one a total of twelve-thousand eight-hundred stormtroopers.

To outflank an enemy unit, stormtroopers could be organized in a strategy known as Sigma Four. This tactic was once used by Sergeant TX-828 against the bounty hunters of Captivator's crew.

The Stormtrooper Corps contained a number of field officers in the form of Stormtrooper Commanders. The various Imperial officers of the Empire also displayed commanding authority over stormtroopers. As the head of the Empire, Galactic Emperor Sheev Palpatine commanded the loyalty of the Stormtrooper Corps, whose members were ready to die in his name, even when faced with poor odds. Due to his status as Palpatine's Sith apprentice and private enforcer, which turned him into the Empire's unofficial Commander-in-Chief, the Sith Lord Darth Vader also had massive authority over the Stormtrooper Corps. Together, Palpatine and Vader commanded the Empire's army of stormtroopers. Vader lacked any kind of formal rank and was simply regarded as a "lord" by stormtroopers or any other Imperial.

Vader had a unique relationship with the Stormtrooper Corps; while Palpatine, as Galactic Emperor, once declared that all of Vader's authority only existed because he allowed it to, the Twi'lek Isval, who confessed to have only heard second- and third-hand tales about the Sith Lord, had heard that the Stormtrooper Corps possessed an almost-religious level of loyalty to Vader. Indeed, Moff Wilhuff Tarkin noticed that Vader and the stormtroopers who supported him had a great rapport. First Sergeant Hazram Namir used the blind loyalty stormtroopers showed Vader as a warning; when he saw his fellow rebels' respect for the Rebel Alliance's leadership, the untrusting Namir remarked that Vader's stormtroopers praised the Sith Lord as a hero, just as they were doing with the Alliance officers.

To the rank and file of the Empire, including its stormtroopers and the TIE pilots of the Imperial Navy, Vader was indeed a hero. While the Emperor was tasked with governing the entire galaxy and thus had to rule from a distance, Vader led their forces from the frontline and repeatedly brought them to victory, which earned him immense respect and admiration from the Empire's rank and file. While other officers might have remained away from active combat in the safety of a capital ship or base, Vader was someone who jumped into battle and then fought on the same level as the Stormtrooper Corps, who watched him fight with a chilling effectiveness. All the same, stormtroopers and other rank and file forces did fear Vader despite their love for the man. Still, that was not unique to the infantry and pilot classes: even the senior figures of the Imperial Officer Corps, who hated Vader and the Commander-in-Chief level authority he held over them, knew to fear the Dark Lord.

Palpatine's remark about Vader's status only existing thanks to his blessing came during the Scourge of Coruscant, in which a number of stormtroopers on Coruscant were ordered to fire on Vader, with Palpatine using it to try and tell Vader that, without his blessing, he had nothing to command. Indeed, Palpatine even ordered Vader's own handpicked death trooper guard to turn on him. Furthermore, Palpatine maintained an order amongst all of Vader's stormtrooper escorts to turn on his apprentice should he need to give the order. Vader himself knew the importance of assembling his own private forces when he wanted to act behind his master's back. However, various stormtroopers still displayed a great loyalty towards Vader, with whom they directly fought under in the field and thought of with great reverence. The stormtroopers of Vader's personal 1st Legion possessed a degree of loyalty that was exceptional even amongst the Empire.

• 1st Legion
• 68th Legion
• 501st Legion
• Bardelberan 7 Imperial Garrison
• Death Star's Imperial Army garrison
• Cloud City Imperial Garrison
• Coruscant Guard
• Tempest Force
• Felucia Imperial garrison
• Foot Patrol 7
• Garel Imperial Garrison
• Gigor Imperial garrison
• Imperial Ninety-Seventh Stormtrooper Legion
• JN-093's squad
• Lothal Imperial Garrison
• Mataou Imperial garrison
• Mantooine Imperial garrison
• Naalol Imperial Garrison
• Naboo Imperial Garrison
• Obumubo Imperial garrison
• One-Oh-Seventh Stormtrooper Legion
• Plateau City Imperial Garrison
• Scarif Deployment
• Scrim Island Imperial garrison
• Team Five
• Winter's Edge stormtrooper garrison
• Wecacoe Imperial garrison

• —The Empire's main enforcer throughout the galaxy. Equipped with E-11 medium blaster rifles and specialized armor made up of over 18 plastoid, composite plates.

• —Heavily armored experimental units of the Empire that wore pitch-black combat armor.
• —Elite stormtroopers who served as bodyguards, enforcers, and commandos active under the death trooper division.
• —Elite stormtroopers with black armor who specialized in hunting Jedi who survived Order 66.One unit personally served GovernorUbrik Adelhard of the Anoat sector.
• —Grey-clad units trained to deal with extreme combat scenarios.
• —Elite stormtroopers deployed in the Imperial Military

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