outside of the bad math, can anyone come up with a legit better number, obvious the answer is "more" but i doubt people wouldn't still fuck her hard if she said "6 trillion"
Several users on
JCF did the math years ago based on several sources, like Dooku's line from AotC that there were too many clones to battle on Geonosis in comparison to the number of droids there, or the sources prior to Karen's Guide to Warfare, or Labyrinth of Evil which was written as a direct tie-in to ROTS and supervised by George, and finally comparing the Republic army to the number of droids in the droid army (which numbered in quintillion) and estimated that the whole Clone Army consisted of around either +600,000,000 clones, two trillion soldiers or at most five hundred trillion (although this last number seems like reaching to me) without counting planetary armies.
Many sources implied that after the Clone Wars began, the Republic army began
recruiting soldiers from localized
Planetary Armies and Security Forces, alongside civilians which were said to number in the trillions or "countless". Tarkin himself came from one of these local security service armies, mainly the Outland Regions Security Force from planet Eriadu
(pictured left). The only author who tried to retcon recruits was Karen Traviss in her novel Triple Zero by having Palpatine say that having recruits is a bad idea, despite all other sources, even ones that came after it outside of her Guide to Warfare still held that recruits were a thing, especially in Dark Horse, and Tarkin himself and his forces existence during the Clone Wars were a direct contradiction to TZ. Labyrinth of Evil which was often considered G-Canon (not that I give a crap) due to its direct input from George also pointed out that there were enough clones to not only serve as the active armies but to populate the whole of Coruscant and other Core planets as active security forces that were referred to as being omnipresent.
Karen's insistence on this seemed to have been based on the basic numbers given for units in production on Kamino in the film and Matthew
Stover'sclaim Edit: Stover's claim that there were only around a million clone soldiers in total in his novel Shatterpoint because of misinterpreting lines in AotC about the million clones in development on Tipoca City alone as the max number, along with misinterpreting the Complete Locations guide's 200,000 clones on Geonosis as the max number rather than the first dispatch while ignoring the dozens of republic ships that were arriving behind the initial force on Geonosis, and while also ignoring Lucasfilm editors and Kaufman confirming that no fixed numbers were allowed.
"LFL was very clear to us that no fixed number of total clones would or could be assigned. Therefore, the number 3 million (plus) does not represent the entire fighting force." - Ryan Kaufman
So the
official answer is that
there was no set number of soldiers in the
Grand Army, it was as big as you wanted it to be, and if a specific number was given it was treated as in-universe propaganda or just a character being wrong.
Despite this and Karen's insistence on using her set numbers, she was one of the few authors to properly portray the reality of how corrupt it is to own an army of clone slaves even if it could get preachy at times, so I have to give her that. Anyway, her fans have also tried to find loopholes to her claims, such as "unit" not meaning a lone individual clone but a whole legion and then compared it to the structure of units used in Her Majesty's Armed Forces (which served as her main inspiration for the structure of the Clone Army in her works), eventually estimating that the Clone Army could indeed number in the trillions or more. However this was all rendered null and void soon after on the starwars.com message boards where Traviss double downed on the numbers and got incredibly hostile with other users, and in return they got just as hostile, and it became an autistic shitshow all around that eventually devolved into threats and immaturity on both sides, culminating into the fandalorian equivalent of a navy seals copypaste and Wayne Poe's infamous machinima video. Good times.
In response, Traviss used "spaarti cloning" from the Thrawn Trilogy in her Order 66 novel (a TFW tie-in novel) to increase the number of clone soldiers to an unspecified number of billions and trillions (but she only did this after there was only less than a year left in the war rather than at its start) and then claiming this was a Palpatine keikaku. However she also introduced these clones as being horribly defective and ineffective, my guess this was her trying to imply imperial stormtroopers came from these guys despite all other sources and even George proving otherwise, and in the end the inclusion felt more like an immature "gotcha" to the users on the message board rather than an actual attempt at expanding the lore. Despite this, she doubled down with the small numbers in Guide to Warfare which she left unfinished after George mostly retconned her version of Mandalore and she never worked for Lucasfilm again.
Was it all her fault though? Did she just have a shitty editor? Was she just too headstrong? Did she have too short a fuse? I'd like to say yes to all four, but without being biased I will say that everyone involved on both sides was an immature idiot and should've controlled their fucking temper because all it did was make things worse and everyone was getting angry and autistic over fucking numbers of all things. I would call her the Furloni or Chuck Windbag of my generation, except she was actually a very competent and skilled writer who knew how to set up scenes and dialogue, and she actually read tech guides and she was a dedicated lore builder (even creating a language for the setting which SW desperately needed) and character developer, that is when she wasn't being angry, jerking off Kal Skirata, ignoring the Taung and TotJ, or talking about numbers and gay
ner vods.
