The Clone Wars was filled with many brutal and oftentimes poorly thought out battles; needlessly leading to the deaths of many millions of beings. However, of all the battles of the Clone Wars, the battle of Geonosis is quite possibly the worst. Although it eventually led to a Republic victory, it came as an immense cost, both for the Jedi and the Clones who served under them. So why was it this now infamous battle so deadly? In this video we will discuss all the reasons why it was such a dramatic failure for the Republic.
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First we must discuss, the brutal first stage of the battle which took place within the Geonosis Petranaki arena. As we saw in the attack of the clones, Mace Windu led a strike team of over 215 Jedi into the arena. This was one of the largest forces of Jedi in galactic history. However, as Windu stated earlier on in the film, the Jedi were keepers of the peace, not Soldiers. When the separatists Unveiled their army of battle droids, the Jedi were simply outnumbered. Out of the 215 Jedi that arrived on Geonosis, only 30 would live to tell the tale. That's just under an 86% casualty rate.
So why did the first part of the battle end so badly?
The Jedi had spent almost 25,000 years as the primary defenders of the galaxy so you would imagine they would be well equipped to deal with this kind of mission. However this was not the case after the 1000 years of relative peace that preceded the Clone Wars. After many thousands of years of war during the old Republic era, the Republic had decided to lay down their arms and disband their massive military in the fear that it could one day fall into the wrong hands. Known as the Ruusan reformations, these put the majority of the military hardware into the hands of individual planets or systems. The Jedi were also greatly demilitarised and were instead moved over to a peace keeping role. This demilitarisation was reflected in the Jedis training and equipment, but we will discuss this later on in the video.
Of course, in the Republic golden age that followed the Ruusan reformations, there was some violence. But these had largely been small skirmishes and clashes with minor systems. In almost every case, these battles did not pose an existential threat to the Republic and were quite easily thwarted by the Jedi and the various planetary militias.
By the time of the Skywalker saga, this had all changed. Led by a former Jedi, Count Dooku, the confederacy of independent systems were a major threat to the Republic. They had attempted to assassinate a democratically elected senator on Corusant, were building up a massive army of battle droids and were attempting to execute two Jedi and a senator in the Geonosis arena. The Jedi had to move swiftly if they were going to put an end to this situation and therefore struck quickly as they had done countless times during the Republic Golden age. However, the Jedis arrogance blinded them to the fact that this was not just a minor skirmish and it would take far more than a few hundred Jedi.
This fact is made even more ubsurd by the fact that the Jedi were well aware of the clones existence. All they had to do was wait just a little longer, and they would have had the support of an entire army. Mace Windu though was very impulsive and in many ways exemplified the worst parts of the Jedi order. Instesd of waiting for back up, he rushed in to try and save the day, a mistake that cost the lives of nearly 200 fellow Jedi. It is no coincidence that Windu would later go on to make another rushed and impulsive decision which again would cost the lives of his fellow Jedi and ultimately his own.
It is likely that the Jedi believed that through a rapid strike, they could overwhelm the Geonosioan forces, arrest Dooku and leave before droid reinforcements arrived. They may have even believed that the sight of so many Jedi would have immediately led to the separatists surrender. Many of the Jedi were so confident that the mission would go smoothly, they even brought their padwans along them. It is unlikely they would have done this if theyd had known events would unfold as they did.
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6 июн 2022
