Republic Marines

"Marines don't have time for regret. At least, we don't when there's battles to be fought. A rocket-jumper can regret not securing her backup thrusters when her mains misfire, but only for the time it takes for her to get acquainted with the ground. A Mandalorian can regret taking on a Jedi, but only until the Jedi can decap him and kick his bucket."

- Laera Reyolé, to

The Republic Marines were a branch of the, which encompassed its ground forces and shipbaord security. Separate from the, soldiers who served in the Republic Marines were considered to be among the best troops that the could field. Generally organized into al-sized units, depending on the era, Marines would often see a wider range of duties than their counterparts in the Army. The Republic Marines served with distinction in many of the Republic's fiercest conflicts, ranging from the to the  before they were eventually disbanded along with most of the rest of the Republic military. However, their tactics and doctrine would be resurrected during the by the.

Formation
First organized during the, the Republic Marines were originally conceived as an adjunct to the Navy, serving as the main line of defense in the event that a Republic warship was boarded, or as shock troops when boarding enemy vessels. As the Marines proved themselves at the height of that war, they were eventually seen as an elite "first response" force that could be quickly deployed to any combat zone in. As a result of this shift in doctrine, Marine training became some of the most grueling in the Republic; becoming one was seen as a mark of honor not only among the military, but of the citizenry.

Old Sith Wars
"The rocket-jumpers have established a toehold, but they're pinned down. Let's go help them punch a hole!"

- Unidentified Marine officer

During the Republic's intervention in of, the Republic Marines saw action alongside their fellow elites, the s. When  initiated his  against the , Marine units fought alongside the Jedi against the invading , when they attacked the  on. In the war's final battle, at, three whole regiments of Marines were among the first troops on the ground, securing a safe landing zone and coordinating the by the Republic's capital ships.

Mandalorian Wars
"We're dead if we leave, but just as dead if we stay. D'you want those dogs to sings songs about how they gunned you down?"

- Laera Reyolé, to her squad during the Battle of Onderon

Despite the losses incurred during the conflict initiated by Kun's forces, the Marines continued to hone their tactics and traditions. Lessons learned from fighting such foes as the and the Krath's own elite forces helped the Republic adopt new training methods, allowing the Marines to diversify themselves. By the time the s began preying on worlds outside the Republic, the Marines had reformed themselves into s, each with at least one specialized that included scout/snipers, infiltration experts, and covert intelligence operatives. When the s finally attacked the Republic, units of ground-based Marines fought valiantly, despite being heavily outnumbered. Though the initial Mandalorian blitzkreig cost the Republic dearly, the Marines helped to prevent total battlefield dominance, often serving as examples for Republic Army units to rally behind.

When and, along with  joined the fight against the Mandalorians, Marine units were sent to take the offensive, even as the Neo-Crusaders continued to push deeper into Republic space. The 3rd Marine Battalion became one of the most highly-decorated units in the Republic at that time after carrying out a series of highly-successful raids against the Mandalorians' supply lines, raids that Revan himself had planned. As the war reached its midpoint, the Republic Army was sent to reinforce strategically-important worlds in order to make them too well-defended for the Mandalorians to risk attacking; meanhile, Marine battalions were sent to non-essential yet still important minor worlds, in order to entice the Mandalorians into attacking a seemingly underdefended garrison. These trap-worlds sucked up Neo-Crusader resources, pinning them under exquisitely-prepared defensive positions, until elements of the Mandalorians' fleet could come to their rescue. These reinforcements would then be ambushed by waiting Republic warships, forcing the attackers to waste far more resources than these worlds were worth to either take or hold. Unfortunately for the Republic, these bait-and-switch tactics were almost as costly. However their strategic value was in keeping the front stalled, preventing the Mandalorians from accumulating enough reserves to enable a direct assault on the and the Republic capital.

After several of these grueling battles of attrition, Revan had succeeded in blunting the Mandalorian offensive, and began to take the initiative. Now trained in rapid planetary assaults and supplemented by Jedi commanders, the Republic Marines proved essential to establishing toeholds and landing corridors on contested planets, allowing Army units to reinforce their positions and retake world after world. The Neo-Crusaders did not give ground easily, and increasingly Marine units were sent in flank and harass the supply lines of the retreating Mandalorians. Serving as snipers, sappers, and shock troopers, they isolated Mandalorian units from one another, allowing each to be tackled separately, without support from their fellows. In the war's final campaign, Marine units served as the spearheads of the assaults on and, taking heavy casualties on the jungle moon against the deeply-entrenched and well-fortified Neo-Crusaders. With reinforcements from the Army, as well as new units of combat droids, the Republic took back what would later be known as "Bloody Dxun."

The, however, would bear witness to the Republic Marines' most humiliating defeat. A force of Mandalorian warships, under the command of and crewed by elite assault units, ambushed an entire Republic task force, boarding Republic vessels before their crews could be properly alerted. The Marines stationed aboard those ships fought with desperate courage against the hardened veterans of Fett's forces; despite their heroism, however, the force of some twenty-four warships, including its commander, was lost, with the few survivors who managed to escape the carnage fleeing in hyperdrive-equipped shuttles and starfighters. By the time Revan had finished preparing his at, few combat-ready Marine units were left among his forces. Instead of keeping them spread out amongst his fleet, he consolidated them, sending them back to worlds on the edge of Republic space to serve as garrison units. Most Marines, unaware of what their commander had in mind, treated this shift as having been caused by a failure on their part. The news of the Mandalorians' defeat and the casualties suffered by both sides, however, quelled these thoughts; senior Marine commanders recognized that Revan had been attempting to preserve what he had come to see as a bulwark against future attacks.

Jedi Civil War
"We had thought that we'd won the war, but that was a lie. Those who had led us, who had sent us into the thickest fighting that sentient beings can engage in, had gone away, only to return as tyrants. You're damn right we weren't going to take that lying down."

- Marine Sergeant Denaas Bekuur, in his memoirs

During the three years between the victory at Malachor and the assaults by the newly-crowned Darth Revan, the Marines rebuilt their forces, drawing exceptional troops from throughout the Republic's armed forces to bolster their ranks (a tradition that had begun in the wake of the Great Hyperspace War). To the Marines' great surprise, the initial offensives did not target worlds upon which they were garrisoned. Instead, Revan had focused his attention on strategic worlds that sat upon the intersection of vital galactic trade routes, or planets that already boasted a fully-functional military-industrial complex and defense network. Revan's surgical strikes threw the Republic, which was still reeling from the devastation wrought by the Mandalorians, into chaos, with the Sith forces under his command putting together an impressive number of victories. While some Marine units, particularly those who first came into contact with Revan's new, joined their old commander and forsook the Republic, the vast majority remained faithful, almost fanatically so.

Proving once again their versatility, loyal Marine battalions undertook their own counterattacks, driving small wedges into the Sith front. One of the earliest of the war's Republic victories came within weeks after the was won by the hardened veterans of the Marines' 3rd Battalion. Acting on intelligence gathered by a member of the 2nd Company's First Platoon, who had trained briefly as a Jedi in between the wars, the force of fifteen hundred soldiers attacked and seized the Sith supply depot on, carting away what munitions and other materiel they could before evacuating, detonating the rest. Further information gathered during the raid led to the Republic victory at the ; the resulting campaign was the first serious counterpunch to be landed by the Republic against the Sith armadas.

In 3,956 BBY, with the war going poorly for the Republic, the Jedi Order conceived a daring plan to capture Darth Revan. The hope was that, in depriving the Sith of its greatest leader, strategist and tactician, a power struggle would ensue that would cause the expanding Sith Empire to lose focus and turn on itself. As a small force of Republic warships engaged the squadron of Sith vessels under Darth Revan's command, a trio of assault shuttles, aided by the of Jedi Knight, managed to board the Sith flagship. As Bastila, accompanied by two other Jedi Knights, made their way to the bridge, the three squads of Marines that had accompanied her did their best to cause as much havoc as possible, in order to draw away as many Sith troopers as possible to provide the Jedi with a clear route to and from the bridge. When Darth Malak took this opportunity to betray his master by firing on the flagship's bridge, Bastila alone survived, and carried the comatose Revan back to the hangar deck and their transportation. The Marines assigned to her command held fast, enabling the Jedi to escape with the barely-alive Dark Lord. As the shuttles made their escape, explosives planted by the Marines were detonated, blowing the flagship to free-floating hydrogen; this masked their escape, and permitted the battle-bloodied Republic force to make a hasty retreat.

The change in leadership of the Sith Empire caused unexpected complications, however. Darth Malak, who was not as skilled in strategy or tactics as his former master, preferred to engage in wholesale slaughter when he encountered worlds that would not immediately surrender to him. While the Jedi Order did its best to find a way to halt this new and incredibly destructive advance, the Marines took the brunt of it. The Sith Empire began to focus less on taking and holding strategic worlds in favor of consolidating its territory. Marine units who had thought themselves far from the fighting soon found themselves under siege by fanatical Sith troopers. Though outnumbered and outgunned, the Marines were much more highly-trained than their attackers, and held out as long as possible before eventually being overrun and destroyed. Despite this onslaught, some garrisons managed to hold their worlds until relieved by Republic forces, but these victories were incredibly rare.

Years between the wars
"The Marines' countless sacrifices throughout the war has ensured their existence for the next thousand years."

- Supreme Chancellor Cressa

With most of the galaxy still on the defensive as the Jedi Civil War came to its sudden conclusion, the Marines suddenly found themselves a shattered force, stretched out across the galaxy in a thin red line. However, with the end of hostilities also came a shift in government policies, as program after program was launched to breathe life back into the struggling Republic. Under the leadership of a new, , a titanic effort to restore worlds ravaged by the Mandalorians and Sith was undertaken, beginning with. This new program of rebuilding came at a cost, however, as the Army and Navy and, by extension, the Marines, were left without adequate resources to recover from the immense losses incurred by the two recent and devastating wars. Warships were pressed into service as cargo haulers as flora and fauna was imported from verdant worlds to those left scourged by conflict, with the Marines stationed aboard serving as impromptu cargo handlers. Despite having won, the morale of the military was ebbing, and many soldiers, from all branches, left the government to find employment as private security, enlist in mercenary companies, or, when there was no other option, to sell their guns to criminal groups, pirate bands, and raiders.

After many years, however, due in no small part to the actions of the, the Republic was able to once again assert itself as the dominant power in the galaxy. The military was given its proper due, and the Marines were once again held in high regard along with other elite units of the Republic. After nearly two millennia of peace, however, the forces of the Sith began once again to threaten the Republic. These "New Sith", however, were not as strong as the Mandalorians and those under the Dark Lords Revan and Malak, and were never able to force the Republic into the terrible state that it faced during the worst of the assaults from the past. For nearly nine hundred years, with few exceptions the Sith were but a nuisance for the border regions, butting heads with Marine units scattered throughout the frontier. When Lord formed his, however, a string of offensives and counteoffensives saw heavy involvement by the Marines, as they fought in ship-to-ship battles and as vanguards for the Army and the forces under the command of the Jedi Order. During the, Republic Marines served all manner of roles, including support for the Jedi as well as the protection of supply lines.

Dissolution and rebirth
"The Ruusan Reformation was greeted with great fanfare by the citizenry of the Republic. But, given all that I've seen, one cannot help but wonder if it was in fact a mistake. The Jedi became bogged down in the everyday currents of galactic affaris so much, that they became blind to threats from within, and because of this, they were nearly destroyed."

- Luke Skywalker, c. 44 ABY

With the victory of the Jedi over the Brotherhood of Darkness, many war-weary citizens from throughout the Republic began to clamor for reform. With no discernible threats to galactic stability in sight, the Senate instituted the, which saw the entire military of the Galactic Republic abolished, with peace being maintained by the newly-organized and the Jedi Order, who had chosen to undertake a greater hand in policing the galaxy. In the thousand-year peace that followed the Reformation, the traditions and honors of the Marines were all but forgotten.

However, with the rise in power of interstellar corporations and their droid armies, which culminated in the pan-galactic, the legacy of the Republic Marines was once again brought to the fore. As the s of the diversified in the face of the shifting tactics and doctrines of the ' droid and naval forces, a new brand of  was created. Formed from an elite division of clones under the leadership of Jedi Master, these troops were cross-trained in a wide variety of environmental combat, including harsh-weather and shipboard fighting. After the war's end and the Republic was remade by into the, these marines continued in Imperial service.

Organization and tactics
The Republic Marines were first formed within the Republic Navy as adjuncts to a warship's security personnel. Trained in close-quarters combat, they became effective at repelling boarders and even at boarding enemy warships. Sakira Tobonne, who had originally outlined the concept of the Marines and served as their first Commandant, soon realized that these skills would translate well to urban warfare. The Marines, who used the same rank system for officers as the Navy, were originally organized into regiments (usually commanded by a Captain or Commander}, which were subdivided into two battalions (commanded by Lieutenant Commanders) per regiment, three companies (led by full Lieutenants) per battalion, three platoons (led by Ensigns) per company, and three twelve-man squads (led by Sergeants) per platoon. The larger warships in the Republic Navy could muster a full battalion, however, most ships maintained only a company-sized presence. Worlds on the fringes of Republic space might garrison a regiment of Marines, alongside two or more regular Army divisions depending on population and strategic value. Small outposts, such as those which contained listening posts, were often staffed only at the company level.

In the years leading up to the Mandalorian Wars, the Republic Marines diversified radically. While they had always&mdash;and continued to be&mdash;experts in small-unit tactics on dense urban battlefields, a greater emphasis was placed on flexibility and initiative. The regiment was abandoned in favor of the battalion as the largest self-contained unit, with emphasis placed on company and platoon commanders becoming more proactive and able to adapt to changing circumstances. While still considered a part of the Navy, the Marines adopted such tactics as scout/sniper pairs, infiltration and extraction teams, as well as commando operations which included sabotage, high-value target neutralization options, and raiding of an enemy's vulnerable rear areas. This model for organization and operation remained largely unchanged throughout the rest of the history of the Republic Marines, due in large part to its success against the Mandalorian Neo-Crusaders and the Sith Empire under Darths Revan and Malak.

Appearances

 * Star Wars: Death and Life