Punishment

596, Punishment

June 21, 22BBY. A month had passed since the Clone Wars erupted.

The Confederacy of Independent Systems' army could be said to be advancing with unstoppable momentum. Of the seventeen fronts where they had launched their initial offensives, eleven had gradually been decided, and the fleets freed up immediately began even larger-scale assaults.

With their string of early victories, the Confederacy of Independent Systems grew bolder. Under General Grievous's command, the droid legions launched attacks on an even greater scale. Sometimes, they did not even bother with escort warships, directly sending a group of transport ships to force a landing before unleashing wave after wave of droid legions in a ground invasion of the planet.

This tactic proved highly effective, because many Outer Rim planets had little defensive strength to begin with. Their armies usually existed only for show, and if dropped onto some planet in the twenty-first century, their combat power might not even match that of city inspectors. They had no chance of resisting the droid legions' assault.

As a result, these planets could only bombard Coruscant with snowflake-like pleas for help, leaving the Republic Supreme Strategic Command caught in a dilemma.

On one hand, their forces were limited. After the Battle of Geonosis, only around 110,000 Clone Troopers remained capable of fighting. More than 40,000 had been dispatched in the subsequent battles, leaving just over 70,000 Clone Troopers to deal with fighting across hundreds or thousands of locations. That was clearly impossible.

Meanwhile, under the military expansion bill previously signed by Chancellor Sheev Palpatine, the newly recruited one billion regular soldiers had already been mobilized and were training on more than a thousand planets. However, these troops would need at least another half year before they could form any real combat power.

Thus, the Republic