Division/Legends

A Division was an important tactical level of military command and organization, widespread throughout the Galaxy. However, the term was not used in either the Grand Army of the Republic or the Imperial Army, which designated comparable formations as Legions and Battlegroups.

Across the Old Republic, sectors and important member worlds typically retained defence forces at Division strength. It seems that the Republic usually supplied half the funding for these units, and Imperial sources later portrayed them as forming the devolved and debased field units of a theoretically unified Army, but in practice, they were autonomous local militias. Often limited to ceremonial and police duties, lacking effective heavy equipment or interplanetary deploymant capabilities, they were normally under the operational command of the planetary governor or sector Senator, and their loyalties were entirely to their homeworld or home Sector - or, worse, to the individual grandee who was their paymaster and commander.

During the Clone Wars, local forces came ever more under executive control, and after the Declaration of a New Order, a key stage of transforming the Galaxy's military forces into the Imperial Army involved the effacement of local loyalties by undermining the existing Division structure: units of the Army, it was felt, should be components of a Galaxy-wide machine, loyal primarily to the Imperial command, and capable of fighting with equal determination wherever they were required. To this end, Divisions were reorganized as Battlegroups, and amalgamated into Corps based on deep-space depot ships. Only a few Divisions retained their old identities, units where the divisional esprit du corps was particularly strong, or where continuity was useful for propaganda purposes. For instance, the Assault Armour Division were typically the first unit to recieve new armoured vehicles such as the AT-AT.

During the Galactic Civil War, the ideologues of the Rebel Alliance laid a marked stress on the ideals of the Old Republic and local autonomy, so it was perhaps inevtiable that they would continue to use Divisions as their primary large-scale military formations. Although the SpecForces, the troops answering directly to Alliance High Command, were typically deployed in small, flexible mission-specific teams, their large-scale organization was based around the Division - the total number of SpecForces divisions is said to have been somewhere around ten. Other Rebel divisions were attached to local Sector Forces, and fought as combat formations in the field: for example, in Atrivis Sector, where the Rebel army on the planet Mantooine was organized into several small Divisions.

Rebel Divisions were designated by numbers, apparently irrespective of whether they were SpecForces or Sector Force troops: the 132nd Forward Division in Atrivis Sector was probably part of the army on Mantooine, while the 117th Light Infantry Division seems to have been a SpecForces unit, serving as a pool from which commando strike teams could be formed.

Under the New Republic, Divisions continued to serve as important army formations, and now - if not beforehand - specific Divisions were assigned to support naval taskforces, such as the 42nd Republican Guard Assault Division, which served with the Fleet's 32nd Cruiser Squadron.

Behind the scenes
Although Divisions were absent from the standard Imperial Army command structure, this page nevertheless depends heavily on the Imperial order-of-battle section in the The Imperial Sourcebook, where Divisions are discussion in the section on the Battlegroups that replaced them.