Troop/Legends

The term troop was used to denote relatively small military formations of platoon or company size, usually being used as an alternative to these terms with mobile or elite forces.

In the Grand Army of the Republic, it denoted a platoon-strength unit in the Special Operations Brigade, a group of 20 clone commandos organized in five squads, with five such 20-man troops forming a company.

In the Imperial Army, however, the term troop was applied instead to a company-strength scout unit, consisting of four platoons, with a total of and 116 infantry and forty scout troopers.

Behind the scenes
In the real world, a troop is historically a unit of mounted soldiers, a subdivision of a cavalry squadron. Today, it is used in various ways to denote units of troops who are not conventional infantry, but in general terms, a troop in the British armed forces is the equivalent of a platoon, with the squadron being a company-level formation, while in U.S. cavalry regiments, the troop is analogous to an infantry company, with the squadron being the battalion-level unit.

This difference in part accounts for the differing uses of "troop" in the Imperial Sourcebook, the authors of which would seem to have all been American, and Guide to the Grand Army of the Republic, where co-writer Karen Traviss is British, and has a military background. However, neither the Clone Commando troop nor the Imperial scout troop represents a subdivision of a squadron as is usual in the real world, with the standard terms "company" and "battalion" being used instead. The term "squadron" is found in Imperial scout formations, but it is used to denote much smaller units, the two-squad groups of biker scouts within each of a scout troop's four platoons.