With the release of Star Wars the Bad Batch Season 1 Episode 3, we were given a dark look
into the earliest days of the empire, and how the Republic’s grand army began to rapidly
transition to natural born troopers.
As Part of this transition, Imperial leadership implemented a top-secret operation known as
Project War Mantle, which also happens to be one of the one of the projects that was
archived in the imperial vault on Scarif, and discovered by Jyn Erso while she searches
for the death star plans.
So what exactly was operation War mantle?
Well, the bad batch has finally given us an explanation.
So let's break it down.
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During the heated battle of Scarrif, Rebel operatives Cassian Andor and Jyn Erso managed
to break their way into the highly secured, and extremely well protected Citadel Tower
vault at the Empire’s security complex on Scariff, which was known by the Rebel alliance
to hold some of the Empire’s most destructive, deadly and sickening plans for the future
of the galaxy.
Jyn and Cassian’s main goal was the retrieve the death star plans and transmit them to
the Rebel fleet above scariff, but while searching for them, she came across imperial code names
for many other top-secret imperial projects.
These were Stardust, which of course contained the death star plans, stellar sphere, mark
omega, pax aurora, cluster prism, black saber and finally War Mantle.
Now quite a few of these are pretty suspiciously named with all of the new context we have
in the time after Rogue One Came out, with Mark-Omega possibly related to Palpatine’s
force sensitive cloning plans and attempting to capture Omega, project black saber, probably
being a reference to the Darksaber, and may contain some information about how Moff Gideon
acquired it during the great Mandalorian Purge and War Mantle, which we now have a ton more
info on.
When Rogue One initially came out, I think the writers wanted all of these plans to have
some relation to the death star construction, as all of the names are related to large spherical
objects, super lasers and components of the death star.
The Dark Saber in legends was actually a super laser, Cluster Prism sounds like it could
have something to do with the cluster of lasers that we see when death fires, stellar spheres…
I don’t have to explain how that one relates to the death star, and war mantle probably
originally referred to the interior functions of the death star.
But either way, it’s very clear now that they are no longer honouring those original
meanings since they were never enshrined into canon, and are now doing something much more
interesting, connecting it to other major events around the galaxy.
It is now clear that Project War-Mantle is an imperial project which begins the replacement
of clone troopers with Stormtroopers, and the mass conscription enlisted, natural born
soldiers into the imperial army.
We know that the project war mantle is being spearheaded by Vice Admiral Rampart, who is
an up and coming Imperial officer, hoping to make his name in the ranks of the Empire
and of course to impress Tarkin while he’s at it.
Leading the war mantle effort, Rampart hopes to transition the vast clone army of the Republic
into a nearly completely enlisted and natural army of stormtroopers that would better suit
the Empire’s desire for loyalty and dominance.
And this program is also pretty likely the precursor to the Imperial Death Trooper program,but
I’ll get into that in a bit because there are quite a few massive connections which
tell us that War Mantle is on a trajectory to the Death trooper program.
Rampart firmly believes that in order to maintain a firm grip on the galaxy and to prevent rebel
uprisings popping up, the Empire needs a strong, ruthless and loyal military from the top down.
And unfortunately for the Clone Troopers of the Republic, this squarely took them out
of the competition, because Rampart believed that being bred in the tubes of Kamino could
not produce anywhere near the same loyalty than a soldier who willingly enlisted could.
On top of issues with extreme cost, acts of disobedience and unwillingness to follow orders
were quickly stacking up in the clone army, as Tarkin got a first hand view of with Clone
Force 99.
Because of this, Vice Admiral Rampart scoured the Galaxy for the Empire’s first group
of Elite fighters, who would serve in Elite Squad 1.
Being an admiral in the opening days of the Empire, Rampart obviously would have had plenty
of experience serving the Republic navy as a non clone officer during the war, and would
have vast experience serving alongside the Clones of Jango fett.
Because of his past serving alongside clone troopers, he believed that they were very
skilled and effective combatants, but would be better off serving in a training role for
the new imperial army, because they had skills which could be taught, but not the loyalty
that the new Empire demanded.
After arriving on Kamino and greeting Tarkin, Rampart introduces the elite squad for the
first time, hoping to prove to Tarkin that they will be the way forward to the empire.
Along with this and the first episode, it’s clear that this is the first time the Kaminoans
are facing the seriously possibility of losing their Cloning contract with the Republic,
which would not only cost them ridiculous amounts of wealth, but also crucial influence
with the Empire that without, they can’t really stay afloat…
You have to remember that Kamino is completely outside of the main Galaxy, so without providing
a crucial service to the Empire, there’s nothing to stop Palpatine and Tarkin from
crushing the Kaminoans, so they can’t pose a threat in the future…
In order to test the Elite squad’s capability on the battlefield, they send them off on
a mission to onderon, to track Saw Gererra and the partisans, but placed a Clone Trooper
in the leadership role to oversee the mission, which was the enhanced Sharpshooter crosshair.
Obviously things didn’t go too well after the enlisted members of the squad began to
question the Clone’s place in the imperial army, and resulted in Crosshair executing
ES-01.
Despite this, they did complete their mission thanks to the fear tactics of crosshair, reporting
back to Tarkin and Rampart with almost complete success.
Now it’s pretty clear that Tarkin has managed to place the Tarkin Doctrine, which is a set
of ideas, into the crosshair's head, through his inhibitor chip, which forces him to lead
and rule by fear.
The Tarkin doctrine basically outlined Tarkin’s beliefs about how to rule the galaxy, and
stated that ruling by fear was the only way.
He believed that overwhelming *displays* of force were far more important than the force
itself.
Now this leads us to the Death Trooper program.
We obviously don’t know what happens next for Crosshair and the Elite squad because
the Bad Batch series is still ongoing, but we can definitely go through some of the most
likely theories and outcomes based on what we already know from the future, when Rebels
and Rogue One take place.
So right away we know that project war mantle, and pretty much every other project that was
covert enough to be placed in the Scariff Vault was overseen by a body of the imperial
Government known as the Tarkin Initiative.
The Tarkin initiative oversaw much of the Empire’s advanced weapons research including
exotic new types of firearms, harnessing the energy of kyber crystals of weapons and many
other fringe weapons that weren’t widespread.
The Tarkin initiative also had a lot of research ongoing on enhancing soldiers to form a stronger
imperial stormtrooper corps, which eventually even led to creating Hutt clone troopers.
But regardless, the Tarkin initiative, which Rampart is clearly a member of, is in charge
of Project war mantle, known for enhancing soldiers and working on exotic new forms of
weaponry.
This is the same group that the Death troopers served and were likely born out of, making
it pretty clear that War-mantle’s final result will be the Imperial death trooper
program.
And even more interestingly, another project we know was at the scarriff vault, Project
Black saber also has connections to the tarkin initiative, firstly because all projects were
overseen by the but, also because Moff Gideon uses Death troopers.
As you can probably see by now, this is all starting to connect.
Now on top of this, we also know thanks to the new Clone Wars encyclopedia that Crosshair
stands at a height of 6 foot four, taller than all of the regs.
And thanks to the Rogue one reference books which came out around the time of the movie,
we know that the height of most of the death troopers is around that 6 foot four mark,
possibly pointing to at least the early versions of them being clones of crosshair.
We already saw in the last episode of the bad batch that the kaminoans are attempting
to clone one of the enhanced troopers to fight for them.
They probably want Omega the most, but what if they have to settle for Crosshair, and
eventually, his DNA sample gets into the hands of the Empire at the perfect time to begin
the death trooper program?
It’s also looking very likely that we’re heading 100 miles an hour into the Kamino
rebellion where the Clone Troopers bred anti troopers, to fight back against the empire.
We’ve seen so many hints at the Kamioans being angry at the Empire, with many lingering
shots on Prime Minister Lama Su, so maybe they obtained Crosshair’s DNA sample for
the death trooper program during the rebellion.
In the legends version of the event, almost all of Kamino’s leadership is killed while
trying to escape off world, so their future is not looking too bright.
In the legends version of the Kamino Uprising, the bloody battle that ensued that day was
the final straw for Palpatine, which convinced him to switch to stormtroopers…
That sounds an awful lot like what is going on in the Bad Batch right now.
After that dark day, Palpatine simply believed that the clone troopers were simply too susceptible
to outside corruption to ever remain loyal to the empire.
But that was Project War mantle from Rogue One explained, and how it will likely progress
into the future as more Star Wars: the bad batch episodes are released.
Thanks so much for watching, really hope you enjoyed the video.
Cheers guys, hope to see you in the next one!