40 A day in the office

General Valentra's office

GAR Headquarters

Coruscant

"Damn." Valentra cursed quietly. He was reading over the preliminary casualty list after the main fleet action over Geonosis was complete. When all was said and done about a third of the fleet was either outright destroyed, crippled or in need of serious yard time. The price in lives was even higher. The conservative estimates were for six hundred thousand dead with another hundred thousand wounded. And all those figures were very rough estimates based on the number of destroyed and damaged ships. So it was virtually guaranteed that the numbers were going to spike as more information came in.

That was before the ground action had begun, not to mention that the fleet was still dealing with the orbital defenses.

The General closed his eyes. While they had won the battle, decisively at that, the outcome was painful beyond belief. Oh, the enemy's losses in both destroyed ships and tonnage were nothing short of catastrophic, but they had lost few hundred people at best. The rest were expendable, easily replaceable droids. It wasn't so with the Republic crews, clones or not. While the Republic had much bigger industrial output, at least once it's economy get into gear and onto war footing, the loss of experienced spacers was critical. Getting more ships into service than the enemy could field didn't mean that much when you lacked the trained crews to run them.

"Give me the estimated completion dates for the latest construction runs." he asked his aide.

It took him few minutes to get the relevant information, before the middle aged captain was able to do so.

"The next major batch of Venators will be complete and ready for trials within a three week period, in two months time. Between now and then, there will be trickle of completed cruisers that should be enough to shore up our losses, if there aren't many victories like today's. There is a similar schedule concerning the Acclamators with another week lead time."

"How are our production figures looking?

"Reasonably good, given the circumstances. The major fleet yards are still expanding and constantly adding new construction slips. There are bottlenecks in trained personnel and expanding the production of various critical components. For the time being we are fine resource wise, but building new factories and production lines takes time and it is the real snag. Add to that the fact that a lot of said production is specialized work and we are hurting as far as trained workers are concerned. That bottleneck is expected to be resolved within the next six months up to a year depending on how fast we want to expand our construction efforts."

"Which lead us up to the next issue. What's our situation with the fleet personnel?"

"Bad. There simply aren't enough clones being grown and trained to fill up all needed positions and that's before we factor the latest approved expansion of the fleet. Unless something is done, within twelve months we'll have brand new ships without anyone to crew them. The current level of losses of trained personnel is unsustainable in the long term."

"A weakness that the enemy is much sensitive of."

"Yes, sir. Only about fifteen to twenty percent of their combined fleet is manned by organics though those numbers are increasing as they ramp up production too."

"Not enough to make a difference. How are our recruitment efforts going?"

"Rather good, though training competent spacers takes up time. If we rush it we lose the edge our crews have on the droids."

"Can't be helped. I'll need recommendations on cutting down the training cycles. To compensate somewhat, we would have to break up many of our current crews and spread the trained personnel to stiffen up the new boys and girls."

"Now, how is the production going on the new equipment?"

"We are steadily replacing all production lines for both small arms and armor. Even when its possible, we simply won't have the resources to outfit the whole army with power armor and heavy weapons, though within two years the bulk of our forces will have the new arms and armor types. As per operation plan Blue, we will be sending the bulk of the old equipment to newly created formations."

"Good. Our veteran units will need all the edge they could get in order to preserve as many of their manpower as possible. Even if its in exchange of much heavier casualties among the new units we are training." Valentra hated the necessity of that choice, but that's the ruthless calculus of war for you. The big edge the GAR currently had was the better quality of its soldiers, something that would inevitably go down as brand new units, which only had few months of training were fed into the fray.

Which in turn made inevitable that Valentra had to preserve the bulk of his veterans, though a significant portion would be disbanded and spread amongst the green divisions that were being trained.

"Did the warning go to our forward units?" the General asked.

"Twenty minutes ago. ONI agrees."

After the first reports of the battle over Geonosis came, it was apparent that mass fighter attacks would soon be plain suicidal. Which was good in the long term, but it also meant that the CIS might decide to use that tactic while the Republic Fleet was still retrofitting it's ships with Guardian systems. So a warning was sent to the various front line units to prepare as well as they could against such tactic. Not that many of them could devise a good counter against few thousand or tens of thousands of small craft doing kamikaze run while they were still useful for something more than scrap.

It was frustrating to be unable to help beyond issuing that warning.

"Enough of that. What's the latest status on our forces in the Outer Rim?"