First Galactic Civil War

The Clone Wars rages across the entire galaxy

### Performers

Galactic Republic and its allies | Confederacy of Independent Systems and its allies (all later reorganized into the Second Eternal Alliance); Second Eternal Alliance | Universal Empire

### Location

The known galaxy

The **First Galactic Civil War,** also known as the **Clone Wars** or **Clone War**, the **Four Year War,** or the **War of 2020, World War III,** and the **Apocalypse** on the original Earth, was a major, destructive, galaxy-spanning four-year conflict waged between the Galactic Republic and Confederacy of Independent Systems, and, during much of the final year of the war, between the Second Eternal Alliance and Universal Empire. Its namesake was the massive Clone Army created in secret by the Republic to combat the Confederacy's innumerable legions of battle droids. These armies, the Grand Army of the Republic and the Confederate Droid Army, were two of the largest ever pitted against each other in a single war, and the conflict rapidly spread to countless inhabited star systems, the war itself being preceded by and becoming the catalyst for many other civilized systems' civil wars.

The flame of war becoming a rapidly-spreading wildfire after the first weeks of the Geonosis Campaign, a prolonged conflict between both sides for control over the vital droid manufacturing world of Geonosis, both sides scored significant victories over each other; at almost any given point of the war before 19 BBY, either side seemed likely to force the other to sue for peace. As the main war raged on across the galaxy, many of Earth's governments had practically declared a state of total war, with the main combatants being the United States of America, Japan, and the European Union, and the Russian Federation and People's Republic of China; the former two quickly became allies of the Republic after an attempted Separatist invasion of Japan, while the EU and the latter two were independent and would be subsequently crushed by the Confederate-aligned Reich der Festen Hand, a neo-Nazi Germany military junta that sought to conquer the world to bring about everlasting peace.

A series of serious Republic defeats in the war's second year, including the disaster that was the Battle of Jabiim, culminated in Operation Durge's Lance, a major Confederate offensive into the Core Worlds led by the Supreme Commander of the Droid Armies, General Grievous, alongside his confidants, the super tactical droid General Kalani, a young Mandalorian bounty hunter by the name of Boba Fett before he turned his back on the Confederacy over inadaquete pay and false promises, and the Gen'Dai ex-bounty hunter Durge, with whom Fett, along with a Terrestrial member of the shadow group known as The Twelve, shared a bitter rivalry with. After this offensive stalled, however, the Confederacy was ejected from the Core and suffered a string of defeats, as the Republic was now finally able to direct most of its industry and economy towards the war effort. This then sparked the Outer Rim Sieges, a series of attritional campaigns fought within the Separatists' own territories.

During the Battle of the Pacific in 19 BBY, which saw the Confederacy attempting to reverse the course of the war by producing warships and battle droids infused with the Dark Side of the Force, the ancient Dark Lord of the Sith Darth Nihilus decided to return to the galactic stage, unleashing his rebuilt army and fleet on both sides and causing the extermination of all life on Earth, sparking the Black Fleet Crisis, which forced the Republic and Confederacy to forge an alliance, known as the Second Eternal Alliance. The Crisis ended with the Sith Lord's final death at the hands of the young Terrestrial captain Hisone Amakasu, and his Universal Empire's resulting dissolution, on the dead, fractured world of Malachor V, with the Clone Wars itself concluding mere days afterwards, after the issuing of Order 66, a clone contingency order that entailed hunting down and killing the Jedi should they act against the interests of the Republic, and the mass deactivation of the Confederacy's droid army by Anakin Skywalker, now a new Dark Lord of the Sith, Darth Vader.

Unknown to almost all, the conflict was instigated, for the most part maintained, and ultimately ended by the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic Sheev Palpatine, in reality the Dark Lord of the Sith Darth Sidious, whose ultimate goal was the luring of Anakin to the Dark Side the transformation of the Republic into the Palpatinian Imperium, or simply the Galactic Empire, with himself at its center, and who also saw Nihilus' relatively brief resurgence as a serious threat to his plans, causing mass chaos throughout the galaxy to last longer than he anticipated. Nonetheless, the conclusion of the war ultimately led to the Sith controlling most of the galaxy for a long period of time. The war also led to the extinction of the sentient dragon-like species who operated on Earth as the Organic Transformed Flyers.