It also could be that this was still early on in the days of the Empire. The Clone Troopers were phased out, the Stormtroopers phased in, but you still had a lot of....not as indoctrinated troopers who weren't cut out to be Stormtroopers. These would be regular army. As time goes on, the Stormtrooper Corps become larger (larger and better indoctrination centers), and the Imperial Army become smaller, since the Empire is mostly occupation forces and removal of insurgents, rather than fighting a war. Thus the Stormtroopers are everywhere, and the Army Trooper are reduced in numbers.
Yeah, I imagine the during the first decade of the Empire there was a transitional period where a *lot* of new non-clone infantry were conscripted as basically cannon fodder. With what was probably thousands of bush-fire conflicts left over from the clone wars (mostly former Seperatist worlds not ready to give up the fight) and the first real push to expand out into the outer rim, the Empire probably went through a *lot* of troops. Most probably didn't have anywhere near the kind of training the Clones did and were thus less suitable and much more expendable, particularly on the worlds that were little more than meat grinders. Once the clones were mostly phased out and most holdout planets pacified, ground wars gave way to occupations and martial law became more an more common throughout the galaxy, the new Stormtrooper legions that were trained up in the interim (though still much less effective by clone standards) became omnipresent. Given the ramping up of the Imperial presence on Lothal we saw in the five or so year period prior to RO/ANH, it seems as though the Empire was still very much in the process of consolidating is assets when the Alliance initiated an open war.
I would love to see more of the Imperial Army in the future movies. Maybe in the upcoming Boba Fett movie.
re: General Veers. Vader order Veers to prepare his troops for a surface attack. Veers gave a direct order to a snowtrooper lieutenant in the cockpit of his AT-AT. The implication is that all of the ground forces, troops included, were under Veers' command.
I would too. Just don't get your hopes up that any of the new writers will know or even care how the military works. For example, in the new movies Rian Johnson seems to think a General would be in command of the Navy. Then again, that's The First Order. I may as well be criticizing The Spaceballs.
Star Wars military structures have always remained strange, ambiguous, and frightening. Like unfrozen caveman lawyer strange and frightening. It's the only fictional world I know of where a commander outranks a captain. (Within the same service- mind you. I'm not talking about Navy 0-5's versus Air Force 0-3's.)
Here's the thing about rank structures and military tradition: they do not operate in a vacuum (metaphorically speaking before anyone makes a "but they're in space!" crack.) They're the end result of and a reflection of the hundreds, even thousands of years of a culture and civilisation and they have evolved accordingly. The Star Wars galaxy isn't our civilisation, it's had it's own (very long!) history and at a million+ worlds and untold thousands of species, it's bound to have orders of magnitude more diverse cultural influences than we've ever had. So to expect it to have an exact 1-to-1 equivalent of the ranks favoured by most NATO countries (and even those don't all use exactly the same ones!) is frankly rather narrow minded.
Assuming you're referring to Hux, that was actually Abrams who did that in TFA. But you know, continue hating Rian Johnson at your leisure.
That's when he was in command of a base on a planet, standing on the ground, screaming at an army. Abrams got it right.
And what about the scenes near the beginning when he was on the bridge of a Star Destroyer issuing orders to the crew as they tried to take out a stolen TIE fighter? Not only did Abrams show us an Army officer commanding a naval warship, we also had the unlikely scenario of a flag officer being in command of a ship, instead of, you know, the ship having its own captain who should have been taking charge of this situation. But no, that's right. This isn't about who know what about the military and its procedures. This is about hating Rian Johnson for the hardship he caused the manbabies who consider themselves the true keepers of the franchise. I suppose childhoods have been violated too? Of course they have, Rian Johnson's evil knows no bounds, apparently. So of course he needs to answer for Abrams's sins. Next thing you know, it'll somehow be Rian Johnson's fault the Kelvin's registry has a leading zero.
General Grievous during the Clone Wars commanded both Ground and Space forces. So did the Jedi 'Generals'. Some Generals in the Rebellion did both as well. And what The Wormhole said above. You're letting your hate for Rian cloud your thoughts.
Actually, I take back what I said earlier. In original BSG, Commander Adama outranked Captain Apollo. Guess they were channeling SW in more than one way...
IIRC, BSG's rank structure had to do with Glen Larson not knowing anything about the military, and so he arranged Captain, Colonel and Commander in alphabetical order.