Marleyan military

Marley's armed forces, sometimes rendered as the Marleyan army, comprise two principal services: the Marley army on land and the Marley navy at sea. Yelena puts their strength in 851 at a million soldiers across fifty divisions of 20,000 each, plus twenty-one battleships spread over three fleets, numbers that likely shrank once the Marley Mid-East War had cost the empire half its naval strength. A general sits atop the whole structure, Calvi until his death and Theo Magath after him, with commanders beneath handling individual combat units.

Manpower comes largely from conquest. Marley conscripts the peoples of its occupied territories while exempting its own citizens, producing a rank and file of many ethnicities; Yelena and Onyankopon both entered the navy this way. The Eldian Unit is the most visible of these formations, ethnically segregated with Eldian enlisted men under exclusively Marleyan officers, distinct headgear marking the divide, and the nine-pointed star armband worn at all times. Officer attitudes range from Magath's pragmatic decency toward his Warrior candidates to Koslow's open contempt. By 854 Magath is pressing to conscript ethnic Marleyans again to meet the threats gathering abroad.

Titans anchor the entire doctrine. Beyond fielding the Warrior Unit as a strategic deterrent, Marley continues the ancient Eldian practice of converting Eldians into mindless Titans and loosing them on enemies, now modernized by airship: the Airborne Unit parachutes spinal-fluid-dosed Eldians over a target, Zeke Yeager's scream transforms them mid-fall, and the impact plus the surviving Titans devastate the zone below. Inheritors of the Nine Titans meanwhile fill a role akin to armor, as when Porco Galliard crushed a machine gun nest at Fort Slava or when Pieck's Cart Titan carried four machine gun turrets crewed by the Panzer Unit through the Allied trenches.

That reliance carried a price. Conventional development stagnated, the standard infantry loadout pairs the bolt action rifle with stick grenades, and rival powers racing to offset Marley's Titans gradually pulled ahead; Magath predicted the army would soon be helpless against the aircraft its enemies were building. The navy fared worse, securing the seas in the Mid-East War only after four years and the loss of half the fleet. Thirty-two ships sent to scout Paradis Island over three years all fell to the Survey Corps and Marleyan defectors, who baited them with false distress calls into ambushes by the Attack or Colossus Titan. During the Liberio raid, Armin Arlert's transformation obliterated a reinforcement fleet along with its port. The military also shows little regard for the laws of war, as when Magath let the candidate Gabi Braun strike an enemy pillbox out of uniform.

The Warrior program itself was born of strategy. Holding seven of the Nine Titans but fearing King Fritz's threat of the Wall Titans, Marley granted six of those powers (the War Hammer staying with the Tybur family) to Eldian children raised as expendable soldiers, their families promised honorary Marleyan status. In 845 four Warriors were dispatched to breach the Walls and seize the Founding Titan; Wall Maria fell, but the discovery that Eren Yeager held Titan powers redirected the mission toward capturing him. The defeat at Shiganshina, costing the Colossus and Female Titans, stalled the Paradis operation, and at Liberio the Survey Corps stole the War Hammer, battered the remaining Warriors, and turned the Beast Titan's inheritor to its side.

General Theo Magath rose from Warrior Unit commander to lead the entire military after General Calvi died. Zeke Yeager served as Warrior Unit captain before defecting, with Reiner Braun as vice captain and Annie Leonhart, Bertolt Hoover, and Pieck Finger among the unit's Titan inheritors, Pieck being one of the few women in combat service. Gross, a sergeant major of the Public Security Authorities, the internal force that polices Marley's Eldian population, personified its cruelty; that repression is what drove Grisha Yeager into the Eldian Restorationists. Navy conscripts Yelena and Onyankopon ultimately turned against the empire as Anti-Marleyan Volunteers.