Ok im gonna say it: Stormtroopers are good at their job.

I've made a similar comment under a few different posts, and they were too deep down to get any good responses, so I want to hash it out (in a fun way please).

The joke about Stormtroopers being bad at their jobs is getting silly, and the only counter argument I've seen concedes "they are good but the heroes have plot armor."

I fully disagree with this.

Stormtroopers are excellent at their job and they are superlative henchmen that Darth Vader has complete under control. They should be seen as at least on the same level as Bane's henchmen in The Dark Knight Rises, because of how committed they are to following orders.

I am sticking to Original Trilogy for obvious reasons.

In the opening of A New Hope, they come in guns blazing, one or two go down. The others relentlessly file in, stepping over their dead comrades until the ship is taken, which they do with ease. They then go down to Tattoine where they take down a sandcrawler with precise attacks according to Obi-Wan himself. Luke's farm has no Stormtrooper corpses around, indicating they had no issues there. Luke, Obi-wan, and Han escape from a coupleof troopers as they flee Mos Eisley, but at that point the heroes are a couplenof no ones to a handful of two-bit troopers who've beem stationed on some backwater outer rim planet and probably aren't keeping up their training. The troopers have no real reason to care about them or try very hard.

Then we get to the Death Star and they seemingly flounder about. This is the real point where the debate starts. Now we have Stormtroopers who are stationed on the premier battle station of the Empire who are incapable of landing a shot and are getting killed by a green farm boy who has never even left his planet. I mean they can't even shoot their feet when their targets are on the other side of a partially open door.

But this exact scenario is where we should actually realize just how terrifyingly dedicated the Stormtroopers are. We find out just as the Falcon escapes that Leia thinks it was too easy, and that the Empire LET them escape. That idea is then confirmed, with the reason given being that they want to track them back to the rebel base, which we are told by Tarkin who says, "I'm taking a terrible risk Darth." So, these troopers were so committed to Vaders plan that they ran into real enemy fire and were really killed by rebels, and they still kept up the ruse because Vader told them too. They didn't fail at all. They executed the plan perfectly. They miss, because they've been told to let the rebels escape. They're not bad shots at all. In fact they're so good thay they get close enough to make it feel real, but not kill any of them. The Death Star is only destroyed because the empire is arrogant and doesn't consider smalll one man fighters to be a threat. They don't have defenses against that. Its not thw Stormtroowrs fault. Its thebfailtnof a hubristic Empire that doesn't respect anything but overwhelming might. This will come up again later.

Then in Empire we once again see the Stormtroopers blow through rebels with ease. They take Hoth in, at most, a few hours. They take Cloud City over completely with no issue. They are totally in control. and they don't hurt Luke because they've been instructed to lead him to Vader. Lando betrays them and does escape, but they dont lose all of cloud city, just three particularly wily prisoners and a couple of pointless droids.

Then in Reurn of the Jedi, they beat the rebels no problem, but are taken down by a native species that they consider to be unworthy of consideration, and who use guerrilla tactics to defeat them. This is a direct parallel to the US in Vietnam as per Lucas, himself. But they only lose because just like in A New Hope they fail to consider the actual threat of anything besides large and powerful forces.

None of the losses are the fault of inferior troops or training. They are all oversights by the Empire, and a failure to recognize the large risks of small insurgencies, but the Stormtroopers themselves perform very well at all the tasks they're given.

So im conclusion, Stormtroopers are good at their job and that is in fact shown throughout the entire trilogy.