The rallying cry of the Republic’s clone
troopers was that they were an army of one man, but the right man for the job. And indeed, the Grand Army of the Republic
did its job well, all things considered. It did, after all, defeat the Confederacy’s
Droid Army against staggering odds, ending the Clone Wars with a decisive victory for
the Republic-turned-Empire. But could the Republic have done better? Were there downsides to the Clone Army? As it would turn out, there were, and in this
video, we’re going to take a look at them. Now, it should be said that the Grand Army
of the Republic was a vast improvement over what the Republic had been forced to work
with previously, and the clone troopers produced by the Kaminoans were indeed some of the greatest
soldiers in the history of the galaxy. But they weren’t perfect. The Mandalorians, for example, were far more
skilled and effective, and there were also issues inherent to clones that complicated
matters for the Republic. These flaws weren’t really discussed much,
as none of them were crippling, but they were still present. The Grand Army of the Republic had three major
flaws. The first came directly from the primary influence
on clone development - the Kaminoans, the cloners responsible for the army’s creation. As we’ve discussed before, the Kaminoans
were borderline sociopathic when it came to how they treated their clones. They expected total uniformity, both genetically
and behaviorally. Aberration from any of these norms typically
resulted in euthanasia. There were a number of well-known flaws in
the cloning process itself, though the Kaminoan method successfully eliminated many of them. Clones produced by more traditional methods
were typically far less effective, as they were grown much faster and flash-trained for
whatever duties they were made to perform. Flash-training essentially imprinted the memories
of a template onto clones allowing them to instantly learn how to perform a task. It was standard procedure for pretty much
all non-Kaminoan cloners, but it had several glaring flaws. First off, it was a poor excuse for proper
training, and it showed in the performance of flash-trained clones. Secondly, it tended to lead to clone madness. In general, clone madness was a huge risk
of cloning. It was a sort of extreme identity crisis that
would drive clones to insanity, resulting in violent instability. That risk was largely why we don’t hear
much about clones outside of the Clone Wars era - fear of clone madness kept the cloning
market on the fringe. Now, the Kaminoans managed to eliminate the
risk of clone madness and the shortcomings of flash-training by growing their clones
at a relatively slow pace and training them properly, so these problems don’t apply
to most of the Grand Army. But the Kaminoans weren’t actually the only
cloners involved in supplying the Republic with soldiers. Near the end of the war, a second clone army
was grown in secret using conventional methods on Centax-2, one of Coruscant’s moons, which
was dispatched to reinforce the Kaminoan clones after the Battle of Coruscant. The Centax-2 clone troopers were outwardly
indistinguishable from their Kaminoan counterparts, but they were markedly less effective due
to the aforementioned flaws. It was the Kaminoans who crafted most of the
inherent strengths of the GAR. Through genetic tampering, they not only made
the clones stronger, more effective, and more obedient, but they also eliminated a bunch
of secondary concerns that most people wouldn’t even think of. The clones didn’t have allergies, for example,
and they all liked the same food, which made supplying the Grand Army a hell of a lot easier
than it would be for a recruited army of comparable size. In this manner, the Kaminoans sought to create
the perfect soldiers, with the added bonus of them being easier to supply and quarter
than a recruited army would be, especially an army large enough to defend the Republic. The Kaminoans also indoctrinated the clones
to be as behaviorally identical as possible. For the most part, they all thought the same
way, fought the same way, and believed the same things; or, at least, that was how the
Kaminoans wanted it to be. In a sense, the Kaminoans designed the perfect
soldier, based on the template of Jango Fett, and then split him into millions of identical
individuals. This was intended to make it easier for them
to fight seamlessly in larger units, almost like an insect hive. Ethical concerns aside, this was a sound strategy,
and it was particularly effective when it came to countering the armies fielded by the
Confederacy, which largely also fought as a collective. But there were some severe drawbacks to having
an army of one man. The most obvious is the colossal danger that
is shared genetics. Since every clone in the GAR had the same
genetic code, all Separatist scientists needed was a sample of clone DNA to be able to cripple
the whole army. Bioweapons that specifically targeted shared
genetic code could be absolutely devastating, and unfortunately for some clones, this wasn’t
a hypothetical problem. The Separatists attempted to exploit the clones’
genetic uniformity multiple times, and while none of their attempts succeeded in crippling
the GAR, several of them were close calls. The Confederacy did love its bioweapons, after
all, and it certainly would not have hesitated to use them to slaughter millions of clones
at once. There was also a danger to the psychological
side of uniformity, too. It was very easy for Separatist commanders
to analyze how clones thought and fought, and once they determined patterns they could
exploit, they could effectively fight clones on a galactic scale. In theory -- though not in practice -- it
also opened the door to psychologically breaking clones en masse. If a Separatist interrogator could find a
way to crack one clone, they could crack them all, and the Confederacy could demoralize
the Grand Army on a tremendous scale. The second major flaw of the Grand Army of
the Republic was how expensive it was. The Republic’s fight for survival was hampered
by the tremendous strain the war effort put on the economy, and while that might sound
like a bit of a lesser concern, it hurt a lot of civilians badly. The Clone Wars would have put a massive strain
on the Republic economy no matter what, but the nature of the clone army did make it worse. It’s incredibly expensive to spend ten years
growing, training, and eventually equipping a single clone, and an army of millions of
them is something only the Republic could afford. An army of recruited soldiers, even one of
skilled, well-equipped, and well-paid soldiers, would have been a whole lot cheaper. That was the biggest advantage the CIS had,
after all - its battle droids were much cheaper than either, and as a result, the Confederacy
was able to muster the largest army in galactic history. The third big flaw was one that, in all honesty,
the Republic probably didn’t even consider - integration. The clone troopers of the Grand Army were
incongruous with the rest of galactic society, and there were manifold problems with integrating
them into society once the war was over. No matter how the Republic handled the Grand
Army after the war, there would have been problems, whether they kept the clones on
as a standing army or tried to integrate them into civilian life. It would have been a disaster for the Republic
if they tried to integrate clones into civilian society. There’d be uproar immediately from the disadvantaged,
who would surely blame the clones for flooding the job market, which would inevitably result
in discrimination and all the problems that come with it. Even without that, clones would have an incredibly
hard time adapting to civilian life, which they never knew and had no training for. Civilian life would be wholly alien to clones,
and the clones would be just as alien to most civilians. On top of that, there are also serious genetic
risks to flooding the galactic gene pool with millions of identical genes, and unbalancing
the gender ratio in the process. But if the Republic kept the clones on as
a standing army, they’d have even more problems to deal with. The rapid ageing of the clones meant that
the army would have died off quickly, so the Republic would have had to keep buying more
and more clones or slowly let the GAR die out. Either would be a tremendous waste of money
that the government most definitely could not have afforded, especially not when it
was recovering from so massive a conflict as the Clone Wars. In reality, the rise of the Empire and the
resultant changes to galactic society prevented the Clone Army from being all that much of
a problem after the Clone Wars. The Empire was much more capable of supporting
a standing army than the Republic would have been in the postwar era, and furthermore,
it didn’t need to care about people angry about the job market when it had secret police
to murder dissenters with. But conditions were different for the Republic,
and so the Empire’s approach to handling the GAR post-war would not have worked out
for it. This was pretty widely known during the Clone
Wars, and Separatist propagandists used it as a fearmongering tactic to garner support for the Confederacy. So, those are some of the major flaws with
the Republic’s clone troopers. But what do you think? Can you think of any others that we missed? Feel free to post your thoughts in the comments
below.
