The Clone Army was one of the most efficient to ever exist; rather than depending on numbers,
which the Droid Army did, the clones spent years training to be highly-efficient killers who could
singlehandedly take on multiple droids. But to run such an army would require a budget,
and although there were much fewer clones than droids, it would still be very expensive due
to the immense training and technology associated with their creation. In this
video I’ll go through the cost of creating the clone army, so smash that subscribe button,
check out the StarForceOne Discord server, and let’s get into it.
The first thing we need to do is figure out how many clones there
actually were across the entire reign of the republic. In Attack of the Clones,
we’re told that there are 200,000 units available with a million more well on
the way. Although there’s been some historic confusion about what a unit refers to, in canon
a unit refers to a single clone. This means that by the end of the Battle of Geonosis there were
around one point two million clone troopers, beginning the grand army we all know and love.
In the middle of the clone wars, since the senators were unaware of Palpatine’s plans
surrounding the war, they were fooled into voting to order five million more of them.
Although this happened in stages, like the clones ordered by Sifo Dyas, eventually this
meant that by the end of the Clone Wars, there were six point two million clones created.
The price of the clones themselves is going to come last since we’ll need to come up
with a few estimates - first, let’s handle the armour and weapons since we know their
prices. The clones used phase one armour until sometime before the battle of Mon Cala in 20BBY,
and the new order for the five million clone troopers was put in during 21 BBY,
so it’s safe to assume that the initial one point two million clones from Episode
2 were using phase one armor, and all future versions had phase two.
Phase one armour cost 2,000 credits a piece, meaning that one point two million sets would
cost the Republic two billion four hundred million credits [2,400,000,000]. The standard-issue weapon
for the clones was the DC15-A blaster rifle, which was a similar price, at 2,200 credits. An
order of one point two million of these would run two billion six hundred and forty million credits
[2,640,000,000], bringing us to a total of five billion and forty million credits [5,040,000,000]
The cost of the next five million blasters would be eleven billion credits [11,000,000,000], and,
since phase two armor would run 3,000 credits per set,
five million orders of it would be fifteen billion credits [15,000,000,000]. This brings
us to a total of thirty-one billion and fourty million credits [31,040,000,000]
When it comes to the actual cost of the clones themselves, this is a lot trickier. We actually
don’t know the prices of the equipment used in the cloning process, nor the cost of maintaining the
training of the clones. The best guess we can make is seeing the price of training a real soldier and
translating that to Star Wars currency. By the way, I made a whole video on that topic here,
seeing how much real-world dollars are worth in the Star Wars economy, and I’ll be basing
my calculations here on that information, so I highly recommend you check it out after this one.
It took the clones a decade of development and training in order to be deployed into
battle. In real life, training a soldier would cost around $60,000,
and the lowest level of salary would be around $20,000 per year. If we use the training price
to estimate the intensive, adult years of a trooper’s training, and use the 20,000 number
as an operating cost for each trooper, this would be $260,000 spread out over ten years.
If we assume that each credit comes out to $1.34 in real life, this would mean that the
clones would run us 194,029 credits each. This brings our 6.2 million clones to an expense
of one trillion, two hundred two billion, nine hundred seventy-nine million and eight
hundred thousand [1,202,979,800,000] credits, which is a crazy number,
but far less than the cost of the droid army - which makes sense when you consider that
the droids were intended to heavily outnumber clones rather than be more valuable per unit.
This isn’t all, though, since we also need to think of vehicles, resources,
unnamed personnel, and other things. To be honest, this is something we basically
have no knowledge of in star wars, so in order to get a rough estimate,
we’ll take the US military expenses over a period of ten years and find the average to see how much
the clone wars would cost each year. Yes, this is a huge guess, but that’s Star Wars for you.
The average of the last decade’s US military expenses is 679.26 billion dollars, which
equates to 506.9 billion credits in the Star Wars universe. Since the clone wars laster three years,
this would mean that the expenses accrued throughout it, adding together all of our armour,
weapons, and training, results in us having spent Two trillion, seven hundred fifty-three billion,
nineteen million, and eight hundred thousand [2,753,019,800,000]
This is honestly a crazy figure, if we adjust that to real life it would be
almost 3.7 trillion dollars, which might not sound like too much in a military context,
but for you and me that’s a wild amount of money to think of. So I hope you found this informative,
obviously there’s a lot of estimation involved but we still get a rough
idea of how much it would have cost, at least as far as boots on the gound go.