There’s an ancient bit of military wisdom you might have heard that goes like this “You go to
war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish you had at a later time.”
Applied to the Clone Army, the Galactic Republic basically hit the jackpot; the
army they had and the army they wanted were pretty much identical. Over the course of the Clone Wars,
the Grand Army of the Republic proved itself to be one of the finest military forces ever assembled,
inflicting terrible defeats on the numerically superior Separatist Droid Armies. But if the
timing of the Clone Wars had been just slightly different, a Separatist victory
would have been almost certain: and it all comes down to the Clone Troopers themselves.
Now the manpower available to an army is going to be a pretty heavy factor in its success or
failure. If you’re recruiting from a normal human population you’re looking for people
between the ages of 18 and 40, with maybe a few more years on either end depending on how
desperate the situation is looking. Every country has a steady rate of births and
deaths so you’re always going to have a sizable portion of your population within this age range.
If you’re entirely reliant on a Clone Army though, things are different. You’re starting from
scratch, literally 0 available manpower until that first wave of clones has been grown and trained.
In the case of the Grand Army of the Republic, and the accelerated aging used in its soldiers,
the time it takes an individual clone to go from an infant to fighting age is about 10 years. But
while this accelerated aging is useful for getting the clones ready to fight more quickly than they
otherwise might have been able, it also reduces the number of years they can remain of fighting
age from roughly 20, to just 10. And this presents a number of problems at the strategic level.
The biggest being, a Clone Army would be absolutely miserable as a purely defensive
or reactionary force. The transition from peacetime to wartime often occurs very
quickly as events spiral out of control and I can think of very few wars throughout history
in which the defender was given 10 years of advanced notice. Even a keen political mind
analyzing the situation would have a great deal of difficulty determining precisely
when a war would take place a decade before. If the war starts too early,
your entire force might still be in diapers, and if it starts too late, you could have entire
generations of soldiers too old to take part. Keeping a clone army in continuous production
is one solution, but given the immense cost, it probably isn’t going to be practical.
So a clone army is really only useful as an aggressive force by a nation that can decide
when and where to start hostilities, but even then, only so long as you
can keep its development a secret. In war, the mobilization of an army is pretty much always
enough to trigger a counter-mobilization from the other side. And a Clone army is essentially
a mobilization that takes 10 years. If the Separatists found out about the Clone Army,
say 2 or 3 years before it was ready, they’d have every incentive to immediately invade.
Darth Sidious however, through his manipulations of both sides,
was able to time things almost perfectly. The war against the Confederacy started just as the first
generation of Clones had reached maturity. But it’s easy to imagine a very different situation
where there was simply no Clones ready for the Battle of Geonosis and the Separatists were
able march against the Republic almost unopposed for months or maybe even years. One wrong move
and the Grand Army of the Republic might have lost the Clones Wars before they even started.
So unless you possess the same machiavellian nature as Palpatine and are able to perfectly
sway galactic events to suit your purposes, maybe stay away from raising a clone army.
Because there’s another ancient saying “suppose there was a war
and nobody showed up”, well if you bet on a clone army but get the timing wrong,
you might find out what happens when there’s a war and only one side shows up.