The CRAZY Cost of the Republic Clone Army...

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.