okay but seriously the clones are terrifyingly competent soldiers.
They are trained from birth by some of the most skilled people in the galaxy. They have a huge budget so there’s no lack of equipment. They also have the technology to do simulations more realistic than anything we could possibly imagine in the real world. And the clones are trained for ten years, day in, day out, no breaks, no days off, no vacations. Just training.
AND there’s also flash training, where they just get concepts and facts and figures and muscle memory pumped straight into their brains by Magic Space Tech. AND they’re genetically engineered to learn faster, learn better, and retain knowledge and skills perfectly. And they train for TEN YEARS.
Let’s do a real-world comparison with some real-life elite troops. Like the Navy SEALS. Those are pretty elite. How much training do you have to go through to become a navy seal? According to wikipedia, after bootcamp (7 weeks), there’s Naval Special Warfare Preparatory School (8 weeks), then Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training (24 weeks), Parachute Jump School (3 weeks), then SEAL Qualification Training (26 weeks), after which you get assigned to a SEAL team. Then, you cycle though deployments, and when you’re not deployed, you’re doing one of three 6-month blocks of further training. But you’re already a SEAL by that point.
So, total amount of training to become a SEAL and get deployed (i’m not going to count the 18 month training blocks after you become a SEAL because clone troopers also presumably spend time training after they’re deployed): 68 weeks of training, or 17 months. Or about 1.5 years. I know precisely jack shit about military careers, but i’m guessing most navy SEALs didn’t just speedrun the whole process, and probably interspersed some of the steps with regular Navy deployments while doing push-ups wearing scuba fins in their free time or something.
BUT clone troopers don’t spend time on regular deployments in between training, at least not while they’re growing up. They absolutely do speedrun their training, and essentially spend a decade straight in intensive training courses. During which they learn faster, retain better, pack on muscle mass faster, ingrain muscle memory faster, and remember better than regular humans, AND have knowledge and skills directly downloaded into their brains like Neo learning kung-fu in The Matrix. And these super-human brainiacs train for OVER SIX TIMES AS LONG as the US’s most elite force.
Fellas, we were ROBBED. Star Wars did an absolute SHIT job of showing how terrifyingly competent and unnaturally skilled the clones should be. Even Domino Squad would easily tear their way through a SEAL team. Even with Fives being a clumsy dipshit. An “incompetent” or “failed” clone would still likely be miles above the most highly-skilled military badass the real world can produce. Like, come ON, star wars. You had a real opportunity here. You coulda shown us WHY the whole galaxy was terrified of clone troopers, and WHY they were so much better than battle droids, and WHY an army of millions was unquestionably superior to the alternative, i.e. the Republic drafting it’s own civilians and forming a regular army of TRILLIONS. And how DESPITE the fact that they were Technology’s Perfect Killing Machines, they were still so achingly human. And young. And also i think it would be hilarious to watch Shiny!Fives parkour his way up an exploding building, dodging canon fire, take down six commando droids like he’s Jason Bourne, and then trip over his own feet and faceplant. star wars PLEASE. DAVID. i am BEGGING
You’re right, and let me add:
Star Wars visual media doesn’t do the clones justice in this way partly because it also doesn’t do all that much justice to how insanely powerful the Jedi are. Jedi are one in two-three-four million for a reason, even the ones from human races in the galaxy are superhuman to a ridiculous extent. The Legends CANON list of Force abilities (I don’t give a heck what Disney says, creative use of the Force is a right and a privilege and we should all be going completely batshit) isn’t just limited to basic telepathy and telekinesis - Jedi are stronger, faster, smarter, more agile than they would normally be even without their lifetimes of training, AND they have a whole range of crazy Force shenanigans at their disposal.
And clones were specifically created TO KEEP UP WITH JEDI GENERALS AND COMMANDERS.
They are literally THE MOST OP HUMANOID RACE IN THE FRANCHISE and they’re mostly TEENAGERS.
WHY ARE WE NOT TALKING ABOUT THIS???
We do get a glimpse of this in Karen Traviss’s RepComm books. I hate KT’s take on the Jedi, but I love her take on the clones. She really does write them as hyper-competent at almost everything they do - so competent they actually scare their own training instructors sometimes.
In the first novel, Hard Contact, a single squad of four Republic commandos are deployed to deal with a Separatist bioweapons facility guarded by hordes of droids, militia thugs, and a Mandalorian warlord. Four of them against maybe a thousand opponents or more, plus hostile wildlife that keeps trying to eat them, locals that sell them out - oh, and their landing shuttle crashed, so several of them are walking off broken bones, they lost most of their equipment, and the enemy know they’re there and are hunting them with speeder bikes and fliers. And they still manage to be insanely badass. It’s really worth reading the books just for the clones (ignore the Jedi stuff, it’s bad).
And if you’re wondering how Boba Fett could become the most feared bounty hunter in the galaxy, it’s because he went through the same training too. Jango trained both the Alpha-ARCs and Boba, and he trained Boba more.
