Professor Wayne King-Meiouf of the University of ProximaKeith Remadra's article on the HCS cuts was very interesting but i have a different take on it. Its not armies of drones the Clones need to keep their empire going with a shrinking budget it is something a whole lot more fundamental : democracy.
As Keith says the Clones need a vast armed forces to keep their empire under control but this is because the empire is ruled by force and not consent. Despite the image the Clones like to give that they are now an empire of happy shiny multi-species peoples (little Clone children playing in the street with little Human children et cetera) there are a lot of tensions in the empire, even on worlds with a largely Clone population.
Clones have a distrust of the centre and always have. Even in the days of fanatical worship of Oojok (which never really went away to be honest) the authorities (including the church) were as hated as Oojok was loved. Cloneworld was ruled by an iron fist and thus once the Clones spread out from Cloneworld and formed colonies and conquered worlds the same mode of rule was followed. A distrusted centre with the veneer of democracy supported by a powerful military fueled by fanaticism and iron discipline.
The only way to shrink the HCS into something much more manageable would be to make the CSE something the inhabitants were genuinely happy to be in and not something to be tolerated and/or feared. How this can be achieved is a good question. Democratic reform proceeds at a very slow pace, the fear being that once order is lost then it could not be resumed. Thus the Clones edge along bit by bit.
But time is running out, the Clones cannot maintain this vast security apparatus and maintain the kind of fleet required to guard and develop the empire. These cuts may buy the Clones some time but the tension is bubbling under the surface and can erupt at any time (see the ease in which a charismatic strongman can surge to power in the CSE - recent examples being Xanadu, Captain Clone and Benito).
Sooner or later Pandora's Box will be opened and a weakened HCS may find itself insufficient to close it again.
