Keith Remadra, former chief advisor to the UNP Security Council on Clone affairs I have been following the Clone Star Empire for years but its surprising these days, as the Clone Wars disappears further into the past, that the Clones have slipped away from Terran attention. Even the Benito coup and the invasion of various Eritran planets hasn't grabbed the wider public attention as earlier events would have.
Suddenly however friends, family and colleagues have been asking me about the Clones and what exactly is going on with them? Is the CSE on the verge of collapse? Are they facing economic oblivion?
Well the simple answer is no but it is serious, however not as serious as the situation the CSE was in around 10 years ago (thats when things got so tight for the HCS they had to resort to crime to try and bring funding in!)
The main problem for the Clones is that their economic is too cyclic and unstable, big peaks followed by equally big troughs, they haven't yet found a way to stabilise their economy and i think the main reason for that is that the CSE simply doesn't work. The empire is probably too big and too varied to make any sense from an economic, strategic and even cultural sense and costs a huge amount to maintain and protect. This is a byproduct of the manic expansion of the CSE during the Clone Wars. No strategic thought was given to how the empire should expand, the object was to expand as quickly as possible. While you can rely on booty bought in from your conquests that works, however when the booty is spent and replaced with running costs then you run into trouble.
So what is the answer? I suspect the HCS will simply have to swallow its budget cut medicine and just wait for the next upturn. Even with the new cuts the HCS will still be a vast military machine, among the best in the known galaxy, though the HCS will likely be put into a firmly a defensive posture which of course is good news for smaller nations along the CSE's borders. The empire won't collapse, though it will suffer.
One possible answer could be to decentralise the CSE, split it into semi-independent mini-empires on the CSE-E model. This was something Oojok did try once before, though did not allow enough time to see if it can work or not. In smaller more cohesive chunks the CSE might work. It would be a risk but it could be the long-term sustainable model the CSE desperately needs.
