The DDS committee which monitors the Clone Defence Forces and empire has published a report into the aborted plans for radical changes to the Clone armed forces mooted a few years ago to radically cut costs. The plans involved massive cuts in the Clone Army and Air Force with each planet in the empire maintaining its own territorial based national defence force backed up by a small core of professional troops.
Paragon, for example, which currently had 30,000 troops stationed on the planet could have changed this to 20,000 territorials in a "Paragon National Army" and a brigade of the Clone Army (about 5,000 men). The plans were evaluated on Taragargi however this is where the major flaws with the plans came to light according to the DDS report.
With most of the troops on Taragargi assigned as "territorials" and one brigade at the capital the "professionals" a number of major incident exercises were held on the planet including a major terrorist attack, natural disaster and even an alien invasion. The problem was the time needed for the professional troops to get to where they were needed. In one test (the terrorist attack), this was staged around 7,000 km from the capital but it took 12 hours just for a bridgehead to be established and 2 more days before the professional troops were in an operational state.
A major lack of transportation assets was found to be a problem, it is estimated the CAF might need 1000 more transport aircraft and helicopters. Plus the time taken to get troops from one side of the planet to the other meant that major threats could not be tackled adequately. The plans for the decentralisation of the Clone Defence Forces has thus been dropped. It is estimated that around 2-3 billion zarks a year could be saved (much less than the original 5 billion estimate) but the cost of new aerial assets was estimated at over 10 billion.
The DDS committee says that a new plan is taking form in the CDF, this using automated drones and ballistic missiles. It is rumoured that a solar-hybrid surveillance drone known as the QX is in early development and this could be married to much greater deployment of a new generation of more accurate Gale ICBMs.
