One of the biggest questions about the period between the Star Wars prequels and the beginning of Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope is the Empire’s unspoken transition in its military which saw the Clone Troopers replaced with the (non-clone) Stormtroopers from Episodes IV-VI and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. There has yet to be a formal answer in any of the movies or television shows, but non-canon sources have come up with some elegant explanations. However, a canon explanation does exist, covering not only when the Empire replaced the clones with Stormtroopers, but why.
Clues can be seen as early as Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, as the Kamino leader Lama Su explains the clones’ life cycle to Obi-Wan Kenobi: “[growth acceleration] is essential. Otherwise, a mature clone would take a lifetime to grow. Now we can do it in half the time.” The statement implies that clones age far more quickly than non-clones, and thus need to be either replaced or discarded within a few years of their use. That detail fits with non-canonical explanations, such as the Star Wars: Battlefront II video game which posits that a revolt among the clones prompted the Emperor to change his recruiting methods.
The Rise of Tarkin Marks a New Era in The Empire’s Armies
Those notions, however, still aren’t “official,” or at best only imply what might have happened rather than verifying what did. A canonical answer, however, can be found in James Luceno’s 2014 novel Tarkin, which covers the specifics of the shift from clone to Stormtrooper in a few key passages.
Tarkin is set five years after the events of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, and entails the titular Grand Moff’s rise to power within the Emperor’s trusted circle. One key passage, however, shines a bright light on the question of the clones, as a hapless Trooper inadvertently damages Darth Vader’s meditation chamber. “Perhaps you are aging too quickly to remain on active duty,” Vader growls at him. The scene prompts Tarkin to remember that the Empire began recruiting human troops after the war. It’s a simple passage, but it reveals a great deal about the mystery and turns at least a few suppositions to firm answers.
The Reasons Are Deeper Than Aging
The passage confirms the inference of rapid aging among the clones, which in turn provides an easy reason for why they have vanished by the time Rogue One and A New Hope arrived. A mere five years after the end of the Clone Wars, the remaining Clone Troopers are quickly becoming too old to function in their positions, and the Empire has decided to recruit individual citizens into its forces going forward. Indeed, Vader himself might conceivably be among the last of the Empire’s servants to still use clones, given his affinity for them as Anakin Skywalker.
If the clones aged too rapidly, however, why not just replace them with more clones? Here, the canon gets fuzzy again, but the passage in Tarkin makes a few logical projections seem likely. First, while Palpatine clearly needed a large army as part of his grand ruse to seize control of the Republic, the same measures are no longer required once the throne is his. It’s simply less expensive to recruit citizens rather than grow them in a lab, and with big projects like the Death Star on the way, Palpatine clearly had other uses for the resources required for a new batch of clones.
There is certainly much more room for development, and a number of unanswered questions remain. But the passage in Tarkin also allows non-canon notions like the Kamino Uprising to remain without violating continuity. With the imminent arrival of the clone-centric Star Wars: The Bad Batch and Temuera Morrison’s continuing presence in the franchise, there will be plenty of chances to take the Empire’s transition from clone to Stormtrooper in some very interesting directions.
