It doesn't seem very efficient to me because:
- the clones grow at the same speed of "normal" human beings, so you have to wait at least 17-18 years for your first batch of cloned soldiers.
- in the Orphan Black universe artificial wombs don't exists, so if you need thousands of soldiers then you need thousands of surrogates mothers.
- It's obviously more expensive than the training of a normal soldier, because you have to look after them from the birth. I don't know if the term "disposable" applies here.
I'm not talking about Jem'Hadar-style quick-cloning, of course, because that would be fantasy. But that's not the only advantage of cloned soldiers, in the minds of the powerful. The people in charge have always wanted their soldiers to be identical, interchangeable, subhuman pawns that they could throw away in droves. Since clones are artificially created, the military leaders in charge of Castor probably hoped they could get the clones defined as nonhuman and as military property, so they'd be free to use them as a slave race. And if you can clone a whole breed of identical soldiers, then as the science improves, you'd gain the ability to clone them with whatever genetic traits you desired -- greater strength and endurance, lower intelligence and empathy and free will, etc.
And no, it's not efficient
yet, but this is just the first attempt. Obviously the first experimental version of a process is going to be a lot more cumbersome, inefficient, and expensive than the later, refined version of the technology, but you'll never get to the later, refined version if you don't start out with the clumsier prototype.
It seems plausible, but the problem is that we have not seen anything like that on the show. The only thing they seem to have done in about thirty years is a study on "Nature versus nurture" on the subjects of the LEDA project. Yes, very interesting, but really, all this effort for some sociological project of which you can not even publish the results?
Thirty years isn't that much when you're studying human development or biological evolution. If a phenomenon unfolds over the course of generations or centuries, then it's only natural for science to spend generations studying it. We never would've gained the scientific understanding we have today if all scientists had been so impatient that they didn't even bother to study things that would take generations to understand fully. Science isn't about instant gratification, it's about posterity. That's why we keep researching a cure for cancer even though it probably won't come in our lifetimes. That's why we sent a probe to Pluto even though it could be hundreds of years before a human being visits there.
Edit:
@Christopher: I sincerely believe that you have some good theories. The problem is that none of those who worked on the project LEDA has ever clearly stated its purpose. And I refuse to consider "We harnessed the power of God! BWAWAWAWA!!!" a valid explanation.
Well, that was pretty much explicitly Henrik Johanssen's motivation -- he saw genetic engineering as a way of serving God's plan. So don't knock it. Not everyone is a rational actor. The ability to clone humans would be seen by many groups as a symbol of unprecedented power. That symbolic power alone might be seen as playing into their ideological goals, as with the Neolutionists, or serving their wish for control, as with the military, or profit, as with Dyad. We've seen plenty of real-life evidence of people having strongly emotional negative reactions toward the idea of cloning or genetically engineering humans (as also seen in-story with the Proletheans other than Henrik's sect), so it stands to reason there would be those who would react just as irrationally in favor of using cloning, just for the symbolic power it gave them over human life.
Even limiting it to rational motivations, cloning is a powerful tool for studying genetics. One of the most important things in science is repeatability. You need to be able to conduct the same experiment over and over again with consistent parameters so that you can change only the variable you want and be sure that every other variable is unchanged. That's why scientists in real life used cloned lab mice and other experimental animals to ensure genetic consistency. That's why the "immortal"
HeLa line of cultured human cells from a single donor has been so invaluable to medical science for decades, despite the ethical problems with it being taken from the donor without her consent. (So there's actually a real-world precedent of sorts for Project Leda and its ethical quandaries.) The Leda and Castor clones could be valuable as lab rats for all sorts of unethical medical experiments, precisely because those experiments would be repeatable.
Didn't Ethan Duncan explain that his original goal behind the project was finding a way to help infertile couples conceive? To give himself and Susan the child they couldn't have themselves? So we do have an idea of why the experiment was begun, I think. It's just been co-opted for various other ends, because it's such a major breakthrough that many different groups see great possibilities in it.
And why after four season none of the clones stopped for a moment and wondered "Ok, but why they createad us?"?
Are you kidding? That's been the driving question of the whole series. What are we, who did this to us, what do they want from us? Sarah has spent four seasons seeking the answers to those very questions, and each answer has raised even deeper and darker questions. Surely you don't expect all the answers to have been revealed yet.
