Book Name: Space Operaish

Question

I am trying to find the name of a book I read many years ago but have not been having much luck. I remember a fair bit about the book but I just can't seem to track it down. Any help would be appreciated.

Things I know about the book:

• Humans join a galactic federation of sorts and every planet gets a monopoly on its trade items, humans being the warriors.
• The story follows a new recruit that gets sent to the worst unit due to them taking anyone.
• The humans use cloning to keep their casualty counts low and one of the main plot points of the books is that during the course of them another alien race is actually trying to take away the human monopoly in the area on soldiers and the humans fight them on a few different planets and eventually catch the aliens stealing one of the human cloning machines to illegally use it.

If I recall correctly the aliens they are fighting look like giant lizards or dinosaurs.

Thanks again for any help in the right direction.

It is not a TV/web-series. And it's neither of the following:

• The Damned Trilogy
• Legion of the Damned

Answer 1

This sounds a lot like the Undying Mercenaries series by B. V. Larson.

https://www.amazon.com/Undying-Mercenaries-7-Book/dp/B06XK5VHR3

In the first book, the aliens are lizard like. The Earth has to pay fees to use technology from other races, such as for transport to other planets, because other races in the federation have the licenses to operate ships. The only thing of value Earth has to trade is soldiers.

One of the plot points in the first book in the series was protecting the cloning machine from capture, or recovery, I can't quite remember.