Reunification - makes no sense?

I was always bothered by the assumption that one broadcast would get them through ALL of Federation defense and security measures all the way to a founding member world.

Assuming that they actually reached Vulcan (damned unlikely, but hey! Science Fiction, y'know?) that the 2000 Romulan troops wouldn't have been able to "conquer" Vulcan so much as take huge swaths of the civilian population hostage and force a negotiated settlement. Remember, each of those Romulans is carrying an energy weapon capable of wiping out whole crowds of people (plus whatever other armaments they might have been carrying) and the Vulcan populace is predominantly pacifist. I figured that the Romulan plan was to put enough boots on the ground to make a full out war too costly for the Federation to attempt.

hmm. Really IS a silly plan, once you think about it, isn't it?
*shrug*

 

The impression I got was that Spock and Pardek had it all worked out in advance: there was to be an underground railroad of sorts for the dissidents, and key people on Vulcan were already expecting the Romulan ships. They just weren't openly telling the Federation or Starfleet or even all of their own government about it.

Of course, the Romulan plot in this case may well have been to deliberately incite Spock to sound the alarm (see my earlier conspiracy theory) - in which case they only offered him the chance to send the "all is well" broadcast as part of this plot. The holotransmission they said they intended to use for the fake "all is well" might not have played any real role in their plan, save for fooling Spock into sending the alarm.

Timo Saloniemi

 

I think you guys are putting more thought into this than the writers ever did . Frankly, the most simple answer is that the Romulans knew it was a dumb plan and some went with it to prove to the Senate what an idiot Sela was.

 

On the topic of "only" 2000 troops. To quote a Klingon proverb from the books "A thousand throats may be cut in one night by a running man."

Stop thinking Infantry and start thinking Special Forces. Striking from surprise, 2000 highly trained commandos could take and hold enough key "choke points" in the planetary network (High Council, VDF Headquarters, planetary energy management facilities, etc) to effectively hold the planet at least long enough for reinforcements to arrive.

 

Then again, our heroes got the 2,000 figure from their scans. Those scans failed to reveal the presence of Warbirds...

If the Vulcan ships were there primarily as noisemakers to mask the cloaked armada, then the Romulans would have had no good reason not to put some of their troops aboard the decoys, too. That's 2,000 more than they'd otherwise have been able to carry! The total strength could still be something like 75,000 - better than the 73,000 that the Warbirds alone could have hauled, at no extra cost.

So even if the plan was a simple invasion without the "they wanted those 2,000 dead" conspiracy theory, we should assume we didn't see the whole truth. How could we, in a secret plot involving invisibility devices? If those 2,000 troops really were a decisive force all by themselves, killing them would have been idiotic behavior from the Romulans. If they were mere icing on the cake, their deaths could be argued to be a lesser evil than the embarrassment of having them be temporarily detained; but not otherwise.

Timo Saloniemi