Actually that would have made for an interesting show. I would have loved to have seen that kind of show. Also less Farscapey.. I liked Farscape but found it at times bordered on fantasy as well as scifi.
Why is there resistance to the idea of Starfleet being military?
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Actually that would have made for an interesting show. I would have loved to have seen that kind of show. Also less Farscapey.. I liked Farscape but found it at times bordered on fantasy as well as scifi.
It absolutely would if Section 31 was an illegal organization that had no official standing to keep files on anyone ever.
Which is because the Secret Service, the FBI and the DSS are all supposed to do those things because part of their job is to keep those political figures safe and monitor them and the people around them for security breaches.
Section 31 having those files is the equivalent of the Fraternal Order of Police keeping a list of Rahm Emanuel's phone records. It's well beyond "dubious legal ground" at that point.
Actually, I think the United States is one of the very few holdouts in this regard. Internationally, the narrative on the importance of having a strong military for national defense has been strongly eroded by the fact that MOST industrialized countries haven't been involved in a major war -- or even, really, a SMALL one -- since 1945. So in many countries there's this idea that "the military" is just another one of many government services and not particularly unique in its own right beyond what one might expect for police officers, fire fighters, coastal rescue, etc.
Most countries that still have a strong thread of militarism near the surface of society are also prone to some weird internal military conflicts (e.g. military coups and the occasional mutiny). From what I can tell, this is mainly because militaristic cultures are USUALLY older than the governments that run them, so there's a cognitive disconnect between militarism and patriotism. Turkey is a really good example of this: There are militaristic (pro-military) factions, and there are also patriotic (pro-government) factions, and their government is considered to be exactly as stable as the common ground between them. Laos, Indonesia, Thailand and a few others are also similar to this.
Israel and the United States, being relatively new countries, have this long flirtation between militarism and patriotism, mainly because both have governments that are slightly older than their militaries. Citizens in both countries have a tendency to assume the collapse of their existing government is basically the end of their entire way of life and the military is the one main thing that will prevent that from happening (where as the lessons of history suggest it is more likely to be the CAUSE than the cure, but whatever).
This is why we have people in America who say dumb shit like "Where would you be right now if those soldiers hadn't gone out there and fought for your freedom?"
It sounds like you're projecting (seeing how you put the word "negative" in quotes as if there are no actual negative aspects of the military). A quick glance around science fiction as a genre reveals that the consuming public has no problems whatsoever with a military organization as a protagonist, or even as an explorer. The Stargate franchise, for example, has greater longevity and a wider following than Star Trek ever did, despite being being horribly written and terribly acted. Battlestar Galactica has the same appeal, as do various other film franchises. In literary fiction, the infatuation with the military is so pronounced that it's actually become its own sub-genre.
You would have a point, in other words, if Star Trek was the biggest and most important sci-fi franchise in the business. But it isn't, not by a longshot. So the resistance to the idea of Starfleet as a military organization is something unique to Star Trek, not to American culture (which, as I pointed out above, actually reveres and glorifies the military to the point of irrationality).
So what is it about Starfleet that makes people think they're not a military organization? Well:
- Lack of tactical functionality in their uniforms
- Lack of obvious combat proficiency
- Lack of obvious combat readiness
- Extremely lax martial discipline
- Extreme focus on luxury and comfort for their crews
- Children on the Enterprise
- Research Scientists as commissioned officers
- Senior officers putting their lives at risk to try and avoid a fight with a clearly hostile aggressor
- Starfleet officers on multiple occasions describing themselves as "explorers" and saying their mission is "peaceful."
- Starfleet officers on multiple occasions explicitly saying "Starfleet is not a military organization."
- Lack of obvious combat proficiency
- Lack of obvious combat readiness
- Extremely lax martial discipline
- Extreme focus on luxury and comfort for their crews
- Children on the Enterprise
- Research Scientists as commissioned officers
- Senior officers putting their lives at risk to try and avoid a fight with a clearly hostile aggressor
- Starfleet officers on multiple occasions describing themselves as "explorers" and saying their mission is "peaceful."
- Starfleet officers on multiple occasions explicitly saying "Starfleet is not a military organization."
It's not like there's some sort of cultural anti-military bias in science fiction. That is clearly FAR from true.
That's kind of inevitable, if you think about it. The privatization of space exploration (SpaceX et al) is already becoming a thing, and eventually Star Trek will have to jump on the bandwagon in order to remain relevant. Look for a version of Trek some time in the next 20 years or so that depicts Starfleet as a private corporation chartered by the UESPA for energy exploration purposes and/or colonization support.
Or, if you don't want to wait that long, look up the "Andromeda Initiative" and see the complex interplay there. I keep thinking of Kaitus' "APEX" militia and realizing that the definition of "military" becomes kind of fuzzy when you don't technically have a government to answer to.
In Alien, they work for the Company, and the Company is the actual big bad. They aren't explorers, they're contractors who have to do what they're told.
The rest of your post was pretty good, though.
- Lack of tactical functionality in their uniforms
Second world war submarine crews went into combat dressed in shoes and their underwear.
- Lack of obvious combat proficiency
They usually hit what they're aiming at, this includes hand weapons fired from the waist. Kirk's crew seemed familar with the operation of the photon mortor.
- Lack of obvious combat readiness
Once the command officer calls for red alert, the crews seem to reach "condition one" fairly quickly. Fromthe order to load torpedo bays until the ship being able to fire them is again quick.
- Extremely lax martial discipline
We've seen all the hero captains (with the exception of Archer) given direct orders and on occasion raise their voice to emphasize their authority. There's a well established military chain of command in place.
- Extreme focus on luxury and comfort for their crews
For the US Navy a six moth deployment is pretty average. Starfleet is out for multiple years.
- Children on the Enterprise
There are children on military bases that might come under attack today.
- Research Scientists as commissioned officers
Starfleet (even with the presence of some enlisted) is extremely top heavy with officers.
- Senior officers putting their lives at risk to try and avoid a fight with a clearly hostile aggressor
US Navy aircraft in international airspace are frequently "buzzed" by fighters from opposition nations, they don't open fire as a rule.
- Starfleet officers on multiple occasions describing themselves as "explorers" and saying their mission is "peaceful."
The motto of the USAF's old Strategic Air Command was "Peace is Our Profession". As the old saying goes; if you want peace, prepare for war
- Starfleet officers on multiple occasions explicitly saying "Starfleet is not a military organization."
And then they go and fight battles and full scale wars as the primary means of doing so.
Second world war submarine crews went into combat dressed in shoes and their underwear.
- Lack of obvious combat proficiency
They usually hit what they're aiming at, this includes hand weapons fired from the waist. Kirk's crew seemed familar with the operation of the photon mortor.
- Lack of obvious combat readiness
Once the command officer calls for red alert, the crews seem to reach "condition one" fairly quickly. Fromthe order to load torpedo bays until the ship being able to fire them is again quick.
- Extremely lax martial discipline
We've seen all the hero captains (with the exception of Archer) given direct orders and on occasion raise their voice to emphasize their authority. There's a well established military chain of command in place.
- Extreme focus on luxury and comfort for their crews
For the US Navy a six moth deployment is pretty average. Starfleet is out for multiple years.
- Children on the Enterprise
There are children on military bases that might come under attack today.
- Research Scientists as commissioned officers
Starfleet (even with the presence of some enlisted) is extremely top heavy with officers.
- Senior officers putting their lives at risk to try and avoid a fight with a clearly hostile aggressor
US Navy aircraft in international airspace are frequently "buzzed" by fighters from opposition nations, they don't open fire as a rule.
- Starfleet officers on multiple occasions describing themselves as "explorers" and saying their mission is "peaceful."
The motto of the USAF's old Strategic Air Command was "Peace is Our Profession". As the old saying goes; if you want peace, prepare for war
- Starfleet officers on multiple occasions explicitly saying "Starfleet is not a military organization."
And then they go and fight battles and full scale wars as the primary means of doing so.
Yeah, Space 1999 was more in that direction, with a more NASA/2001 type organization. Just speculating, a blank-sheet organization may cause headaches for writing teams as the show goes along, developing an org chart for who reports to who, different authorities, jobs, titles etc. and then exposition to explain it all. Where OTOH you can just plug in a military structure and most viewers will have some basic understanding of it. Plus you can use war stories, which seem to be pretty popular.
Good job addressing the original topic, too!
As someone who spent the vast majority of his childhood overseas on Naval bases, I can say that there is a profound difference between living on or off base in places like Italy, Japan, S. Korea, etc. and living on a deployed ship. Not the same at all.
And if their uniforms consisted of shoes and underwear, that would be a legitimate point.
The rest of these are just mindless nitpicks. You know good and damn well that science fiction depictions of military organizations diverge from Starfleet's depiction on exactly all of these points. It isn't at all that Starfleet isn't CAPABLE of fighting, it's that they don't SPECIALIZE in fighting. In fact, they go out of their way to make sure everyone knows that they are on a "peaceful mission of exploration" and will only defend themselves when necessary.
In almost anything else, the mindset leaves little to interpretation: "We're the Navy. Normally, our job is to kick ass. But this is a mission of exploration, and our job is to make friends and avoid a fight, so we're going to be very extra careful about how we go about this because we're also really really professional."
Starfleet, on the other hand, plays it as "We're an exploration service, our job is to explore new worlds, make friends, and avoid a fight. But those bad guys over there just glassed half a planet and we're going to have to go kick their asses, because we're also relatively well armed and trained for this sort of thing."
There are lots of science fiction militaries and militias that go out of their way to make that depiction clear and unambiguous. The Federation Starfleet is NOT one of them. It's an exploration service with a military role, not a military organization with an exploratory role.
All respect to the OP, but it isn't a question of "Why the resistance" to the idea. The question is why the INSISTENCE on the idea. They don't completely fit that category, and they don't really seem to be trying to.
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Yeah, and then you have Kira Nerys saying, "I thought Starfleet didn't believe in warships" when Sisko explains what the Defiant is. His response is "Desperate times, desperate measures." So Starfleet can take up the mantle of a traditional military but if you say they're a military they're definitely an unconventional futuristic military with a totally different focus. Whether it is or isn't a military is mostly semantics. Starfleet is defined by its stated purpose, which is to explore.
Uggghhh I can't get dragged back into this debate. Bye everyone lol
It was that way in the pilot, but once the Moon was blasted out of orbit and Alpha was on its own, it was like martial law, with Koenig as the benevolent but absolute authority. In terms of how episodes played out, the command structure was basically and effectively just a broad stroke clone of Star Trek's, but without any admirals poking their noses in.
The primary difference was in terms of the overall mission. In Space: 1999, the major concern was always simply survival, and they were always looking for a planet to move to, because their resources were so limited. In Star Trek, their missions tended to come down the chain of command, or if events were precipitated by a random encounter then the objective was implicitly to solve the crisis in accordance with
edit - Even though they did a lot of exploring, the Alphans weren't actually on a mission of exploration. They were often under severe time pressure to make a choice of whether to colonize or get back to the Moon before it went out of range.
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And you know (or should) that we see more fighing, battles and wars, than we do exploration. In all honesty the majority of the hero ships are built to fight, they have specialized systems just for that purpose.
All the bridges of the hero ships had a individual (or more than one) who had weapons controls right in front of them.
Keep coming back to, given that the Federation frequently fights battles and war, if Starfleet isn't the military than what is?
No one. At least not for the Federation.
Not unless the Andorians still maintain for military, since Vulcan seems to have disbanded theirs.
The Earth Starfleet learned prior to the formation of the Federation that space was dangerous and if you are going to go out exploring, your ship better be armed or else you might not come back. As the frequency of more powerful alien species, some of which were hostile, increased, the number or power of the weapons on a starship would increase to ensure the survival of the exploration vessel and any other vessels the Earth or later Federation might send out into the galaxy.
The Dominion War was partly in response to fans. I was at a Star Trek Convention a year or two before Deep Space Nine came out. One of the presenters started asking questions about what the audience wanted to see in the future. The two largest cheers were for "A War" and "More Klingons". At which point the presenter made a comment about, "so much for Gene's idealism".
Which doesn't change the fact that their purpose is exploration.
I got could get in a fist fight every day for a year, that wouldn't make me professional boxer.
It's an exploration service that fights battles and wars. Which is exactly what they've CLAIMED to be all this time.
It's like the Pathfinders from Mass Effect. The Ryder Twins basically fight -- and win -- an interplanetary war in the Heleus Cluster, and both of them belong to what is unquestionably a civilian exploration program. In Mass Effect 2 ad 3, Cerberus -- a human-supremacist militia with corporate sponsorship -- single handedly fights a war against the Collectors and later against the entire Systems Alliance, and they make it very explicit that they are fighting a WAR, and not just holding the line for the "real military" or whatever.
Standing militaries are nice (and in science fiction, pretty common) but they're not the only tool for that particular job.
Well, I think these first four can be swiftly debunked...
JAKE: "What's going to happen to him?"
BASHIR: "Oh, he'll probably be court-martialed."
JAKE: "He said that some of the people in his squad got scared and ran."
BASHIR: "It happens."
JAKE: "But they're Starfleet. They've passed psych-tests. They've spent hundreds of hours in battle simulations."
BASHIR: "Simulations can't prepare you for the real thing. Nothing can."
What type of uniforms would you expect Starfleet to wear?
It should be pointed out that in the episode "Nor The Battle To The Strong" the people Bashir is helping are wearing different uniforms that were only seen again in the "The Siege of AR-558" Neither of these episodes personnel fit within any established norms for Starfleet. At all. Both stories are takes of World War One and World War Two Army films.
If they WERE military, something like these would be fairly close. The examples I already posted (Alliance Navy, Colonial Fleet, Honor Harrington) sort of reflect this. Hell, the Navy-esque khakis of the Gundam and Macross franchises would fit the military look pretty closely.What type of uniforms would you expect Starfleet to wear?
OTOH, in terms of functionality, professionalism and discipline (e.g. the reason why uniforms are even a thing), a spaceborne military would probably have a uniform code very close to what we saw on Enterprise. Which is ironic considering Earth Starfleet at the time was actually farther from being a military organization than its later incarnations.
Sure, but we've basically known that since Tasha Yar walked onto the bridge.
But having a couple of badass jarhead types on your crew doesn't magically turn your crew into a military unit.
Anyway, the fact that this is even an issue in the Star Trek franchise basically tells you everything you need to know about the topic. Because of the tendency to glorify and admire the military (at least in the U.S.) then the closest we can get to a consensus is "It's debatable". This is not something that can be said for literally any other science fiction organization in any other work of fiction. When an entity is supposed to be a military one, they just flat out SAY it and make it very clear by the way they act, the way they function, the way they walk, talk and live. When it comes to starfleet though...
"Starfleet isn't really a military organization. We're sort of LIKE a military, but we're also really sensitive and inclusive and we talk about our feelings alot."
Yeah no doubt, I was just thinking of Koenig's boss who did himself in with some aliens, the Commissioner or whatever. He seemed more like a politician. But it's been a long, long time...
That was Commissioner Simmonds in "Earthbound," one of the better episodes,* interestingly also the one with Christopher Lee and supposedly both Tonnika sisters.
Unfortunately, Simmonds wasn't present in any episode except "Breakaway" and "Earthbound," and IMO by that absence they missed an opportunity to have ongoing tension at the top of the command hierarchy. It was even part of Simmonds's motivation in "Earthbound" that he was useless on Alpha. The only thing Simmonds did after "Breakaway" was, as you said, do himself in, although what we heard in the teaser of "Earthbound" probably typifies what many debates between him and Koenig would have been like and he provided plenty of conflict throughout the episode, albeit much of it as nothing more than a black hat.
* - relatively speaking
I agree with most of what you're saying, but this part irks me somewhat. Research scientists are accomplished in their field, and have degrees and years of study under their belt. In our time, scientists of that calibre are almost always granted commissions when joining a military.
I don't know if you expect them to be enlisted crewmen (nothing wrong with that), it's just that I would expect at least a Lt. rank for anyone with such a highly placed position in Starfleet.
Research scientists being commissioned is a defining trait of the modern military structure.
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