Big Tactical Errors During the Klingon War

[Ro_Laren]

When I was watching Discovery, two big tactical errors really stuck out to me:

1. When Lorca or Ash Tyler didn't kill L'Rell when they escaped from the Klingon ship
2. When Saru didn't have Mudd, who knew the secrets of the Spore drive, arrested and put in a Federation prison instead of letting him leave Discovery with his fiance's father.

Did these two actions/inactions bother anyone else? Of course, you could say that #1 occurred because mirror Lorca didn't care whether or not L'Rell was killed and Tyler was experiencing PTSD and wasn't emotionally able to kill her. However, #2 doesn't make sense at all considering how logical Saru always seemed (if you ignore his actions the episode Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum).

 

[Awesome Possum]

So there could be a plot afterwards. I'd imagine they like to keep going forward and not just end the series right there.

 

[F. King Daniel]

When Saru didn't have Mudd, who knew the secrets of the Spore drive, arrested and put in a Federation prison instead of letting him leave Discovery with his fiance's father.

Yep, this one was especially dumb. All he did, and he gets a little slap on the wrist because TOS continuity. Either have the balls to reimagine Mudd as they did and follow through with it properly, or keep him the same character as TOS so there isn't such a huge gap between crime and punishment.

 

[Hythlodeus]

there is one big law in Star Trek that is supreme over anything else and that's the Law of the Narrative

 

[NeoStar9]

The Mudd thing is the only big questionable one to me. However since I've seen worse in other Trek shows and the episode was so good I'm not willing to really hold Discovery's feet to the fire for that. It kinda earns the pass it gets.

 

[Ro_Laren]

It has been a long time since I saw the Mudd TOS episodes, but I can't figure out why Starfleet couldn't have thrown him in prison and have his sentence last to the end of the war. Couldn't that work with the Mudd cannon established in TOS?

 

[The Wormhole]

It has been a long time since I saw the Mudd TOS episodes, but I can't figure out why Starfleet couldn't have thrown him in prison and have his sentence last to the end of the war. Couldn't that work with the Mudd cannon established in TOS?

Considering he has access to time travel technology which has allowed him to board and take control of one of their most advanced starships, destroy the ship, murder the crew, including personally pulling the trigger on the captain himself multiple times, he's arguably done a serious enough crime to warrant life in prison. Anyone of those crimes on their own would be sufficient grounds to send him to a secure black site prison where he'll spend his entire days in a cell, to say nothing of the combination of all of them.

But then, Starfleet does have weird disciplinary standards. Murdering entire starship crews is shrugged off, but pinch your captain's neck, and you face a shadow tribunal who sentence you to life in prison.

 

[shapeshifter]

Where is the corpus delicti? Homicide would be a pretty tough sell given the defense could simply point to the 'victims' and ask the Jury: Do these people look dead?

 

[eschaton]

My biggest issue with the Klingon War - by far - is not tactical. But it is writing related. Basically in the penultimate episode, we discover that the Klingon houses have brought the Federation to the brink of defeat despite having no leader any longer, and having no coordinated attack strategy. Unless you presume that the Klingons were not an even match for the Federation, and outgunned them by an order of magnitude or something, they should have crumbled as soon as Kol was out of the picture - cloak or no cloak. Wars are won on logistics, not strategy as is commonly thought. But the Klingons had neither of these in their favor. Honestly the lazy writing in this section just suggested that not a single person in the writer's room had even the most casual exposure to military history - a subject that I find boring and have generally avoided, but still apparently know more than they do.

 

[Gavin70]

Letting Mirror Georgiou go off on her own at the end of the season? Is there anybody that thinks that's not going to come back to bite them some time in the future?

 

[Rahul]

The Federation in DIS was entirely inept to go even near a war - despite being the most militarized portrayal of Starfleet ever, with probably the exception of DS9 right during the middle of an actual galaxy-spanning war.

• They managed to almost let their one(!) dilithium crystal mine fall in klingon hands. If there exists one colony that could lead to defeat, that's the one you protect the most. Even DS9 got that right, where they put the wormhole over friggin' Earth(!) because of it's tactical value
• They get utterly pummeled by the cloaking device, but they have a way to defeat it - the crystalline thing-y on Pahvo, and they send one(!) ship, only once(!) - Then the next nine month nothing. Despite being a fuckin' science organization, and the klingons a scattered mess, not once does anyone in the entire Federation manage to crack them.
• They lost to a non-united army! That's...stupid as hell. If the klingon Empire is THAT much more powerfull, a united klingon Empire (like during the TOS era) should have been able to wipe out the Federation effortless - cloaking device or not (which, just btw, they did have then as well)

Basically, I think having the Federation so easily loose against the klingon was a massive mis-calculation on the writers part. The klingons aren't the dominion or the Borg. They should be peers, even a bit weaker than the Federation, but still a formidable enemy.

The TOS Federation wouldn't have been that cocky towards the klingons - Kirk and the Enterprise being sent alone(!) to confront a klingon fleet(!), or Starfleet Admirals conspiring for war with the klingons in 'undiscovered country', if the Federation basically has NOTHING to oppose an aggressive klingon Empire and the experience of a devastating defeat already just a few years back.

Basically, the entire interpretation of the war against the klingons in DIS is borderline unbelievable, and as incongruent with existing canon as the depiction of klingons in all else aspects (visuals, charcterisations, stories,...). Basically, it is best to pretend it never happened, like the Warp-10 salamanders in "Threshold". And in the last 10 minutes of DIS, they already went out of their way to basically erease everything that happened in that war from their memories and basically hit the reset-button full power, despite not technically resetting things actually, just pretend they would have no consequences.

 

[eschaton]

Basically, the entire interpretation of the war against the klingons in DIS is borderline unbelievable, and as incongruent with existing canon as the depiction of klingons in all else aspects (visuals, charcterisations, stories,...). Basically, it is best to pretend it never happened, like the Warp-10 salamanders in "Threshold". And in the last 10 minutes of DIS, they already went out of their way to basically erease everything that happened in that war from their memories and basically hit the reset-button full power, despite not technically resetting things actually, just pretend they would have no consequences.

And the worst thing, as I said before, is it was completely and totally not needed from a dramatic perspective. The emotional core of the story was Burnham's loss (of rank and captain) and her recovery. Even if they insisted on bringing the spore drive along for the ride (which was, IMHO, a mistake unless they use it better as a concept in the future) there was no reason to make Burnham and the Discovery at the center of the entire war. In the end the most emotionally compelling war stories are not told from the perspective of generals, but grunts. 90% of what we found out about the war was just through expository infodumps, because they really had no idea about how to integrate the war into the story they wanted to tell.

 

[Lord Garth]

My biggest issue with the Klingon War - by far - is not tactical. But it is writing related. Basically in the penultimate episode, we discover that the Klingon houses have brought the Federation to the brink of defeat despite having no leader any longer, and having no coordinated attack strategy. Unless you presume that the Klingons were not an even match for the Federation, and outgunned them by an order of magnitude or something, they should have crumbled as soon as Kol was out of the picture - cloak or no cloak. Wars are won on logistics, not strategy as is commonly thought. But the Klingons had neither of these in their favor.

It's true that a one-on-one conflict would require strategy to win if both sides are equally matched, roughly. But, the Federation would also be worn down by fighting 24 enemies at once. Even if some Houses were united, that's still multiple enemies the Federation is fighting. And who's to say each faction wouldn't have its own attack strategy? Starfleet would have to spend the same amount of energy and resources into the war, just that it would spread out among different Klingon factions instead of one at the same time.

If the Klingons had defeated the Federation because Starfleet had to divide all its resources, then the Klingons would just end up fighting each other afterwards until only the strongest faction and whoever allied with it was left standing.

 

[eschaton]

It's true that a one-on-one conflict would require strategy to win if both sides are equally matched, roughly. But, the Federation would also be worn down by fighting 24 enemies at once. Even if some Houses were united, that's still multiple enemies the Federation is fighting. And who's to say each faction wouldn't have its own attack strategy? Starfleet would have to spend the same amount of energy and resources into the war, just that it would spread out among different Klingon factions instead of one at the same time.

If the Klingons had defeated the Federation because Starfleet had to divide all its resources, then the Klingons would just end up fighting each other afterwards until only the strongest faction and whoever allied with it was left standing.

Can you give me one historic analogue where a unified country was brought to its knees by one to two dozen different foes attacking semi-randomly? All I can think of is Rome in late antiquity, and I think that's a terrible comparison, because Rome had been in decline for centuries, rotting from the inside. Not to mention it didn't have the benefit of subspace communications allowing for coordination of defense across its entire frontier.

 

[lab rat]

It's true that a one-on-one conflict would require strategy to win if both sides are equally matched, roughly. But, the Federation would also be worn down by fighting 24 enemies at once. Even if some Houses were united, that's still multiple enemies the Federation is fighting. And who's to say each faction wouldn't have its own attack strategy? Starfleet would have to spend the same amount of energy and resources into the war, just that it would spread out among different Klingon factions instead of one at the same time.

You do realize that the 24 enemies are not 24 times as large as the single enemy, they are roughly each 4% as large.

What good does an attack do if you only use 4% of your available force? How does one defend against the counter attack with only a 4% force.

Can you imagine D-Day if the allies told the troops, "OK everybody go where ever you want and do whatever you want"

How about a football game where there was no team plan, just a bunch of guys running around with no unified plan. Instant Superbowl win there, yea.

What if the Japanese divided their Pearl Harbor attack squad in to 24 pieces and each one decided what day to attack and where?

 

[Timo]

Why all the talk about being brought to one's knees? Starfleet lost a lot of ships - but quite possibly so did the Klingons. Starfleet is suffering, but it doesn't follow that the Klingons would be winning anything much. Victory conditions in space war are vague to begin with, and we know next to nothing about the specific conditions of Trek.

What we do know is spelled out for us: things in space are extremely vulnerable to attack as such, and Klingons in this conflict are hell-bent on scoring destruction points. Does this mean they are "winning the war"? We are told it does not. They can raid SB1 and gain nothing from this. They can conduct lots of suicide attacks which qualify them as terrorists par excellence, but apparently those don't help them win the war, either.

The one victory condition that seems to be common in Trek is destroying the enemy homeworld. We saw the folks who raided SB1 fail to accomplish this. We saw another bunch try it the conventional way, and turn away. Apparently because they weren't sure they could pull it off, while the Federation demonstrably could.

Sounds like a classic Starfleet victory to me. The bad guys huff and puff, while the eggheads in the UFP come up with a way to tie their shoelaces together. Only it takes a spore drive ship, so they have to wait for nine months. Which they demonstrably can afford to.

As for Mudd, I rather think giving him to Grimes was elegant. It would be difficult to make charges stick, and we know that at this time, Dr. Adams has already remade the UFP penal system so that criminals always walk - and the ones conducting the more serious crimes walk faster, being given a more ruthless brainwashing. Unless they walk to Elba II, but our heroes couldn't be sure of that. They can be sure of Grimes, who is Old School incarnated.

Yes, they could put Burnham in a cell and throw away the key. But Burnham was Starfleet, and everybody else apparently goes to Adams. Including Mudd, whose "sentences" in his TOS rap sheet were specified as psychiatric treatment (for petty crimes, consistent with the futuristic take on penology in "Dagger of the Mind" long before that episode was written).

The consistency geek in me punches the air. In a geeky way.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Lord Garth]

You do realize that the 24 enemies are not 24 times as large as the single enemy, they are roughly each 4% as large.

I do realize it. My argument is Starfleet would have its attention split 24 ways not that they'd have 24 times as many ships to fight.

 

[eschaton]

I do realize it. My argument is Starfleet would have its attention split 24 ways not that they'd have 24 rimes as many ships to fight.

I understand the argument, and I understand the desire to come up with some plausible explanation of how to explain what canonically happened. It still makes absolutely no sense according to any laws of warfare.

Of course, if Star Trek were realistic, no one would need goofy planet bombs or even invading fleets. Just accelerate an empty ship to full impulse and ram a planet. Boom!

 

[Lord Garth]

I have another thought, for the purposes of insight not necessarily about how much strategic sense it would make but looking into Klingon Mentality, which seems to be a big part of the debate. Taken directly from Star Trek III.

Kruge: Take every last man and form a boarding party, armed heavily.

Torg: They outnumber us!

Kruge: We are Klingons! Once we've taken over their ship, we'll transfer our flag there and take Genesis from their own memory banks.

They might not care how many Starfleet ships there are if they think they're unprepared.

 

[Groppler Zorn]

Letting Mirror Georgiou go off on her own at the end of the season? Is there anybody that thinks that's not going to come back to bite them some time in the future?

Without the might of the Terran Empire propping her up I didn’t get the sense that Mirror Georgiou was that much of a threat to anyone. She didn’t strike me as a brilliant tactician (she was bested by Lorca and kidnapped by Michael), although she was a competent hand to hand fighter. I think she was feared when she had the resources of the Empire to draw on. Alone, she’s no more threatening than anyone else - unless she’s going to punch her way to the head of the federation.

I suppose her dubious morals could be a problem - if she gets her hands on a death ray she could atomise everyone without a second thought. But captain proton would stop her no doubt... I mean section 31 would keep her in check or Michael would give her another “this is starfleet” soliloquy.