Data's rank

[Timo]

(Are you going to complain about Klingon ranks too? )

No complaints there, as they, too, seem to match US Army and Navy through and through. Just in an interesting mix. (But the mix makes good sense in terms of who outranks whom, as opposed to the one in Babylon 5.)

Klingon enlisted ratings, OTOH...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Snaploud]

The occupation lasted 50 years. My point is that the post-independence military leadership was likely in flux.

I'm sure it was. But Bajor had tens of thousands of years of civilization behind it, with military experience to match. They would not be likely to forget that during the (relatively) short time that the occupation lasted.

I didn't say that they forgot how to run a military. I said that their leadership structure (organizational chart, if you will) would be in flux. Kira had already jumped from no rank (pre-independence) to major (post-independence). Some people had jumped from no rank (pre-independence) to general (post-independence). In the early stages of any newly minted military command structure, you're bound to have a bit of "feeling out" of who really deserves to be at one rank over another. Kira probably showed herself as much more capable than a lot of guys who went from no rank (pre-independence) to colonel (post-independence).

The 50-year-gap means that you have to build a military from scratch. Sure, you have all the old military rules, and you definitely have a good crop to draw from the resistance. That doesn't make building a command structure (who gets what rank) easy.

 

[Timo]

One wonders if the resistance didn't have an internal rank structure of its own. Not in the early, terrorist cell days of its existence, of course, but perhaps later when the freedom fighters grew bolder and began to operate more openly and aggressively?

There might at least have been a theoretical correspondence between one's position in a resistance cell and one's subsequent militia rank: every cell leader would become a Major, every second-in-command a Captain, every leader of a fighting team a Lieutenant, and any distinguished fighter would get a rank or rating as recommended by the cell leader. That is, every fighter who decided to go for a militia career; most probably didn't.

Whether Bajor had a military caste before the occupation remains unclear. If it did, that caste apparently lost all credibility in the process, and could offer no resistance to the rise of people from other castes to military prominence.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Snaploud]

The biggest difficulty would be the lack of record-keeping for a resistance movement. It's hard to judge leadership ability when you don't have a written track record.

Theoretically, they could have had some sort of resistance rank structure, but you're still going from a decentralized cell structure to a centralized military organization. It's a big leap. Also, many of the fighters were probably acting outside any formal orders, and it's questionable how much anybody could truly be considered in charge.

My guess is that cell structures could tell you who deserves to be in the military leadership, but it wouldn't tell you enough about how to organize the upper echelons (who gets which of the top ranks).

 

[Timo]

That would be a political decision anyway, not particularly closely related to how good at fighting these top people would be.

The role of the militia would be atypical for a planetary fighting force at first. There would be extremely limited resources for the sort of work a "normal" Trek fighting force does: opposing an interstellar enemy's attempts at invasion, influencing and intelligence gathering. There would be a lot of work in pacifying one's own population instead, and in preventing the formation of armed factions in competition with the government militia. Basically, the early militia could not fight with guns much because it didn't have enough of them, and because it would have difficulty deciding where to aim anyway. Rather, the militia would fight with appointments.

It would be easier to fill the lower ranks with good fighters than it would to choose the right politicians for the top jobs - and the latter decisions wouldn't be made any easier even if there pre-existed a clear-cut military hierarchy from the occupation days. Such a hierarchy might in fact make matters more difficult...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Snaploud]

That would be a political decision anyway,

Exactly. The top leadership positions would be tough to work out, and Kira's political capital grew dramatically during the course of the series. The liaison to Deep Space Nine was not a lofty position in the beginning. Kira started out thinking that the provisional government would fall and that the Federation would be kicked out. The wormhole changed all that...

Suddenly, Kira was in one of the most important positions available, and she had a close relationship with the Emissary. That's exactly the kind of political boost that could push Kira up to a much higher rank (during a time in which those positions were considered political gifts rather than something earned through decades of service in the organization).