Now with the Borg I don't mean to sound rude but people have to understand something that was actually mentioned in Before Dishonor. That the Federation only beat rather small scale Borg invasion of ONE SHIP through not any strategy on their part but DUMB LUCK, I repeat: THE FEDERATION BEAT THE BORG BEFORE BECAUSE OF DUMB LUCK!!!!!!
Indeed.
It's also important to note what the Romulans--both states--did.
It's been established throughout the series that the Romulans are more than willing to develop and deploy any manner of advanced military and related technologies, from warp drives powered by quantum singularities to cloaking devices to programmable plasma torpedoes. If we go by the Rihannsu novels, which seem to be mostly canonical in the Treklitverse, the Romulans of the
23rd century were also able to trigger devastating ion storms at will and make stars hyperflare with diaastrous results for their associated worlds.
What have the Romulans done with these technologies? They haven't set them aside, rejecting them as too powerful or too destabilizing. Rather, they've been quite ready to use them, rejecting their use only on moral grounds. In
The Empty Chair, we saw the sensible majority of the Rihannsu rejecting the Praetorate's plan to make Sol hyperflare. In
Nemesis we saw Donatra decide that Shinzon's plan to use thalaron weapons agaisnt Earth was a crime.
What would the Romulans do when faced with a massive Borg armada intent on obliterating their entire civilization and all their worlds? They wouldn't be inclined towards mercy, or timourous behaviour. The Romulans would set upon the Borg with a frenzy, using every technology at their disposal. This includes the thalaron weapons that Picard ultimately decided not to build.I doubt that the Romulans wouldn't be able to install thalaron weapons on as many of their ships as possible, seeing as how Picard was able to imagine building one with only some modifications to his ship's existing systems and the thalaron weapons are of Romulan design.
And what happened?
Destiny did not end with one or both of the Romulan state claiming victory over the vanquished Borg. The Romulans' use of thalaron weapons may have limiting the extent of the Borg offensive and left the Romulan states better off than the Federation or the Klingon Empire, but from what we can tell the Romulans were just as threatened as the rest of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants.
I read Picard's order as a last desperate effort to try to save known space from the Borg. If it came down to a conflict between the
ad hoc squadron and the Borg,
Enterprise might well have inflictedsignificant casualties on the Borg before it was destroyed. It still wouldn't be enough to save known space. As a character (Dax or Hernandez) noted, using brute force to overcome the Borg never worked and wouldn't work agaisnt such novels--they had to be more subtle. Fortunately for us all, the Caeliar were capable of just that sort of subtlety.