Not when you want to capture and hold those worlds, rather than just destroy them.
But that's the only thing ground forces are good for - destroying what you are trying to obtain, piece by piece.
If you threaten a world with The End, you may capture it intact. Nobody down there wants to die just for the dubious fun of preventing you from getting the planet. Not when they have zero opportunity to fight back.
However, if you deploy troops down there, the natives will fight back, even if with bare hands or cooking utensils. Soon the world will lie in ruins, and lots of people on both sides will be dead, maimed and crippled. Resistance will hamper your attempts at exploiting what little you did get, and the only way to end that resistance is to do what you should have done in the first place: to utterly terminate the population, or then to blackmail it with a threat of this action.
Ground troops don't capture and hold. They fumble and bleed. Doomsday weapons, or the threat of them, is what captures and holds. At least that's the way it happened in the real world between 1945 and, well, now.
Remember that the Feds didn't build Data, Dr Soong did. And no one else was able to replicate his work
Umm, it could just as well be that nobody else was interested. After all, what good was Data? A somewhat superior lifeform, thus a piece of wasted time and effort when it comes to the worthier goal of making life superior for already existing forms. Data was a work of vanity, and only Soong seemed interested in channeling his vanity in that particular direction.
nor did they want to create a new race of sentient beings for purely "slave" work.
They could have created a "race" of fighting automatons by using most of Data but leaving out his brain. They readily build "races" of fighters and other slaves (for example the
Excelsior race of starships); they just feel bad about imposing slavery on certain types of machinery or life that remind them of themselves.
However, I don't see the Federation building a "race" of ground combat robots even if there's no element of moral unease involved. A ground combat robot would only be a slightly better variant of the live infantryman, and why bother having those? Infantrymen and their mechanical counterparts are targets for the enemy; victory is best achieved by depriving the enemy of targets.
They have to stand by their own stance on sentient beings.
I don't think they really have one. They like life that is like themselves. They fear and loathe many other sorts of life, be it stupid or clever, uncaring or feeling. "Sentience" (a disgustingly ill-defined concept) is only thrown around when minds are already made up on protecting a certain form of life.
The Borg are certainly sentient. Their lifestyle differs, though, and some parts of it remind the humans and humanoids uncomfortably about their own history of oppression and slavery. Thus, there's no "stance" that would honor and protect the Borg lifestyle, not even the good parts of it.
Timo Saloniemi
