Commanders of aircraft carriers undergo intense training. There is no reason not to expect that starship captains undergo similar training, if not even more intense.
We may assume Starfleet operates like some of today's military organizations if we aren't told otherwise. But on many an occasion, we are indeed told otherwise. There's no evidence on intense grooming of starship captains for psychological stability, and indeed most of the starship captains we see (including our main hero) appear troubled in one way or another, and tend to snap under pressure in a rather human fashion. We might be expecting too much of Tracey, Decker, Kirk or the rest if we assumed they had received special training that allowed them to, say, take a dispassionate view on complex Prime Directive issues.
If the Starfleet functions like a true military organization, it has routinely scheduled communications with its vessels.
Again, this appears not to be the case. Schedules are fine and well in an unsurprising operating environment such as today's oceans, and with means of communication that cover the entire theater of operations in real time. But Starfleet didn't appear to react to silence from the
Exeter for months, whereas the
Defiant only went missing for three weeks until the
Enterprise zeroed in on her last known position (so it
isn't particularly difficult or time-consuming to assign a fellow starship to do a search if such is desired). And nobody worried about the whereabouts of the
Constellation in "DDM"...
The same thing continues a century later, as the
Yamato goes AWOL for months and nobody appears particularly worried. Earlier on, Picard already indicates that Starfleet doesn't know where the
Yamato is by accepting that she
might be in Nagilum's spatial rift (even though that ship proves to be a fake).
Communications appear to take place when possible, but Starfleet also seems to trust its skippers with the occasional bout of silence.
Tracey is determined to stay and fight the Yangs, wipe them out. Sounds like he's more interested in being in control here.
To be sure, "being in control" would be limited to not being immediately slaughtered by the Yang hordes. Even if Tracey got his ten extra phaser 2s, the best he could hope to achieve (as his recent experiences would have taught him) would be to buy a few more days of survival, a little time to ponder whether McCoy is telling the truth about being able to escape or just lying to protect Starfleet integrity and force Tracey (and Kirk's own equally infected posse) to accept the legally mandated suicide.
Killing a few thousand additional Yangs would seem to make no difference on the fate of the planet. If Cloud William is right, the Yangs have already won on the global scale, and could easily send more troops to Tracey's village until it fell, phasers or no phasers. OTOH, killing the additional thousands would allow Tracey to think things through and at the very least allow for the evacuation of the last remaining Kohms, with whom Tracey was much in debt. The end result would be the same, absolute Yang superiority and genocide of the Kohms.
Kirk's quoting of the sacred words saves the last Kohm village from absolute slaughter, and perhaps helps putative other Kohm survivors in occupied lands avoid doom as well. Now
there we have disruptive interference with actual permanent effects! The natural development would have been for the Asiatic-looking race to disappear from the face of Omega IV.
On the issue of contacting the locals, Kirk only seems to avoid this in cases where the locals are judged hostile in advance, or covert ops are necessitated by the overall mission. Only "Bread and Circuses" seems to form an exception, as it introduces the "no revealing of self or mission" clause, even though Kirk has no
a priori reason to think the natives are behind the loss of the
Beagle or otherwise hostile. The level of development of the local culture doesn't seem to be a consideration anywhere.
And to be sure, the "BaC" clause about secrecy is invoked for a fairly ambiguous reason:
Kirk: "The SS Beagle was the first ship to make a survey of this star sector when it disappeared."
Spock: "Then the Prime Directive is in full force, Captain?"
Kirk: "No identification of self or mission. No interference with the social development of said planet."
McCoy: "No references to space, or the fact that there are other worlds, or more advanced civilizations."
We could easily assume our heroes opt for a full-force PD here because the lack of intel on the planet forces them to assume the natives are indeed hostile (and perhaps bristling with anti-starship weaponry). That would be a good reason to
a) be covert and secretive in general
b) not do anything extra to catch local attention even if it otherwise were the duty of Starfleet officers to save damsels in distress, slay oppressors, vaporize invading hordes, and generally put right what once went wrong
c) not provide the locals with key military intel such as information on the UFP and its allies and enemies.
Timo Saloniemi
