Spoilers Is there a way to win the war without using time travel?

No it isn’t.

 

Based on the preview for the finale, I get the impression the Discovery will succeed in their mapping mission, The Fed fleet will warp in and devastate only the military installations on Kronos and the Klingons will agree to end the war. That would seem a bit anti-climactic but that is my prediction for how they will end the war.

 

The preview also shows a green planet with its atmosphere on fire. Qo’nos has been green in almost every incarnation of it.

Might be misleading, or maybe it isn’t fire.

 

Considering how low on the food chain he was, I doubt he knows any of this.

However you're right, one would think they'd still ask him, and they may have even done it off screen.

 

Oh, I forgot. Starfleet isn’t (a) military.

 

I didn't say that. They are a military, but they're not like the Klingons. Their fleet isn't for attacking.

 

IMO this strengthens my above statement. The Federation’s military isn’t just in cahoots with the arms industry, but it has even become the one and the same institution.

 

Think how space war in Trek is fought. Compare with naval warfare, especially of the Horatio Hornblower era. And please forget all about land warfare, because it does not apply here at all.

Planets sit far apart. How far? Traveling even a single lightyear takes plot time, as seen this week. Within plot time, an attacker can complete an attack aimed at destruction: messing up a planet down to the mantle was supposed to only take five hours in DS9, and glassing the surface actually took just seconds, with enough starships at it. 23rd century guns might not be quite as powerful, but they need not be much weaker, either.

The important thing is that the attacker can arrive in sufficient numbers to complete the attack in allotted time. He gets to choose the numbers, and the target. The defender has to guess: do I move my ships to this planet or that one, in wait of the attacker? If I don't move all my ships, the enemy will outnumber me; but if I move all of my ships and choose the wrong planet, the enemy wins.

The attacker wins, then. Assuming the defender is blind. But Starfleet is not blind - the Discovery all on her own was able to track down ISS Shenzhou across random but necessarily considerable interstellar distances (especially given how Burnham this week claims the Terran Empire reaches far beyond the area explored by the Federation). So the defender can and will move his ships to counter the attacks, in a giant game of chess.

Now enter cloaks, and the defender automatically loses. In this case meaning, the UFP automatically loses, as it is the defender, and cannot be the attacker, as its ships aren't invisible.

But a single attack sortie of the suicide sort is always available to the Feds, restoring their local numerical superiority through a brute-force approach. It's natural for them not to think of doing that, I think. Not unless there's a reason to think it will win the war for them.

Basically, Starfleet is learning how to fight like Hornblower's First Sea Lord after having gotten used to oceans-wide satellite coverage. The learning curve just isn't steep enough. But the guns and ships involved remain at the relative Hornblower level. Setting fire to an undefended Caribbean island's forests is doable. Bombarding a fortress to submission is doable. Conquering an island is a chore. Fighting one's way to an island defended by ships is not worth the bother. And thus we have these brave, foolish or cheap attacks by the Klingons, with control of empty and worthless "seas" flowing back before it again moves forth.

Timo Saloniemi

 

No it wasn't, and is not a terrible idea. This was proposed by Robert Hewitt Wolf (who was a wtiter/producer on DS9). When it was rejected as a Trek series, he used it for Andromeda.

 

There's absolutely no evidence in ST canon that corporations, as we understand them, exist any more in the Federation. There may be individual people who "own" things (like the Sisko family restaurant) but all organizations appear to be either directly part of starfleet or "nonprofit" style agencies.