Federation Complacency After 'By Inferno's Light'

[StarMan]

Just rewatched this episode and it got me thinking. We have The Dominion - a hostile, powerful threat to The Federation which has knowingly sort to undermine the AQ with the expressed intent of eventually installing their particular brand of order on all the major AQ players.

Now, The Dominion makes an unexpected alliance with Cardassia, seemingly legitimising their crossing over into the AQ in order to provide support to their latest member world.

While such a move is not necessarily an automatic call for war, surely the attempted destruction of the Bajorian System would be enough to rouse even the most complacent of politicians?

Given what was known about The Dominion, their intentions and their growing list of hostile actions... with the most recent addition being the aforementioned attempt to blow up an entire freaking star system... What the hell was The Federation thinking allowing them to build a foothold?

Wouldn't the more obvious action not have been to amass a huge fleet to form a blockade of the wormhole and pour all available resources into fortifying the wormhole entrance? Shoot down anything that comes through in the interim. Instead they waited until the Dominion had built up enough forces to pose a critical threat before implementing any defensive measures.

What were they thinking?

 

[Timo]

No doubt this is exactly what the Federation did.

It just happens to take closer to two years to "amass a huge fleet", what with about 90% of the ships being somewhere in deep space chasing dikironium clouds and charting strange new worlds. And there's no point in igniting a war before your huge fleet is ready, because then you will assuredly lose that war.

That the couple of ships the Dominion did get through while Starfleet amassed happened to present an actual threat was a nasty surprise. The Feds (and other Alphans) clearly underestimated the Dominion capacity for mass production. The wormhole slammed shut at the very start of the war, and stayed shut - and yet this stranded beachhead force of Jem'Hadar, Vorta and a handful of Founders outproduced the sum total of Alpha war industries, threatening to overwhelm Alphans with numbers at every stage of the war.

That's what you get when trying to have war with aliens you don't know too well. A bit like Hitler against Russia, only to the umpeenth power.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[tomalak301]

Wasn't this just after the Borg attack, and that was mentioned in the episode? Maybe that's why they couldn't get a huge fleet in place in time. That's quite a bit of manpower to, fighting off the Borg threat while also having the dominion to worry about.