Not anymore, unfortunately.
Is Starfleet a military organization?
- Thread starter Commander Troi
- Start date
Not anymore, unfortunately.
you want the holy inquisition back?
I think he meant "they" as in the actual government, not a church.
And I'm fairly sure that treason is still a capital offense in most governments, even today.
so why did he quote me?
not in the eu - death penalty is outlawed
Just a thought re: Ent era SF
Obviously they were under pressure from the Vulcans to curb their nasty human aggressive instincts (you know, because Vulcans never do anything wrong...) and with that oversight maybe they explicitly made SF a purely exploratory/expeditionary force?
The MACOs fall outside SF and are then assigned for the Xindi campaign which makes sense.
Obviously post Fed the two merge and certain MACOs feel like it isn't military enough (looking at you Edison) but one could argue that it becomes at least quasi military after they combined due to the realisation post Romulan War that there needs to be a mixed defence and exploration fleet to account for the risks out in deep space?
Obviously they were under pressure from the Vulcans to curb their nasty human aggressive instincts (you know, because Vulcans never do anything wrong...) and with that oversight maybe they explicitly made SF a purely exploratory/expeditionary force?
The MACOs fall outside SF and are then assigned for the Xindi campaign which makes sense.
Obviously post Fed the two merge and certain MACOs feel like it isn't military enough (looking at you Edison) but one could argue that it becomes at least quasi military after they combined due to the realisation post Romulan War that there needs to be a mixed defence and exploration fleet to account for the risks out in deep space?
No, oberth is right. I was doing a joke about Inquisition activities and other lovely forms of capital punishment as practiced by the Holy See, Papal States, and various holy forces.
No one would expect that....
Oh, bugger!
Honestly, that's more my thinking is that the Vulcans wanted to emphasize exploration, which possibly impacted their attitude towards the Andorians in the first place. Once the UPF was established, and post Romulan War, the MACOs were absorbed in to Federation Starfleet and creating that "combined service" but with a strong emphasis on exploration, thus the USS INTREPID in TOS. However, this middle of the road approach didn't appease all, including Edison, as well as the Vulcans who pushed the expeditionary group over Starfleet, as well as still others who pushed in to Section 31.
My reply encompassed all of TOS, TAS, TNG, DS9, VOY, and ENT. Every time we see Starfleet Security officers beaming somewhere and pull out a phaser, it's the same thing as a USAF officer going somewhere with a firearm.
In "The Ensigns of Command," Data used a type-2 hand phaser to vaporize a large aqueduct that had extended all the way up into the mountains surrounding a settlement. Throughout DS9's Dominion War arc (and most prominently in "The Siege of AR-558"), we saw type-2 hand phasers being used routinely in combat with Dominion troops.
Yes, a hand phaser is a military-grade weapon of war.
This is false. We know from "Errand of Mercy," Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, "The Way of the Warrior, Part II," "A Call to Arms," and "The Vulcan Hello" that Starfleet is the agency of the Federation government legally charged with defending the state in times of war or violent conflict. We know from "Homefront"/"Paradise Lost" that the Federation President is Starfleet's commander-in-chief and that he has the authority to declare a State of Emergency on Federation worlds and place Starfleet troops on the streets. We know from "Court Martial," "The Menagerie, Parts I & II," "Ensign Ro," "Caretaker, Part I," "Battle at the Binary Stars," and numerous other episodes that Starfleet operates a system of courts-martial legally empowered to charge Starfleet officers with crimes and imprison them if they are found guilty.
Well, what something is called in informal vernacular is a separate question from what its legal status is. But I would suggest that Starfleet is the military service and the exploratory service and the major deep-space scientific research service and a deep-space diplomatic service when civilian ambassadors are unavailable. It can be E and A, B, C, and D, and which term people use in the informal vernacular is gonna depend on the context of the conversation.
So the Catholic Church is a little more complicated of an example than others, because the Holy See (the Church's HQ) is recognized as having sovereignty in the international community (it is an observer member of the United Nations, for instance, and conducts foreign relations with sovereign states), and as having sovereignty over a state (the State of the Vatican City, where the Pope is ex officio the Sovereign of the State of the Vatican City). So in the State of the Vatican City, yes, the Catholic Church can arrest you, charge you, try you, convict you, and imprison you, because the State of the Vatican City is a sovereign state where the church rules.
However, outside of the Vatican, neither the Catholic Church nor any other church has the right to arrest you, charge you, try you, and imprison you.*
Now, sure, any private organization can have internal processes for determining whether or not to expel a member or employee. And they can call them "charges" and "trials" if they want. But it's not a legal charge with a legal crime, and it's not a legal trial, and they don't have any right whatsoever to arrest or imprison you. The most they can do is expel you from the organization. That is completely different from a system of courts-martial with the authority to charge you with a crime, try you, convict you, and imprison you.
Edited to add: * Unless you are in the territory of a sovereign state that grants that authority to a religious organization, such as the Islamic Republic of Iran or the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. However, in the United States and the Western world, no religious organization has any such right.
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Nope. I'm vegetarian.
THANK YOU!No one would expect that....
Thankfully!
Re: Vulcan and Earth in the ENT era. The goal of the Vulcans during ENT was not to curb "Human aggression." That was an after-the-fact rationalization. The Vulcans were plenty aggressive themselves, up to the point of plotting to invade and conquer Andor on the basis of falsified claims of WMD development (shades of the Iraq War). The Vulcans' goal during the ENT era was to prevent United Earth from establishing itself as an important interstellar state so that Vulcan could retain its position as the regional hegemon in that part of space. This changed after the Syrannite Revolution led to a widespread rejection of neo-imperialism among the Vulcan populace.
Honestly, I don't buy the idea that even the United Earth Starfleet was non-military. Yeah, I know that was the intent, or rather the retcon after the MACOs were introduced and they did the whole dance of calling the MACOs "the military" with the implication Starfleet was not, but even then, UE Starfleet still had court-martials and they had their own prison facilities and their security service has the authorization to investigate kidnappings on Earth. Not to mention when the NX-01 was attacked by Klingons just outside the Sol system, it was other Starfleet ships which showed up to fight them off. UE Starfleet is just as much military as UFP Starfleet. They're just a naval force, while the MACOs are a ground force. The whole thing about Starfleet officers referring to the MACOs as "the military" can be explained by the fact that it's common for the Navy to refer to the Army as the military despite the fact the Navy is also military.
It's all just semantic word play because, for some, the military=bad. They even play that up in TWOK with Marcus and CO. angry at giving Genesis over to the military.
Burn you for heresy
They specifically said that it was not.
In one episode, Archer and Adm. Forrest are doing an inspection tour, and Forrest asks if Archer has a problem with having the military (the MACOS) on board. Archer replies that he has no problem with non-Starfleet personnel.
The Federation Starfleet has also been specifically stated to not be military. And yet here we are debating that matter, just as we always have.
Which I addressed in my post you quoted:
But it's important to note that when Enterprise was first being developed, Berman and Braga had actually intended 22nd century Starfleet to be a military that admits it's military. Reed was going to be a Starfleet Marine because of that. And though Reed ended up being regular Starfleet Security in the finished product, you can still see how he and his security officers were a bit more robust in the first season, like in The Andorian Incident where they go on a commando raid to take the monastery back from the Andorians. It wasn't until they began developing the Xindi storyline they decided that 22nd century Starfleet is also allegedly non-military like in the 23rd and 24th centuries and decided to introduce the MACOs as "the military."
That distinction is historical. Even FDR made the use of the distinction in his "Date That Will Live in Infamy" speech:
"The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces."
'Military' used to only refer to land forces, i.e., armies, because the word relates to soldiering. And while sailors may be legal combatants, they are not, for the most part, soldiers.
In fairness, the idea that the United Earth Starfleet would simultaneously have never launched a ship faster than Warp 5 and didn't have any deep-space expeditions running in 2151, BUT ALSO had a fully-develop bureaucratic infrastructure including a United Earth Starfleet Security division investigating the disappearance of Phlox on Earth; a United Earth Starfleet Intelligence division of which the journalist in "Demons"/"Terra Prime" was a member; and operated their own prison... that always seemed very contradictory to me. Like, it's this tiny organization that's not well-developed sometimes, and then other times it's had this well-developed infrastructure for decades?
I can buy the idea that the UESF is not a military because they haven't yet realized that there's a need for an interstellar military capable of defending United Earth in times of war. I just squint at everything else because the idea that the UESF is non-military makes more intuitive sense given the context of ENT.
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