Is Starfleets Anti-Army Sentiment Justified¿!
- Thread starter Kamen Rider Blade
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But small specialist ground force teams are an appropriate "switch " to borrow a phrase from Heinlein's "Space Cadet," and the difference between Solar Patrol officers (Starfleet) and Space Marines (MACOs).
Does camouflage clothing really matter though in the face of sensors?
Reminds me of 21st century US navy that wore camouflage uniforms (discontinued in 2019). Why? They aren't typically seen by the enemy. In fact, the camouflage uniforms made it more difficult to see a sailor that has fallen overboard into the ocean and in need of rescue. https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-navy-throws-much-mocked-uniform-overboard-210452329.html
Navy camouflage might promote a sense of unity with other military branches, but serve no practical purpose. Perhaps Starfleet feels similar in the day and age of pinpoint sensor readings
Remember the Siege of AR-558, when all sensors on every side gets jammed
Once all sensors gets jammed, everything is back to basics.
Basic Optical Camoflage with your uniform actually makes a huge difference at that point.
Well, they do still wear camouflage uniforms, it's just not blue camo anymore, but rather a sort of green/brown blend.
Camouflage does not necessarily mean the literal interpretation of wearing outfits meant to blend a person in with their surroundings, but rather just something which does not place a shining beacon on someone which essentially tells the enemy "I'm over here, shoot me." One of the main reasons why military uniforms are the way they are today, IE everyone wears similar uniform regardless of rank is so the enemy can't pick a person out from a distance and instantly recognize them as the commander and therefore priority target. Starfleet uniforms almost always contain the department color in prominent easy to see places, even with the field uniforms seen on DS9.
Indeed, this was one thing Disco actually got right in the first two seasons, the field uniforms worn by everyone were blue with no department markings, plus they had body armor. Even medical officers, who usually wore a white duty uniform wore a blue field uniform. There is no way an enemy can take a look at a group of people dressed like that and instantly work out who the priority targets are. Though, SNW has forgotten this and now has everyone in the field wearing department color coded body armor, which is basically negating the purpose of a field uniform altogether.
Star Trek is about helping worlds.
Star Wars Stormtroopers are about holding the populace to the whims of Empire.
The Feds are about soft power and trade.
Androids cost money (even in a BS system where 'money isn't a thing', because = resources), take time to build, and then they ALWAYS (eventually) 'run amok'. Ask just about any Scify franchise. Even Data had his evil counterpart.
What you do is take a page from Nog's book of cost-effective combat (and yes, I am copyrighting that LOL) - have a special ship designed to replicate and 'seed' into orbit thousands of holoprojectors...
Now you have any size army - with ANY type of weaponry - you want, appearing everywhere at once, with no casualties for your side. And if there is a McGuffin (There's always a McGuffin!) that stops holo's from appearing, then you just use the transporters to create your own disposable clone-army. Transporters hooked-into the replicators (its basically the same system, right?) means you create the weapons for cloned personal on-the-fly as you beam them down, depending on the situation. Combat in ST would be NOTHING like it is in our time, and yet, they never show it that way.
And lastly, humans would NOT need to know how to fight. You know all those nasty Nausicans, Chalnoth, Kzin, etc., that are in UFP space? They'd love to fight a war for us. Just use them as mercs. Solves two problems - keeps the undesirables to a manageable population level, and gives you one of the most bad-asz fighting forces in the galaxy. And you can even keep thousands of them stored in transporter buffers 'for delivery' (because you don't want those types to ever have the opportunity to takeover your ships). In the end, between all these different techs and methods, the Federation becomes the scify equivalent of a fantasy genre necromancer - create your armies as you go along.
What you do is take a page from Nog's book of cost-effective combat (and yes, I am copyrighting that LOL) - have a special ship designed to replicate and 'seed' into orbit thousands of holoprojectors...
Now you have any size army - with ANY type of weaponry - you want, appearing everywhere at once, with no casualties for your side. And if there is a McGuffin (There's always a McGuffin!) that stops holo's from appearing, then you just use the transporters to create your own disposable clone-army. Transporters hooked-into the replicators (its basically the same system, right?) means you create the weapons for cloned personal on-the-fly as you beam them down, depending on the situation. Combat in ST would be NOTHING like it is in our time, and yet, they never show it that way.
And lastly, humans would NOT need to know how to fight. You know all those nasty Nausicans, Chalnoth, Kzin, etc., that are in UFP space? They'd love to fight a war for us. Just use them as mercs. Solves two problems - keeps the undesirables to a manageable population level, and gives you one of the most bad-asz fighting forces in the galaxy. And you can even keep thousands of them stored in transporter buffers 'for delivery' (because you don't want those types to ever have the opportunity to takeover your ships). In the end, between all these different techs and methods, the Federation becomes the scify equivalent of a fantasy genre necromancer - create your armies as you go along.
In space operas space warships and defenses against them are just about all that matters.
In Starship Troopers (1959) by Robert Heinlein there is a scene where a recruit asks what value infantry have in a society which has atomic weapons and could kill millions by pressing a button. So the instructor has the recruit pose with his hand over a light switch poised to flick the switch. Then the instructor throws a knife through the recruit's wrist and pins his hand to the wall, unable to fligk the switch. The instructor says that now he can't press the putton and kill millions with an atomic bomb.
I never found that arguement very convincing, and I think that Heinlein was just trying to keep the readers from realizing just how unimportant infantry would be in a space war for the sake of his story.
After all, Heinlein was a friend of E.E. "Doc" Smith, and in "Requiem" Heinlein even had Delos D. Harriman mention Smith as an equal influence as Verne and Wells. So Heinlein was quite familiar with how hard it was to sneak onton a planet undected, let alone inflitrate and enemy command base, and be in positon to stop an enemy for launching their weapon of doom, in Smith's Lensman series..
As I rememeber, there were about a dozen or two characters (below the Arisians and the Eddorians, of course) in the Lensman series who could sneak onto a heavily guarded enemy planet and into a geaveukt gr uarded base to sabotage the enemy. And they mostly used their tremendous menal powers to make themselves effectively invisible and undetectable to their enemies, who could not sense them, and who they could make instantly forget about it if they were momentarily noticed.
Bases, planets, and star systems were surrounded by many concentric force screens which would instantly detect any spaceship which would cross those force screens.
Of course such force screen detectors have never yet been invented in real life, and might never be. But on the other hand special forces, assassins, and saboteurs with the ability to cloud the minds of men and other beings and make themselves effectively untedetabletough mind power alone a have also never existed n real life and m probably never will.
I point out that radar was invented by various powers and extensively used in World War Two. So Heinlein could hardly have been unaware of radar and it uses for detecting approching enemy vehicles. When Heinlein was writing Starship Troopers the Distant Early Warning Line or DEW Line was already in operation, a line of radar bases across the Arctic regions of Canada and neighboring lands to detect Soviet bombers. The horror film fiend Without a Face (1958) happens near a US radar base in Canada, part of a more southern radar line. And if I remember correctly, I knew a little declassified information about the DEW LIne as a kid by a few years after then, so someone as interested in defense matters as Heinlein should have been quite familiar with the capabilities of such radar tracking systems.
And being fairly familiar with i the rapid pace of improvements in radar at that time, and a science fiction writer, Heinlein, should have been able to extrapolate that centuries or millennia in the future, in a society which has space opera type flaster than light space warships, radar should fantascially more advanced thanin 1959.
So Heinlein should have been able to imagine that in a space opera setting, some sort of super advanced radar analog would be used to constantly scan the space around any inhabited planet or any world with a military base, and that it would be impossible for any authorized spaceship to approach without be detected and blasted.
And if a ship did manage to land with some mobile infantry, how would humans in human shaped power armor going to sneak into an ememy city or fortress with its own defenses, and prenetrate a command center undetected by the radically different looking aliens, and pin a wrist or a tenticle against a wall to prevent pushing a button and activating a supeweapon weapon? Or how could they penetrate a spaceship's detectors undetected and sneak aboard it to disable their weapons?
So in a space opera setting like Star Trek the important battles will be fought between fleets of space warships and between fleets of space warships and the orbital and ground based defense systems of various bases and planets.
Planets in Star Trek should have planetary defense sysems of various scales depending on their importance. Invasions of an interstellar power would involve space battles with the goal of destroying the enemy fleet in a region so your own ships can operated unhindered until the enemy brings in more forces. Once an invading space fleet destroys a defending space fleet, it can move to attack enemy worlds in the area. If the planetary defense systems are strong enough, the invading fleet wil lhave to withdraw or be destroyed. If the planetary defenses of giant force shield generators, giant phaser banks, and giant photon torpedo launchers, aren't strong enough they will be defeated and the planet will be at the mercy of the invading space fleet.
Why does Starfleet leave Earth itself undefended, with the Enterprise the only starship within range? I believe starfleet doesn't leave Earth undefended, but has Earth defended by its solar system defense system and its planetary defense system, instead of by whatever starships happen to be at or near Earth at the moment. And presumably the planetary defense system is designed to hold off an attack by the total combined Klingon and Romulan fleets for long enough that a relief force of starshps can arrive to defeat the enemy ships. Or maybe the planetary defense system is designed with such long range weapons that it would be able to destroy the entire combined Klingpn and Romulan flleets before they could get witin the range of their own weapons.
Of course the Earth defense system was defeated by such superior foes as V'ger, the whale probe, and the Borg Cube, wich were probably far more powerful than the combined klingon and Romulan fleets. And I suppose that it was greatly updated every time.
The main use that an aggressive, expanding power would have for ground soliders would be to garrison planets onece they surrender after their palnetary defense systems are defeated. Possibly many thousands or millions of living soldiers would be needed as the garrison of each planet, each soldier with power armor, and each soldier in command of 10, or 100, or 1,000, robot soldiers.
Costume designer Robert Fletcher not onlyd esigned the many costumes in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but also was involved in the design of various aliens who wore some of those costumes. Fletcher described the Arcturians, who were Federation members.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Arcturian
Possibly every Federation member that wants one has a garrison of Arcturian soliders to defend from enemy ground troops in addiiton to its planeary defense system. And possibly the colony planets of Federation members, and various mining and other outposts, and star bases and other bases have units of Arcturian soldiers to defend agaisnt ground attack..
Though in the decades of time and hundreds of Star Trek productions since then, nobody has ever bothered to depict Arcturian ground soldiers.
Possibly Arcturus joined the Federation soon before Star Trek: The Motion Picture and then left the Federation peacefully or otherwise because of some political problem sometime after Star Trek: The Motion Picture and probably before the era of TNG. Possibly the Arcturians and some other aliens seen in Star Trek: The Motion Picture were part of a space empire or federation which united with the UFP shortly before but split back off again after a relatively short time, sort of like the United Arab Republic, for example.
In Starship Troopers (1959) by Robert Heinlein there is a scene where a recruit asks what value infantry have in a society which has atomic weapons and could kill millions by pressing a button. So the instructor has the recruit pose with his hand over a light switch poised to flick the switch. Then the instructor throws a knife through the recruit's wrist and pins his hand to the wall, unable to fligk the switch. The instructor says that now he can't press the putton and kill millions with an atomic bomb.
I never found that arguement very convincing, and I think that Heinlein was just trying to keep the readers from realizing just how unimportant infantry would be in a space war for the sake of his story.
After all, Heinlein was a friend of E.E. "Doc" Smith, and in "Requiem" Heinlein even had Delos D. Harriman mention Smith as an equal influence as Verne and Wells. So Heinlein was quite familiar with how hard it was to sneak onton a planet undected, let alone inflitrate and enemy command base, and be in positon to stop an enemy for launching their weapon of doom, in Smith's Lensman series..
As I rememeber, there were about a dozen or two characters (below the Arisians and the Eddorians, of course) in the Lensman series who could sneak onto a heavily guarded enemy planet and into a geaveukt gr uarded base to sabotage the enemy. And they mostly used their tremendous menal powers to make themselves effectively invisible and undetectable to their enemies, who could not sense them, and who they could make instantly forget about it if they were momentarily noticed.
Bases, planets, and star systems were surrounded by many concentric force screens which would instantly detect any spaceship which would cross those force screens.
Of course such force screen detectors have never yet been invented in real life, and might never be. But on the other hand special forces, assassins, and saboteurs with the ability to cloud the minds of men and other beings and make themselves effectively untedetabletough mind power alone a have also never existed n real life and m probably never will.
I point out that radar was invented by various powers and extensively used in World War Two. So Heinlein could hardly have been unaware of radar and it uses for detecting approching enemy vehicles. When Heinlein was writing Starship Troopers the Distant Early Warning Line or DEW Line was already in operation, a line of radar bases across the Arctic regions of Canada and neighboring lands to detect Soviet bombers. The horror film fiend Without a Face (1958) happens near a US radar base in Canada, part of a more southern radar line. And if I remember correctly, I knew a little declassified information about the DEW LIne as a kid by a few years after then, so someone as interested in defense matters as Heinlein should have been quite familiar with the capabilities of such radar tracking systems.
And being fairly familiar with i the rapid pace of improvements in radar at that time, and a science fiction writer, Heinlein, should have been able to extrapolate that centuries or millennia in the future, in a society which has space opera type flaster than light space warships, radar should fantascially more advanced thanin 1959.
So Heinlein should have been able to imagine that in a space opera setting, some sort of super advanced radar analog would be used to constantly scan the space around any inhabited planet or any world with a military base, and that it would be impossible for any authorized spaceship to approach without be detected and blasted.
And if a ship did manage to land with some mobile infantry, how would humans in human shaped power armor going to sneak into an ememy city or fortress with its own defenses, and prenetrate a command center undetected by the radically different looking aliens, and pin a wrist or a tenticle against a wall to prevent pushing a button and activating a supeweapon weapon? Or how could they penetrate a spaceship's detectors undetected and sneak aboard it to disable their weapons?
So in a space opera setting like Star Trek the important battles will be fought between fleets of space warships and between fleets of space warships and the orbital and ground based defense systems of various bases and planets.
Planets in Star Trek should have planetary defense sysems of various scales depending on their importance. Invasions of an interstellar power would involve space battles with the goal of destroying the enemy fleet in a region so your own ships can operated unhindered until the enemy brings in more forces. Once an invading space fleet destroys a defending space fleet, it can move to attack enemy worlds in the area. If the planetary defense systems are strong enough, the invading fleet wil lhave to withdraw or be destroyed. If the planetary defenses of giant force shield generators, giant phaser banks, and giant photon torpedo launchers, aren't strong enough they will be defeated and the planet will be at the mercy of the invading space fleet.
Why does Starfleet leave Earth itself undefended, with the Enterprise the only starship within range? I believe starfleet doesn't leave Earth undefended, but has Earth defended by its solar system defense system and its planetary defense system, instead of by whatever starships happen to be at or near Earth at the moment. And presumably the planetary defense system is designed to hold off an attack by the total combined Klingon and Romulan fleets for long enough that a relief force of starshps can arrive to defeat the enemy ships. Or maybe the planetary defense system is designed with such long range weapons that it would be able to destroy the entire combined Klingpn and Romulan flleets before they could get witin the range of their own weapons.
Of course the Earth defense system was defeated by such superior foes as V'ger, the whale probe, and the Borg Cube, wich were probably far more powerful than the combined klingon and Romulan fleets. And I suppose that it was greatly updated every time.
The main use that an aggressive, expanding power would have for ground soliders would be to garrison planets onece they surrender after their palnetary defense systems are defeated. Possibly many thousands or millions of living soldiers would be needed as the garrison of each planet, each soldier with power armor, and each soldier in command of 10, or 100, or 1,000, robot soldiers.
Costume designer Robert Fletcher not onlyd esigned the many costumes in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but also was involved in the design of various aliens who wore some of those costumes. Fletcher described the Arcturians, who were Federation members.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Arcturian
Possibly every Federation member that wants one has a garrison of Arcturian soliders to defend from enemy ground troops in addiiton to its planeary defense system. And possibly the colony planets of Federation members, and various mining and other outposts, and star bases and other bases have units of Arcturian soldiers to defend agaisnt ground attack..
Though in the decades of time and hundreds of Star Trek productions since then, nobody has ever bothered to depict Arcturian ground soldiers.
Possibly Arcturus joined the Federation soon before Star Trek: The Motion Picture and then left the Federation peacefully or otherwise because of some political problem sometime after Star Trek: The Motion Picture and probably before the era of TNG. Possibly the Arcturians and some other aliens seen in Star Trek: The Motion Picture were part of a space empire or federation which united with the UFP shortly before but split back off again after a relatively short time, sort of like the United Arab Republic, for example.
With due respect you are conflating the scene from the movie and what was actually written in the book. In the book, Sgt. Zim has a discussion regarding the use of knives in modern combat with his trainees.
Thank you for the correction. I hate it when I remember things wrong after a few decades.
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Itallblurstogether...
And yet he also describes himself as primarily an explorer (rather than a military commander).
'Starfleet Marines' is a concept that has been floating around since forever, but other than a single FASA supplement for the old RPG, I don't think it has ever been seriously tackled by either trek writers or any other form of media.
The closest we came was the MACOs on the Enterprise series.
Given that Starfleet's 'nature' is primarily exploratory and defensive, I like the idea of Starfleet Marines being a 'reserve force' that is held in existence with a very small active component which exists mainly to train and administrate the larger organization until its activation is required by something like the Dominion War. Then, it goes 'active' for the duration, and when the war is over, stands back down to its smaller reserve status.
The closest we came was the MACOs on the Enterprise series.
Given that Starfleet's 'nature' is primarily exploratory and defensive, I like the idea of Starfleet Marines being a 'reserve force' that is held in existence with a very small active component which exists mainly to train and administrate the larger organization until its activation is required by something like the Dominion War. Then, it goes 'active' for the duration, and when the war is over, stands back down to its smaller reserve status.
That's literally not how a modern military works.
You can't just "Turn On" Ground forces like they're robots.
Trained Professional Ground Soldiers take alot of training, prep time, and constant maintenance / upkeep.
Along with updating of skills. If you're not training to deploy, there are many other things you can train, such as fundamental skill sets.
But you can't just stand-down a Ground Force like you were parking cars.
The danger in be primarily administrative and training is that these units will struggle with actual combat. It would be more appropriate to deploy them on ships or ground installations for security and combat experience.
If you look at how Starfleet seems to operate in general, it seems that they have a half-baked idea that if you give any Starfleet personnel a phaser, they will be an effective fighting force. From their perspective, it's better to have a scientist that knows how to shoot than to have a soldier try to be a scientist. On paper it seems like a great idea, in reality it typically works out extremely poorly, as we frequently see on screen.
Unfortunately, even with their dedicated security staff they are still overcome by the casual invader. Even the Ferengi were able to do so with minimal trouble. So, Starfleet's attitude towards security is extremely limited, designed around mutual trust and support that unfortunately is easily to overcome.
The Federation would do well to borrow from a lot of the history of violent member worlds, like Andoria, Vulcan, and Earth, and incorporate at least some principles in to their use of security and ground forces.
The Federation would do well to borrow from a lot of the history of violent member worlds, like Andoria, Vulcan, and Earth, and incorporate at least some principles in to their use of security and ground forces.
Imagine some of the cool ships you could come up with for transporting, deploying, and providing air cover to Starfleet Marines. In cases where transporters weren't useable for whatever reason, perhaps they could deploy from orbit like Heinlein's Mobile Infantry.
When your security staff training is at "Rent A Mall Cop" level, I'm not surprised.
Exactly, there's alot of training knowledge, tactics, manuevers, tricks, fighting styles to pick up from all the history behind Androia, Vulcan, Earth, let alone any other member worlds that might join.
Luckily they showed a bit of competence with the MACO's.
Even DISCO showed a bit of competence by being properly geared up for away missions and having a tactical vest.
There would be many cool methods of deployment when transporter scramblers are up and blanketing entire continents or planets
