DUDE, THAT IS THE POINT! A fleet of 47 Klingon ships destroyed by a SINGLE Romulan ship is NOT a RANDOM situation!
Until Starfleet categorizes it otherwise, it is. It's not as if this information was intercepted by an intelligence sweep from the Argolis cluster, it's a distress signal received BY ACCIDENT from an academy cadet. Even IF Starfleet had a reason to inform Pike about it--let alone give him a full briefing with all the current information at hand--they would still have to follow up on it first with their intelligence division to figure out whether or not the message was genuine, whether it's related to another situation they're tracking, what it could mean to the Romulans, what it could mean to the Klingons, and how Starfleet will react. Depending on those conclusions they might end up forward this information to the Constellation instead of Enterprise.
That's right, a cadet made the discovery. In the Long Range Sensor Labs. That name sounds big and official.
Modern comparison: some Naval Academy students in the "Long Range Radio Communications Lab," using a HAM radio accidentally intercepts a message from a Russian official saying that a Chinese ASAT missile has just shot down a Russian Soyuz-TKS spacecraft. They immediately call their superior, who takes the message, sends the students home, and calls HIS superior.
But your reasoning, by the
following morning news of the attack should have gone out from Annapolis to every command grade officer in the U.S. Navy, even on ships that are still sitting in port waiting for a shakedown cruise. History, however, shows this is rarely the case; in Starfleet's case, it's more likely that the first Pike would have heard about it was when the Federation News Service reported the fact that the Klingons had declared war on Romulus in response to the attack.
And LOL, I'm just imagining another cadet sitting right next to Uhura who makes the discovery of the Lightning Storm inside the Neutral Zone at 22:00 hours. Then one hour later, Uhura makes her discovery. And the officials are now pondering... "do we let Starfleet Command know about this beautiful lightning storm, or the Romulan ship busting 47 Klingon ships?"
I doubt they pondered it very long. I also doubt the Starfleet officials responsible for those kind of inquiries would have been on their speed dial, considering they are, you know, Academy instructors and not SIGINT specialists.
And if you think how it works in the real world... if something happens in North Korea, no matter how small, the United States would know, because they are constantly observing their main threats.
Absolutely the United States would know. The first people who would know about it would be the CIA or the military intelligence division that uncovered the information. From there it goes through the pipeline to the Pentagon to be taken apart and broken down by analysts, and depending on what the situation is, it either goes straight to the President in an emergency briefing, or the appropriate cabinet member. AFTER that point, the Navy may decide to provide detailed information to its commanders in the region and tell them to be prepared for possible problems, assuming they haven't already figured it out from their own sources.
The one thing that will NOT happen is that some academy cadet hears about, say, 47 North Korean tanks being destroyed by an air attack and six hours later the Captain of a yet-to-be-launched aircraft carrier gets a full report on the situation. The information has to go up and then back down the chain of command for that, and unless Pike is the instructor in charge of the Long Range Sensor Lab, he would be one of the LAST people to know about it.
The entire world would know because of all the tweeters and intergoobles and facetubes of people who received messages about the incident (like radio transmissions). And think how this evolves in the next 250 years on an interstellar level.
I doubt that changes matters much. Captain Pike may have a twitter account, but Klingons use ForeheadSpace. It would take considerably longer than twelve hours for that information to find its way to Pike's hands by
accident. As it stands, the only reason he knew anything about it at all was because Kirk happened to overhear Uhura mention it to Gaila; even
Kirk didn't initially think it was all that important until he heard about the lightning storm.
Indeed, the only two people in the entire fleet who would have connected the two were Pike and Kirk. The rest of Starfleet's brass would have read the report and shaken their heads thinking "Aw, not this shit again... Better beef up border security."
Why in TUC Kirk never knew about the explosion of a moon of the Klingon capital planet is just the same type of huge blunder.
How do you figure? The only reason
Excelsior knew about it was because they were sitting right there on the border. Rumors would have crossed the border via merchants and radio traffic, but the Klingon news service would have censored it and the Federation news service would be pulling their hair out trying to figure out what was going on.
Space, you know, is very very BIG. Across interstellar distances, unless you've got a Starship-grade sensor array and a lot of time on your hands, what's happening ten light years away might as well be on the other side of the galaxy. Subspace sensors or not, we'd be hard pressed to spot the explosion of a moon in Alpha Centuari, let alone hundreds of light years away.
