One thing about "The Wounded"
- Thread starter indolover
- Start date
Well, the points about the technological gap between Cardassia and the Federation have been made so I won't bring them up again.
However the concept that it was a "limited war" seems to contradict Journey's End where Picard says "millions died" in the last war, when the pot was about to boil over again. So that's at least combined casualties of 1 million or more, even if this was spread over ten years.
Despite this high casualty figure, you still get the impression the Federation's pre Wolf-359 idealism, peace and harmony with everyone in the galaxy, was still getting the better of them. Certainly the Federation wasn't putting everything they had into the war, while the Cardassians were.
So really, I'd consider the Federation/Cardassian border war more of a series of smaller conflicts where the Cardassians were trying to stake claims to Federation planets along their mutual border and the Federation responded defensively each time.
However the concept that it was a "limited war" seems to contradict Journey's End where Picard says "millions died" in the last war, when the pot was about to boil over again. So that's at least combined casualties of 1 million or more, even if this was spread over ten years.
Despite this high casualty figure, you still get the impression the Federation's pre Wolf-359 idealism, peace and harmony with everyone in the galaxy, was still getting the better of them. Certainly the Federation wasn't putting everything they had into the war, while the Cardassians were.
So really, I'd consider the Federation/Cardassian border war more of a series of smaller conflicts where the Cardassians were trying to stake claims to Federation planets along their mutual border and the Federation responded defensively each time.
Knight Templar
Commodore
Even two million killed is not that many when you say ten years of fighting spread over 10-20 border planets.
And remember wars on Earth like the so called 100 years war. It lasted what, 116 years but it actually only had three major battles in all that time. Crecy. Pointers, and Agincourt.
We know in DS9 that a "Cardassian Order" totaled about 500,000 troops. So a single Cardassian Order landing on a world and fighting for a few weeks against a comparable Federation force could quickly total in fatalities a substantial portion of the "million killed" in a single battle on a single world.
The most reliable figure we have of casualties in an interstellar war is Damar's figure of 7 million over a year and a half of fighting. That was full scale war involving the Federation, the Klingons, Romulans, and the Domionion/Cardassians.
Most likely this figure can be calculated due to most of the battles being in space or uninhabited planets minimizing civillian casualties even though dozens if not hundreds of inhabited planets are involved.
So even a figure of two million between two powers over a sizable portion of time, is still not a "limited war" by any measure of the word. Or if that's your idea of limited, I don't want to see your idea of a full scale war. Seems to be a major noteworthy incident to me and probably a couple million others. Certainly the Federation seemed to be in containment mode, responding to Cardassian incursions instead of taking the war to the Cardassians. This would be consistent even with Klingon and Romulan backing a hesitance to take the fight to the Dominion.
The thing is, the early Dominion War probably was limited, as we have a point of comparison - the predicted 0.9 trillion casualties from the Jack Pack analysis in "Statistical Probabilities".
One might speculate that the Dominion would be unmotivated to hurt inhabited worlds much at first, but would start sterilizing them as soon as a situation arose where the Alpha powers would be able to make a significant defensive stand, as the Dominion would know that the opposition would be subject to psychological pressures from massive casualties. OTOH, the Dominion itself could never suffer corresponding casualties, as it had no inhabited worlds to defend on the Alpha side - so as long as the UFP was halfway victorious, casualties would be artificially low. Thus, a "slow" start to the war.
Timo Saloniemi
One might speculate that the Dominion would be unmotivated to hurt inhabited worlds much at first, but would start sterilizing them as soon as a situation arose where the Alpha powers would be able to make a significant defensive stand, as the Dominion would know that the opposition would be subject to psychological pressures from massive casualties. OTOH, the Dominion itself could never suffer corresponding casualties, as it had no inhabited worlds to defend on the Alpha side - so as long as the UFP was halfway victorious, casualties would be artificially low. Thus, a "slow" start to the war.
Timo Saloniemi
Well I'm skeptical to take what the Jack Pack turned out as reliable, but 900 billion is possible being Weyoun was nonchalantly willing to eliminate all life on Earth. So one would presume once the Federation lost the ability to defend it's core worlds, the Jem'Hadar would start targetting said civilian population's to start adding up to that figure.
Too bad nothing was ever said about how the Dominion treated occupied Betazed. That would have been telling.
