Of course soldiers are supposed, that is, designed, to kill, just as weapons are designed to create damage; the concept of a purely self-defending soldier is not a tactically viable one, and never was. It's just that this must be covered in a web of transparent lies, because everybody has soldiers and weapons, and the only way to create the asymmetry of good vs. evil is to lie a lot.
A successful soldier wins wars, which in the general case indeed need not involve much killing, or even much action: the most effective victories are those based on fear alone, making the enemy do your bidding without actual use of force. But if one fully accepts the lie that the soldier does not kill, then there is no chance of success no matter what the method. That is, the enemy can't be allowed to think your soldiers aren't supposed to kill. If you can't offer bloodshed as proof, you must at least talk tall, giving the impression that your promise of, say, "no first strike" is a blatant lie.
As for the Trek number of kills, Trek is all about weapons of mass destruction. Even the sidearms of the heroes are that. This in mind, the low body count we observe is doubly amazing: not only do the heroes show great restraint (although all of them kill at least hundreds, by blasting their ships out of the sky), but the enemy somehow still accepts this lack of bloodshed as a deterrent. But how can MAD work when the individual starship commander can, and on occasion has to, terminate entire cultures, and as a matter of peacetime routine rather than as a part of the war to end all wars? Why is there no gateway effect there? Why don't the enemies of the UFP constantly test the boundaries of the deterrence, allowing their soldiers to kill with these convenient WMDs until there finally is a response? It's not as if there would be a high threshold to cross, moving from moderate to unlimited destruction - it's just a matter of applying more of those same WMDs than usual, at least whenever the Klingons attack Earth or whatnot.
On the specific issue of James T. Kirk, we can check a few boxes:
- Did kill hundreds in action, by blowing up ships, but only dozens by directly gunning them down with his sidearm or punching them to death or the like
- Did threaten with bombardment of large numbers of people (including civilians), but never followed through
- Did threaten with other ways of getting large numbers of people killed, and sometimes delivered ("Taste of Armageddon" probably ended nonlethally, but "Wink of an Eye" led to mass extinction, say).
- Did enjoy a reputation of a warrior hero
- Did not earn the title of "Monster of XYZ" for any value of XYZ, or a reputation of being cruel, as far as we can tell
In both domestic and interstellar terms, Kirk would probably be the very model of the acceptable soldier, then, one worthy of commemorating both as an inspiration to domestic warriors and deterrent to foreign ones. It's just that Starfleet apparently doesn't do that through ship naming.
Timo Saloniemi
