...OTOH, in a "world" where strategic weapons don't instantaneously cross from one "nation" to another, but rather take hours or days to do so across the separating (interstellar) gulf, it's a matter of life and death to keep the enemy away from your empty borderlands. If, say, ICBMs today had a range of 1,000 kilometers, theoretical tops and never to be surpassed, then keeping enemy ships 1,200 km off your coast would be a worthwhile goal.
I don't see why claiming ownership of empty space could be morally indefensible. It is, after all, empty space - worthless for any other purpose except as attack path, or a buffer zone blocking such a path.[/quote
What? Empty space is what you navigate in. If you could claim empty space, you could cut off one star system from another or completely box in a rising species. Imagine if the direct approaches to Alpha Centauri are Vulcan space, for example.
It shouldn't be too difficult legally, either, as everybody can make their own legislation on the matter, and then the legislation of the one with the biggest guns wins, regardless of other factors.
That's only
sometimes how international law works.
For Starfleet, it would be hugely important to prevent Klingon warships from entering the empty space between Earth and Sirius, because the enemy could strike within hours or minutes from that range, but would take days to attack from the more distant line-in-space border that separates the outermost holdings of the respective empires. And Starfleet would need those days to gather its far-flung starships into a defensive fleet.
I dunno. Even before you factor in cloaks, I was never convinced that anything but point defense of important targets combined with a retaliatory policy could ever be effective.
Thus, any Klingon scout loitering two and a half meters beyond that line-in-space border would have to be escorted out by a battleship, or blasted apart and then asked stern questions. Without the deterrent, the Federation would be open to surprise attack.
They're open to surprise attack anyway. It's fantastic to believe they could police that much area, and cloaks just seal it.
T'Girl said:
Well the federation could certainly "claim" open space, and if the had the political will and military might they could back it up. If you accept that the united federation of planets is politically a form of
thalassocracy, (which I kind of push) then controlling the interstellar space surrounding the various members many star systems would be one of the federation primary reasons for existing at all. Although I can't see the federation controlling a
continuous bubble surrounding the entirety of
all the federation's members, there likely being other political states in between some members.
The Royal Navy could police the North Sea approaches and enact a long blockade of Germany, but even enacting a close blockade of something the size of the Neutral Zone* strikes me as unlikely. Even high estimates of the size of Starfleet, like 100,000 just couldn't cover the volume. They're all thalassocracies, or the equivalent thereof, by necessity (few land connections to other planets), but the question is really how best to approach the problem of maintaining control over that thalassocracy's territoy. Space demands a Mahanian strategy. Corbett just can't hang when the lines of communication are many millions of cubic light years in extent, and a single infiltrator is capable of devastating a biosphere. Concentration of one's own fleet and seeking the destruction of an enemy's fleet, fleet resources, and in extremis the its value targets is probably the normal mode. Also, Mahanian strategy looks cooler.
Although the very existence of Neutral Zones suggests they have proper borders. But it's only narrative convenience or the timorousness of adversary forces that realize the Fed could annihilate them in return, if provoked, that makes it possible to enforce.
