Herbert's Dune did a good job portraying future warfare and general manslaughter as extremely ritualized: use of powerful weapons was a major religious taboo, apparently because such use would have resulted in the End of Everything soon enough.
I could easily see the Republic of SW similarly set in its ways: if your enemy amasses an amphibious attack force on an island one simple nuclear artillery lob from your beach, you are not allowed to fire that nuke at them, because it's Wrong. After all, the Republic would have thousands of years of history to prove that it really
is Wrong, and that losing for being decent in this respect is Right and ultimately better for you. Ditto with, say, Asimov's Empire.
But the Feds and some of their opponents are whippersnappers who haven't learned a thing yet. It would make sense for them to use powerful weapons instead of sending envoys with lightsabers to sort it out. Yet they still don't...
...Or do they? We never see a "real" ground fight - perhaps this is for a good reason?
Even in the abortive fightlets we witness, we do see that some post-Napoleonic moves are out of the question: air mobility is contested by mere ground troops (hoppers get shot down), transporter leapfrog isn't practiced (jamming or blocking is often mentioned as an issue, even if not in this context), and orbital supremacy is difficult to establish so space support of any kind suffers or is absent (and you'd expect a ground fight to be balanced the same way as the orbital fight in all those situations where the fighters arrived at the location from space in the first place, so impasses are plausible).
Now, none of that would be a problem if one merely killed the opponent instead of fighting him. Trek has plenty of weapons for the purpose, including ones that don't harm property (just ramp up stun and you can make everybody dead while still dressed in clean and intact clothes in nice buildings where every appliance works, say). But if everybody won wars, the galaxy probably would be an unhappy place, not to mention an empty one. Perhaps even the young races do learn to fight clean, that is, to fight small, all on their own?
Or perhaps there's always a Q or a Gary Seven to clandestinely make a WMD-based strategy backfire so badly that the youngsters necessarily learn?
And as great as StarShips are, you still need to occupy territorial facilities with ground troops to truly take over land territory.
Strongly disagreed. Ground troops are what
prevents the occupier from achieving any sort of takeover.
Taking over a planet from space is practical: the planet is yours and can't do anything about it. But the moment you deploy a Stormtrooper on the surface, the poor sap becomes a target, motivates local resistance at all levels, inevitably escalates it so that the resisters grow in numbers and competence, and necessarily ends with the sap dead and the locals beyond your control (either a zillion of them are dead from your futile attempts at retaliation, or they all secretly rebel and sabotage, or then you just run with your severed tail tucked in your pocket).
Stay in orbit and none of this will happen. We have little evidence of anti-starship cannon of any potency, and in any case those are things you can destroy, and will have to destroy even if you then plan on sacrificing your Stormtroopers in your quest to lose the planet. The locals will have nothing at all to rebel against. And as long as you don't need to threaten them for self-protection and thus establish your weakness, you can very effectively threaten them for gain.
The classic: an invading army arrives, and drops futuro-leaflets (say, holographic heralds) stating "In case you didn't notice, you all have been infected with a disease that will kill you quite gruesomely starting in 96 hours. Antidote is available at designated stations, for the small fee of total cooperation. The thing is, attempts at replication or other faking will result in a poison worse than the original disease. Oh, and the antidote is time- and region-coded, too, and a dozen other things you probably will try to find out, being stupid and all. Just yield. Or die, but the death won't be quick." and then turning, not into a holographic image of the patriotic flag of your exalted empire that the locals could hate, but merely into nothing at all.
In short, the Dominion got it right. If you need to occupy, you do it with a force that is never there, and thus never vulnerable. (Being invisible helps with that a lot, especially with the part where one can't tell whether you are there or not.)
Sure, mass suicide is an option. But we know humans never volunteer for that ITRW, and Trek folks are all humans. Any attempt at sabotaging would be tantamount to mass suicide, and we know how human resistance works, too: through hate-driven infighting. When you yourself aren't in but out, not human but simply the triumphant force, you can't be resisted.
Few of the regular Trek players are there yet. But the Dominion supposedly is - this in practice visible through the stated fact (doubt certainly permitted) that it has not had to resort to war for thousands of years. The Dominion is old; whether the associated strategy is the result or the cause, isn't all that relevant to either the winner or the losers.
Timo Saloniemi
