Whay doesn't starfleet use ships by other races.

[Sci]

Considering the number of witnessed Federation-wide threats, as opposed to the ones merely causing uncertainty about the continuing existence of planet Earth, I'd say the chances of some other defense service existing are a flat zero. Were something else out there, we would have seen it many times over during the Dominion war.

Except the Klingons and Romulans were arguably only an immediate threat to Earth and Earth-local operators in the first place.

The problem with this argument is that ENT Season Four makes it clear that the Romulans were very clearly more of a threat to Vulcan, Andor, and Tellar than they were to Earth. Meanwhile, TOS makes it clear that the Klingons were a long-term rival who threatened Federation border worlds.

Even the Cardassians didn't become a problem until humans started building colonies along the expanding Cardassian border,

Plenty of the Federation colonists seen along the Cardassian border, and plenty of the Maquis, were non-Humans. Colonization along the Cardassian border was a Federation endeavor, not a Human endeavor.

which would seem to suggest that while the Dominion War could be fought along many fronts, the "Earth front" that included Earth, Cardassia and Bajor would have been the primary responsibility of Starfleet

DS9's Dominion War arc, especially "Favor the Bold," make it very clear that Earth is a distance away from the Cardassian border, and that defense of all Federation worlds was the responsibility of the Federation Starfleet, including Vulcan, Andor, Tellar, and Betazed.

if there existed a separate Andorian Blue Fleet or somesuch...

How often was Andoria even MENTIONED during the Dominion War? By TNG's time, it's not even clear whether or not the Andorians are Federation members.

Andor was established to still be a Federation Member in the 24th Century in several DS9 episodes, most explicitly in "In the Cards" -- in which it was established that the Federation Starfleet is responsible for the defense of Andor.

Neither. I was asking about the scope of the fictional universe in which Star Trek takes place,

Let's look at the context of the conversation again:

At the end of the day, it's a question of how big you think the Star Trek universe really is. Is it a place where a handful of small far-flung planets, divided by huge interstellar gulfs, have banded together to find common ground culturally and economically, or is it a place where a handful of solar systems that just happened to be in the same local cluster ceded their autonomy to an Earth-based superstate?

It's a place where over 150 planets, some relatively close and some relatively far-flung, all divided by huge interstellar gulfs, have banded together to find common ground culturally and economically, and thereby ceded their sovereignty, but not their general autonomy, to an interstellar federal superstate whose seat of government is located on Earth, and Earth is one of the planets who have so ceded their sovereignty.

It's very clear that this is a question about the nature of the Federation, not the nature of all of known space.

Which is to say, what "world" are we supposed to be projecting on the Federation when we imagine it? Is it the "world" as defined along anglo-centric terms such as to mean "Our country, and also our allies, and a bunch of people who don't like us" or "the world" in global terms to mean "a bunch of countries that includes us."

Neither. The Federation is something different -- it's more akin to a planet-wide democratic federal state than it is to anything that has ever existed in reality.

This is based on the false premises that accepting a certain amount of centralization in joining a federal system is the same thing as yielding to imperium

It IS the same when it comes to the centralization of one's military, especially if that centralization implies either the disbandment or expatriation of ones' own armed forces.

No, it's not. An empire is a type of polity in which there is a dominant, pre-existing political unit -- the "center" -- which dominates all of the other member polities (the "periphery") for its own benefit. A true federal system is one in which none of the member polities dominate the others, and in which the federal government is one that represents the interests of the entire federal state and balances all of the competing needs of its members.

In particular, with regards to the military -- there is no reason whatsoever to think that Federation Membership involves dissolving local defense forces, or involves compromising the new Member world's defense in the interests of the center.

You become part of a foreign empire the moment you entrust a foreign entity with your national defense,

By that logic, any federal state is actually an empire, and democratic, egalitarian union is impossible.

You don't become part of a foreign empire when you join the Federation. In part, because the Federation ceases to be foreign upon your joining it. The Federation shares the burden of defending your world with you; it supplements rather than undermines your existing planetary defense system.

especially when it is implied that that foreign entity will value its own defense at a higher priority than your own (something Starfleet has been seen to do in nearly every iteration of Trek; they have this concept of "core worlds" which must be held at any cost, the most important of which is always Earth; everyone else is seemingly left to wonder).

When have we ever seen the Federation Starfleet compromise the defense of Member worlds close to the border in favor of worlds closer to the capital?

Hell -- most of the time, it's Earth itself that's facing the threat of destruction, not the rest of the UFP.

The Federation is a democratic union of democratic planetary states, which practices federalism. It leaves a great deal of power in the hands of its Members, but it also has specific sovereign powers itself. And it is not dominated by any one Member -- not even Earth.

Militarily, this appears not to be the case. That's the significant difference here. It could, certainly, be mere coincidence that both Starfleet headquarters, the Academy and all of the major construction and R&D facilities all just happen to be on the same planet as the Federation's headquarters.

All this means is that there's a capital planet where the government and military HQ is housed. That does not mean that Earth dominates the rest of the Federation. Indeed, of the three canonical Federation Presidents, only one of them was even Human (and we don't know if he was from Earth); the others were Grazerite and Efrosian, and no implication was ever made that they were a subordinated caste within the UFP. There's certainly no indication that the Federation Councillor from United Earth in any way dominates the Federation Council, for instance.

Meanwhile, you're overlooking the fact that the canon has established that Starfleet Academy has numerous branch campuses across the UFP, and that Starfleet Command doesn't run every decision through Headquarters -- the Admiralty operates as much out of starbases and HQs away from Earth as it does on Earth. Hell, it was the divisions of Starfleet Command that operated out of Starbase 375 and Starbase Deep Space 9 that controlled most Starfleet operations during the Dominion War. Militarily, Starfleet Headquarters on Earth was almost completely irrelevant.

But it goes beyond coincidence that starbases and ships outside of Sol are overwhelmingly dominated by humans,

Except we don't know this. We have only ever gotten a good look at three 24th Century crews -- 3 out of a Starfleet that DS9 established has dozens of fleets and thousands of ships. This is not enough to have a statistically meaningful sample.

And on top of that, we don't know that all of those Starfleet officers we see running around who look Human actually are Human. Any number of those officers we glimpse but don't get a good look at could be Betazoid, Ardanans, Argelians, Capellans, Elasians, Lumerians, Ullians, Trill, Ramatians, Risians, Deltans, El-Aurians, etc.

And on top of that, even among the Humans, we don't know how many of them actually come from Earth. Lt. Hawk from First Contact, for instance, was established in the TNG novel Section 31: Rogue to be a native of Mars whose family still resented Earth for opposing Martian independence before the Founding of the Federation.

Further, it is very clear that the Federation Starfleet is not the United Earth Starfleet.

That's far from clear at this point.

Yes, it is. The Starfleet of the 24th Century is referred to at numerous points in DS9 as "the Federation Starfleet," not the "United Earth Starfleet;" they talk in DS9 about taking an oath to defend the Federation, not Earth; they always introduce themselves as "Captain X of the Federation Starship Y;" and, most importantly, they refer numerous times throughout TNG, DS9, and VOY to there being six starships Enterprise and never reference the NX-01 -- meaning, they don't count the NX-01, because it was part of the United Earth Starfleet, not the Federation Starfleet.

The canonical evidence does, however, seem to imply that the Federation Starfleet is the UFP's only federal defense organization. It seems that Member worlds maintain their own forces in the same way that U.S. states have their own National Guards and State Defense Forces, but there's no indication that they operate on a Federation-wide scale.

This is problematic insofar as the Federation Starfleet is as highly centralized as it is vis a vis Earth.

You have yet to demonstrate in what manner the Federation Starfleet is highly centralized vis a vis Earth. We've seen numerous Starfleet operations being planned and approved in branches far away from Earth, with no involvement established from HQ whatsoever. Hell, in TOS, we never even saw contemporary Earth, nor was it established that Starfleet Headquarters was on Earth until TMP. (In fact, Franz Joseph's old Star Fleet Technical Manual from the mid-70s depicted Starfleet Headquarters as a space station, not bound to any planet.)

It's becomes more problematic if those local defense forces are depicted as having secondary authority to Starfleet such that the latter can become involved in a situation and tell the locals "We are taking control of this situation." If Starfleet has higher authority than the locals, this again trends towards imperialism.

I'm sure that the Federation Starfleet is a parallel defense agency with no authority over the local agency unless that local agency is called into Federation service by the UFP President -- the same way, for instance, the United States Army has no authority over the Maryland State Guard unless it's called into federal service.

How you handle a foreign threat is a big giveaway for your definition. A federal system prioritizes overall national defense of all its territories; in the event of a foreign threat, it will tend to mass its defenses on the very edge of its territory to prevent the enemy from attacking its outermost/vulnerable areas.

Which is what we saw in the early DS9 Dominion War episodes, before the Dominion was able to break through and enter Federation space. It's also what we saw the Federation Starfleet do in ST09 -- amassing its fleet along the Klingon border, such that the majority of its forces couldn't intervene in time when the Narada was found to have penetrated Federation space and attacked Vulcan and Earth. Then there are the numerous occasions when Earth hasn't even had an appreciable number of starships in orbit or in the Sol system -- V'Ger, for instance. So it's pretty clear that the Federation does exactly that -- try to protect the overall border -- on a standard basis, even to the extent of sometimes leaving its own capital planet relatively undefended.

An empire grows out of a central point, so the response to the foreign threat is to use those outer territories -- and even some of the inner ones -- as buffers to absorb the enemy onslaught or at least keep it at a distance until a compromise can be reached that the central government finds satisfactory (even if the outer territories hate everything about it).

We have never seen this done in Star Trek.

Of course, the Klingons have said EXACTLY this on a number of occasions. "The Federation is nothing more than a 'homo-sapiens only club.' Present company accepted of course." And earlier, "Vulcans are the intellectual puppets of this Federation!" Both the Klingons and the Romulans seem to believe that Earth -- and humans in particular -- are the heart of the Federation, and moreover, they firmly believe that the destruction of Earth would bring the entire Federation crashing down. Maybe they know something we don't?

More likely, they're too hamstrung by their own imperialism to recognize that another powerful state could be federal in nature rather than just a copy of their own system.

 

[Timo]

The idea that there could exist other fronts in the Dominion war where non-human, perhaps non-Starfleet UFP defensive forces were in action doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

After all, DS9 extensively featured a mixing of the fronts, with fleets diverted from other fronts to partake in the spectacular fights of the Bajoran-Cardassian one. Starfleet was Starfleet there - no "alien" ship designs, no "alien" sub-organizations or parallel navies.

We could further dispute the existence of fronts in the first place, as every location within the UFP was close to every other location in terms of starship or fleet travel times. It just isn't plausible that this type of dynamic fighting could have failed to reveal a competing defensive force, unless said force flat out failed to take any part in the war. Which still leaves Starfleet as the sole defending force of the UFP in all circumstances, as these traitors could not be counted on no matter what.

When have we ever seen the Federation Starfleet compromise the defense of Member worlds close to the border in favor of worlds closer to the capital?

Now the mixing-of-fronts thing in DS9 might provide us with an example: after all, Betazed was neglected and taken, and subsequently indicated to be a path through which the invasion could proceed deeper into the Federation. But the neglect wasn't due to Starfleet being at Earth: an entire fleet was assigned to defend Betazed, but was "out on exercises" at the key moment.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Sci]

When have we ever seen the Federation Starfleet compromise the defense of Member worlds close to the border in favor of worlds closer to the capital?

Now the mixing-of-fronts thing in DS9 might provide us with an example: after all, Betazed was neglected and taken, and subsequently indicated to be a path through which the invasion could proceed deeper into the Federation. But the neglect wasn't due to Starfleet being at Earth: an entire fleet was assigned to defend Betazed, but was "out on exercises" at the key moment.

Timo Saloniemi

Fair enough -- the question ought to be, "When have we ever seen the Federation Starfleet intentionally compromise the defense of Member worlds close to the border in favor of worlds closer to the capital?"

 

[blssdwlf]

The idea that there could exist other fronts in the Dominion war where non-human, perhaps non-Starfleet UFP defensive forces were in action doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

After all, DS9 extensively featured a mixing of the fronts, with fleets diverted from other fronts to partake in the spectacular fights of the Bajoran-Cardassian one. Starfleet was Starfleet there - no "alien" ship designs, no "alien" sub-organizations or parallel navies.

We could further dispute the existence of fronts in the first place, as every location within the UFP was close to every other location in terms of starship or fleet travel times. It just isn't plausible that this type of dynamic fighting could have failed to reveal a competing defensive force, unless said force flat out failed to take any part in the war. Which still leaves Starfleet as the sole defending force of the UFP in all circumstances, as these traitors could not be counted on no matter what.

How does one tell the difference between a "defensive force ship" from a UFP one? Or the difference between a starship that is under Earth defense authority or operating for Federation purposes?

I'd say you can't tell them apart unless it was pointed out to you. It could be argued that the funky designs of the Norway-class, Akira-class, etc are non-Earth ship designs and that alien defensive forces were drafted in to defend the entire Federation in DS9, IMHO.

 

[Timo]

...Thus establishing that they don't operate separately, as we both see how they behave in battle (single formations, undifferentiated melee) and how they are being commanded (onscreen Starfleet admirals for each fleet, no contribution from exotic aliens in exotic uniforms).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[blssdwlf]

...Does that have more to do with 100+ years of fleet integration where there might not be any more exterior or behavioral differentiation between an Earth defense ship and say an Andorian defense ship? I think your argument might be stronger during the Enterprise series or even pre-TOS/TOS though.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Considering the number of witnessed Federation-wide threats, as opposed to the ones merely causing uncertainty about the continuing existence of planet Earth, I'd say the chances of some other defense service existing are a flat zero. Were something else out there, we would have seen it many times over during the Dominion war.

Except the Klingons and Romulans were arguably only an immediate threat to Earth and Earth-local operators in the first place.

The problem with this argument is that ENT Season Four makes it clear that the Romulans were very clearly more of a threat to Vulcan, Andor, and Tellar than they were to Earth.

That depends. The Romulans meddled with their politics through various means, but it's unclear which of them -- if any -- participated in the so-called "Earth-Romulan War." That could have simply been Romulus' unsuccessful attempt to invade Earth and the ensuing counterattack, which would explain Romulus' obsession with conquering Earth 200 years later.

Meanwhile, TOS makes it clear that the Klingons were a long-term rival who threatened Federation border worlds.

Once again, much less clear is which Federation members -- and whose colonies, specifically -- were threatened by the Klingons.

Plenty of the Federation colonists seen along the Cardassian border, and plenty of the Maquis, were non-Humans. Colonization along the Cardassian border was a Federation endeavor, not a Human endeavor.

And much like Starfleet, it's a situation that appears mostly dominated by humans, handled with mostly human-based policies which are enforced primarily by human Starfleet crewmen. The pattern is clearly not intentional (as far as writer intent) but by DS9 it had become almost explicit that the Federation disconnect with the Maquis was almost as cultural as it was political, and the particular culture causing the disconnect was that of EARTH culture. I doubt, for example, that the Andorians would have been that much opposed to the Maquis taking up arms to defend their own colonies, nor the Tellarites would have so easily given up any of their economic interests in the region. Other Federation races would have had a much different interpretation of the situation and the Federation's priorities in this matter, but what we SEE is that a uniquely human point of view is being imposed on the colonists for some reason. This is either because the Federation is dominated primarily by human interests and human politics (a possibility that neither of us seems to relish) or because the Maquis situation falls strictly under human jurisdiction for some reason and nobody else was ever consulted. I lean towards the latter, since in DS9 it is implied that Bajor and Cardassia are both uncomfortably close to Earth.

DS9's Dominion War arc, especially "Favor the Bold," make it very clear that Earth is a distance away from the Cardassian border

Actually, "Favor the Bold" suggests that Earth is the closest major Federation world TO the Cardassian border, with the others being somewhere on the peripheral or at least equidistant. It is the extent of Earth's heavy defenses, not its distance, that dissuades the Dominion from invading it outright.

It's enough to know that a trip from DS9 to Earth can be accomplished in less than a week using a standard runabout... of course, ENT suggests that the Klingon home world is only 4 days away at warp 4, so travel time and distance may not be related factors.

Andor was established to still be a Federation Member in the 24th Century in several DS9 episodes, most explicitly in "In the Cards" -- in which it was established that the Federation Starfleet is responsible for the defense of Andor.

We now note the COMPLETE absence of Andorians in Starfleet service by the 24th century. We have the same two options to explain this fact: Either the Andorians no longer have a fleet of their own and have ceded defense of their world to a mostly human-dominated organization, or the Andorians have their own space service which -- much like the Andorians themselves -- has never been seen and is rarely spoken of in polite company.

You have to wonder what would cause a warrior race like the Andorians to cede responsibility to their own defense to a "peaceful exploration" outfit like Starfleet. It's unlikely they would do so if they had their choice, which again raises the possibility that maybe they WEREN'T given a choice.

Maybe an explanation -- finally -- for Picard's "renegade Andorian" anecdote in "the Survivors"? He might be referencing relatively recent events, namely the subjugation of one of Andoria's few remaining starship commanders who didn't take the dismantling of their fleet with a smile.

It's very clear that this is a question about the nature of the Federation, not the nature of all of known space.

To be sure, it's about the nature of Earth's role in the Federation. Since you're still not getting it, I can simplify it even farther: is Earth the Fatherland of the Federation, or is it part of a brotherhood? The former implies it is the most important world of them all, politically AND militarily; the latter implies it is merely one of many, the loss of which would be felt and mourned but would hardly doom the entire Federation to collapse.

That's the difference between the United States and the Federation. The US could -- and did -- survive the destruction of its capital city. In the opinion of just about everyone, the Federation could not survive -- indeed, could not even exist -- without Earth.

Neither. The Federation is something different -- it's more akin to a planet-wide democratic federal state...

Democratic federal states are not so centralized; that's what breaks the analogy. Too much of it depends on the activity of a single world.

This is either an illusion (due to the fact that Star Trek plays to a human audience) or a feature of what is essentially a democratic empire.

No, it's not. An empire is a type of polity in which there is a dominant, pre-existing political unit -- the "center" -- which dominates all of the other member polities (the "periphery") for its own benefit.

Which -- IF we assume the primacy of Starfleet as shown -- describes the Federation to a tee. I'm merely suggesting we either accept that the Federation is essentially a democratic empire, or we accept that there is ALOT more to the Federation -- politically, economically and militarily -- that we have not seen and that Earth and Starfleet are merely a very small (if highly influential) part of it.

Except we don't know this.

We have never seen it otherwise. The question is WHY. Is it because human interests are dominant in the setting in which Star Trek takes place (which could be either regional or merely organizational vis a vis Starfleet), or is it because human interests are dominant in the FEDERATION?

You clearly lean towards the former interpretation, but then you reject the implications of that interpretation: that in a political alliance as vast and diverse as the Federation it is inconceivable that the Starfleet we have seen is typical of the entire Federation from end to end. Even YOU concede that we've never seen the Andorian- or tellarite- or Vulcan- or Xindi-dominated arm of Starfleet, and thus we know absolutely nothing about them. We cannot even establish for certain that those fleets even exist, let alone what kind of ships they use, what kind of training they receive, what kind of command structure they answer to and what their responsibilities are. From the lack of mention in DS9, however, we can INFER that those fleets are not part of the command structure we have come to understand as "Starfleet," thus nobody mentions them for the same reason nobody in movies about Guadalcanal ever seems to know or care about what happened at Stalingrad.

In short, it's a question about the nature of those alien-dominated space forces we never see on screen. To deny they exist AT ALL is to accept the concept of Federation as Empire, and then all you have to do is concede that Earth -- being the only world to truly achieve enlightenment having turned itself into a cashless post-scarcity paradise -- really IS doing the universe a favor by slowly dominating it.

Plenty of characters WITHIN STAR TREK seem to dig the Federation as Empire theory; Eddington compared the Federation to the Borg, with a hidden-in-plain-sight agenda to assimilate everyone everywhere and bring them under Federation hegemony, and Quark and Garak once compared the Federation to a bottle of rootbeer: A vile, insidious thing, all bubbly and sweet and happy, and if you drink enough of it you even start to like it.

And on top of that, even among the Humans, we don't know how many of them actually come from Earth.

Which means that even accounting for colonization, humans would STILL be over-represented in known crew compositions. In some ways, that actually makes things worse.

Yes, it is. The Starfleet of the 24th Century is referred to at numerous points in DS9 as "the Federation Starfleet," not the "United Earth Starfleet"

The Illinois National Guard is usually referred to as merely "The National Guard" when spoken of in local terms. It is usually not neccesary to specify that the unit in question belongs to the Illinois National Guard unless other NG units are in the area.

Those instances in TOS where Kirk (or a Romulan or Klingon) makes an explicit reference to Starfleet as an EARTH organization would therefore be taken as implicit that non-Earth Starfleet forces are present or at least in the area. For instance, when spock calls the chapel in "Balance of Terror" and says "Earth Outpost Four reports they're under attack," this either indicates the outpost is manned by "Earth's Starfleet" or "The outpost within Earth's jurisdiction." (The Romulans' continued mention of "The Earthman" and "The Earth vessel" could support either interpretation, but I lean towards the latter).

In this case, the Starfleet we know is merely the Sol branch of it such that Earth Starfleet has been "incorporated" into the Federation service more seamlessly than most (or possibly less; how would we know the difference?) but would be one of many fleets headquartered on one of the Federation's many worlds. But that still leaves open the possibility that no other fleet exists, in which case every alien who has ever implied or even outright stated that the Federation is basically "the Great Smiley Terran Empire" is basically correct.

I'm sure that the Federation Starfleet is a parallel defense agency with no authority over the local agency unless that local agency is called into Federation service by the UFP President -- the same way, for instance, the United States Army has no authority over the Maryland State Guard unless it's called into federal service.

Then where the hell is the Andorian Fleet?

Again the choice: are we merely seeing the region(s) in which Earth resides and has primary influence, or is what we're seeing representative of the entire Federation? There could be a sector of the galaxy where all the Starfleet ships have Andorian script on their hulls, are named after Andorian explorers/ships/cities/concepts and have mostly Andorian crews with token aliens scattered here and there; could be we've never seen them because Andorians only ever colonize frigid semi-glacial worlds and the best place to find those is right out along the Tholian border (thus the Tholians rarely appear in the American broadcast of Star Trek but would be frequent antagonists in the Andorian version of the show).

An empire grows out of a central point, so the response to the foreign threat is to use those outer territories -- and even some of the inner ones -- as buffers to absorb the enemy onslaught or at least keep it at a distance until a compromise can be reached that the central government finds satisfactory (even if the outer territories hate everything about it).

We have never seen this done in Star Trek.

That's what they did to the Maquis. It's also what they WOULD have done to Bajor, which was the entire reason why Bajor declined to join the Federation until after the Dominion War.

Think about that for a moment. Arguably, the most strategically significant position in the entire galaxy was the wormhole to the Gamma Quadrant: seal that up, and the Federation's mortal enemy would be cut off from reinforcements from its main sphere of influence. Inducting Bajor into the Federation would be like admitting Hawaii unit the Union on the eve of World War-II.

Instead, the Bajorans declare their neutrality, calculating -- correctly -- that the Federation WILL NOT defend them if it means putting their "core worlds" at risk.

That is either because of the nature of the Federation, or it's because of the nature of Starfleet. ONE of those two things is primarily focussed on the Federation's core worlds. The question is, which one?

More likely, they're too hamstrung by their own imperialism to recognize that another powerful state could be federal in nature rather than just a copy of their own system.

Which is funny, because nobody calls them on it until Kurla suggests that peace will eventually lead to the annihilation of Klingon culture. THAT part, says McCoy, isn't true: Klingons are welcome to join the homo-sapiens-only club with their existing culture intact (just going to have to observe certain ground rules is all).

But Azetbur calls the Federation a "homosapiens only club," and Chang immediately apologizes for offending Spock, who nods politely.

What is Chang apologizing for, if not drawing attention to something Spock -- as a Vulcan -- might feel a bit sensitive about?

Just a thought.

 

[Tim Walker]

I'm thinking that a devastated Cardassia would find a way to rebuild its economy-by exporting warships. What happens to politics when minor powers have their fleets upgraded?