And the very act of scanning and forwarding the position is an act of military reconnaissance.
Actually it's an act of law enforcement, depending on whether or not it materializes into military action. OTOH, about 20 pages ago it was pointed out that reconnaissance isn't always a military mission either.
So you do agree a military mission will almost always take priority over a simultaneous exploratory mission?
Again, it depends on the nature of the threat. Starfleet will ALWAYS redirect to a different mission when lives are at stake, even if it means putting off a military mission (which they arguably
did in Angel One).
Land troops won't be any more useful against such a planet because those very same defences will keep them from ever reaching it.
That's what they used to say about air power until the South Vietnamese and later the Israelis found out the hard way that most of the time this just isn't the case. Air defenses can always be surmounted, neutralized, bypassed or redirected without actually being dominated. And again, the point about weapons ranges becomes especially relevant, since it puts a certain limitation on how well you can defend a planet even with a hundred ships in orbit; they don't HAVE to dominate your fleet, in fact they don't even have to distract it, all they have to do is get within transporter range of the planet and beam down an assault force large enough to get the party started. They can hang and fight for a while (keep your ships distracted while the ground battle rages) or they can bug out altogether and swing back around a couple days later to land even more troops.
If your enemy is trying to DESTROY your planet, there isn't a whole lot you can do about it, considering--as you pointed out--it doesn't take many ships to do that. But he's trying to CAPTURE the planet and exercise control over it; since you cannot control a planet from ORBIT, the loss of the ground war means your fleet no longer has anything to protect and you are now, by definition, in hostile space.
The only way to defeat the defences is with a fleet. Well, you can attempt a sneak special operations attack or something - but that would be the job for the Starfleet's equivalent of Navy SEALS.
Or Klingon/Romulan ships which at various times have demonstrated the ability to use transporters will still under cloak. Even if they lack this ability (most of the time, they don't seem to) then they can easily slip under your defenses and beam down an entire army before you can even bring your weapons to bear.
And Klingons, we know,
prefer ground combat to fleet action. If they have their way they don't even bother destroying your ships, they just BOARD you and hack their way to the bridge with their batleths.
Wouldn't that by extension mean a naval assault would never be able to breach coastal fortifications? After all, you can put much larger guns, much heavier shielding and much more ammunition on land than on a ship.
Indeed, which is why naval assaults ALONE cannot accomplish this, and neither can air assault. No matter how many AA emplacements or SAM batteries you bomb, the enemy can always build new ones or reposition old ones from the rear line. If they're really good at it (like the North Vietnamese) they can put up new sites even faster than you can target and destroy them.
Even if you have air superiority, the only way to PERMANENTLY suppress those defenses is to physically occupy the ground on which they would be built. Bombing them from the air may be easier, it may even cause more quantifiable damage, but it is STRATEGICALLY useless unless you've got ground forces moving up behind the air strikes.
And starships have one massive advantage a planet doesn't, the fact that they can move. They can fire their torpedoes at the planet all day while evading the planet's torpedoes. Heck, they don't even need torpedoes. Just grab some asteroida with a tractor beam and hurl them at high speed at the planet's defences.
True as that is, consider the amount of difficulty the Klingons had capturing Deep Space Nine. This for a single space station in interplanetary space surrounded by a massive Klingon fleet, no starship defenses to speak of. If not for the fear of starting a war with the Federation, Gowron could and would have mopped the floor with that Starfleet task force and taken the station anyway.
But WHERE are those forces? We've never seen even an inkling of them in any of the major crises. And if they're there why is it always Starfleet that has to save the day?
Why is it always MARINES who have to save the day in movies that are about marines? If you knew nothing about the U.S. Armed forces you'd walk out of "Jarhead" wondering if the United States even HAS an army.
I was not talking about comparing planet-based fighting in today's setting and in Trek's setting. I was talking about comparing a war fought in today's extent of 'the world' (the surface of a single planet) to a war in the Trek's extent of 'the world' (a significant part of the Galaxy, comprising lots and lots of planets and the space between them).
Just because you can travel the galaxy doesn't make the world any smaller. Your soldiers still stand a little under six feet tall and the weapons they fire are still only effective up to a couple hundred meters. Planets are not small things in a big universe, planets are big things in an even BIGGER universe.
You CAN'T win a war spanning hundreds of planets just with land troops.
Of course you can, for the same reason you can do so on Earth. Even if you don't have direct land access to the enemy's territory, you can always arrange indirect transport by air or through somebody else's territory. Starships do not typically appear to be in the business of ferrying troops (except in "Yesterday's Enterprise" alternate timeline, and this after twenty years of warfare with the Klingons, who
do).
You don't have large land masses and large land fronts (compared to the size of the entire 'battlefield').
Which is irrelevant, because the size of the COMBATANTS has not changed at all. Moving into space doesn't turn Earth into Oahu, especially since any major increase in your tactical capabilities has a corresponding increase from threat races, and your soldiers are STILL under two meters tall.
Yeah, but without colonial or deep space interests you're not really a space power, are you?
The Federation has never demonstrated a particularly high priority over its colonial interests, except insofar as it cares about the lives of its citizens (it cares significantly less about where they live than it does about whether they live at all). They don't seem to be interested in acquiring or projecting power in the modern sense, unless they have some sort of altruistic excuse.
But it would be ridiculously expensive to get it to Earth, way more than just producing it here.
Not in the case of platinum, where the cost per kilogram is less than one third the average cost per kilogram of payload into Earth orbit. If you can return 3000kg of platinum (not ore, but the actual meta) for every 8000kg of payload sent to orbit, then you've turned a profit. The only thing that doesn't currently exist is a corporate presence in space capable of taking the risk, but that will eventually change.
More importantly, the POLITICAL WILL to do so does not exist, even if that profitability could be concretely demonstrated. Military participation in exploration has a long history, but PRIVATE exploration has an even longer one, and in some cases private industry has actually ousted the military from its role as a warfighting organization (the Dutch East India company, for example). This is the case in space exploration as well, and to a FAR greater extent than it was in the age of sail, because of the never-before-existing difference between manned and unmanned operations. The military can always cover its defense operations better with automated systems while profitable exploration will always require some human presence. For this reason it does not appear that practical MILITARY space craft will ever be manned vehicles.
I don't think that they are lying, doing propaganda or that they are out in space solely for strategic value. How does stating that exploration and discovery are the key motivation for doing the things they do preclude that those things also have a strategic benefit and that that is also one of the reasons Starfleet does them?
I never said it doesn't. I said that they are explorers FIRST and soldiers second. I've speculated in the past that the reason for this is probably some political expedience, where an enormous space combat force is difficult to justify in the absence of clear and present danger where an enormous EXPLORATION force makes alot more sense. It's easier to procure extra funds from Federation worlds if it's expected that Starfleet is going to be finding new resources for them to exploit and new benefits for everyone through peaceful exploration; nobody asks the question of "Why do we need thirty galaxy class starships when the Klingons are our allies and the Romulans are isolationists now?" because it's understood that the Galaxy's enormous size and complexity is intended for peaceful missions primarily, and will always be justified even if the Federation never goes to war with anyone ever again.
Yeah, but 'entire planet' is comparatively nothing in a universe where the largest powers have hundreds and thousands of worlds.
"Comparatively" makes no difference. Fighting for control of a city is just as difficult now--if not more so--than it was a thousand years ago, despite the fact that we can now project power on a global scale and deliver weapons of mass destruction over ranges of thousands of miles.
Talking about Federation membership, I'd bet the Militia being too weak to protect Bajor was one of the major reasons Bajorans sought UFP membership.
IIRC, it was the
Federation that sought their membership primarily; Bajorans mostly hated the idea until Ben Sisko became the emissary and suddenly it became their religious obligation to join up.
The answer is No. NO ONE raised that as a point against Starfleet being a military. It was actually neozeks who first brought it up saying "some people simplistically think military=evil." So far all I have is your word for it, but this now the fourth thread on this subject I have seen and I have NEVER seen anyone actually argue against Starfleet being a military on the basis of some negative feelings about the military.
Yes, I brought it up. And I have seen it. In fact, on this very board, there was a thread in TrekLit where IIRC a couple of people had a long discussion similar to this and you could clearly tell one of them had a strong bias against the military and that colored his perception of Starfleet.
Admittedly there's alot of weird shit going on at Treklit and I tend to avoid it as much as possible. So I wouldn't know. I've never seen it in General Discussion, though.
