They could be in the regular Starfleet, they could be a separate organization entirely (the 'FALCOs' ), or as I prefer to call them - and yes, I'm well aware there is no overt evidence for an organization of this name, and I don't care, cuz I like the sound of it anyway - the Starfleet Marine Corps.
But I don't think they're Starfleet, though. As I said to Saito, canon references alot of overtly military equipment that Starfleet rarely uses and has NEVER been seen to use in the 24th century (and we even know from "Legacy" that a starship carries photon grenades in its arsenal, just as Voyager carries "spatial charges").
IF they were part of Starfleet they would have a recognizeable presence on Starfleet ships; the contrast, I think, would be staggering, so much so that the two branches of service would have very little in common. It may well be that the failure of the two to integrate into a single organization lead to their permanent separation, which explains why Starfleet's "security officers"--NOT marines--are in charge of their ground combat missions.
Besides, the implication in "Marines" is that of an expeditionary force aboard naval vessels. Starfleet isn't the Navy, and doesn't conduct expeditionary combat missions. Federation Starlift would probably be more accurate.
At the risk of being *extremely* nitpicky, perhaps Starfleet could be construed as not being a military simply because it's a navy?
But it's NOT a navy, because it doesn't operate in the ocean.
As to your overall point, though, I said upthread that the word "Starfleet" is probably not strictly a proper noun but also a descriptive one: there's "naval vessels" and then there's "U.S. Naval vessels." The distinction would be more concrete than that between "Navy" and "military," though, since Starfleet's primary role is that of exploration in the first place and not--as most navies--a secondary role.
The Federation is HUGE. Thousands of light years. Starfleet has to spread it's ships thinly so it can be ready to protect every part of the Federation.
And for a Federation that size even a fleet of thousands of ships would be able to do nothing else. That's the thing about military readiness: you can't wait until there's a threat to pull ships away from non-military duty.
That depends. How valuable is the nebula and how dangerous are the aliens? Just so we can make this an apples-apples comparison.
I'd say protecting the life of even a single Federation citizen should and would be more important than studying even the most scientifically interesting nebula. At least 99% of the time.[/quote]
Hence the question. In terms of military objectives, ANY incursion by an unknown vessel warrants redirection to investigate and challenge that craft for identification and intentions. I don't see Starfleet doing this unless the alien vessel is actually suspected as posting a danger. As long as you're not crossing the border in a Romulan warbird, they'll usually just scan you and forward your position and heading to Federation outposts along your flight path.
If you ARE crossing the border in a warbird, you're probably looking to do some damage. That would warrant a priority shift to be sure.
And if it's a completely unknown vessel, then it's a first contact scenario and potential diplomatic situation. Starfleet's even more interested in strange new life forms than strange new worlds.
Not to mention the fact that once you have a starship in orbit you have a huge advantage over any purely land troops. True, the planets will probably have some orbital or landbased antiship defences but you won't even attempt a large landing before you neutralize them and gain control of the space around a planet - for which, again, you need starships.
You're talking about space superiority. As already mentioned, that's a virtual impossibility; space is too large for anything less than an ARMADA to have a chance of controlling all of it; air superiority alone is difficult to maintain just over a single landmass on Earth. Much has been made of the supposed weapons ranges of starship weapons, but battles are never VISUALLY depicted at ranges of more than a few dozen kilometers, and in many cases plot logic actually precludes the usual "artistic license" excuse. Even if a single ship can only engage targets in a range of, say, 10,000 kilometers--ridiculously optimistic in light of DS9's depictions--then space superiority around an Earth-sized planet would require hundreds of ships just to secure low orbit.
OTOH, ground based defenses like EP-607 render space superiority irrelevant. The forces on the planet can render your fleet useless without having a fleet of their own, and they have the advantage of larger ammunition stores, larger power sources and shield generators much larger than anything your ships can carry. You simply can't carry a weapon large enough to breach their fortifications: they have an entire planet to work with.
So my conclusion would be that any ground military force will most likely be a part of Starfleet. Or even if it was some sort of a separate organization it would still serve under over-all Starfleet command at practically all times.
I don't think so, because Starfleet's jurisdiction is--by definition--in space. Ground operations are a whole other ball game, and putting that organization under the auspices of a space service is a little like putting the Army under the Air Force's command (where only the opposite has ever been the case.)
Well, you do realize that the fact that it was still Starfleet that was always first on the scene means those hipothetical other first responders (for which we have no proof) are even more lax than Starfleet?
No, because the other organization would ALREADY be there before the fighting started, which is my point. Starfleet wouldn't need to maintain a large or permanent presence in areas where a dedicated defense force was already in place.
If you think about it, this explains better than anything else why Starfleet never assigned a permanent task force to Deep Space Nine even after the wormhole was discovered. Sisko had to go and get the Defiant himself, and even the "local" Starfleet ships like the Malinche and whatever the hell the Bradbury was are never attached to DS9 as a home base. The reason for this, I tend to think, is because Deep Space Nine was being operated by Starfleet on behalf of Bajor, who DID possess a very effective military, but had very little or no experience in managing space combat or space vessels and couldn't afford to develop their own starfleet. The Bajoran Militia, therefore, fills a niche that would normally be filled by the Federation military. So when three Cardassian cruisers show up and start blasting away, it doesn't really matter that the Enterprise is still a day away at maximum warp, because it's expected that the Bajoran Militia will prevent them from taking the station or seriously threatening Bajor.
Though, now that I think of it, what about those 'hoppers' from Nor the Battle to the Strong?
Hoppers? Refresh my memory, it's been a while.
Except you can't compare a planetary war with an interstellar war.
Yes you can. In point of fact there's no FUNDAMENTAL difference, except for the possibility of both retreat and reinforcements to/from locations off-planet. Both the nature, size and locations of military objectives remain the same: cities are still cities, valleys are still valleys, and an eight-man fire-team is still gonna be puckering their collective rectums when they try to breach an enemy-occupied building.
The only real difference is that, in a a large interstellar war, this occurs not just on one planet, but DOZENS of them, at different times or even simultaneously. You could compare it to the island-hopping campaigns in the Pacific during World War-II, except that each "island" is a fair-sized planet and the battle to capture each planet involves the resources and manpower equivalent to AT LEAST three world wars.
Technology has changed, of course, which makes this effort easier to sustain. With starships you can MAYBE make the case that advanced weapons can compensate for the hugeness of space (see above) but in ground combat, even with phasers and advanced guided weapons, you've got troops fighting tooth and nail over rough terrain that at least one side is not at all familiar with, through urban terrain in block-by-block, house by house fighting, through mountain passes and dense jungles, caves, rivers, glaciers, etc. And even if you limit the scope of your operations to only capture the resources you need, the sheer size of a planetary body means your troops still have to HOLD that ground and prevent the enemy contingent on the southern continent from sneaking over and re-capturing it.
There's quite a lot of fighting to this, and it can't be done from orbit. In modern warfare, we've learned the (to many, counter-intuitive) lesson that technically it can't even be done from the
air.
Like I tried to show in a previous post, land troops are much, much less important in such a war than a space navy.
On the contrary, I've come to think that that MOST of advanced civilizations in the galaxy manage to get by without a so-called "space navy" to compete with any other race. Without colonial or deep space interests, you've got nothing to defend except your homeworld and your own systems; your fortifications can be fixed, and they can be made quite a bit larger than the enemy fleet's offensive capabilities. So people like the Angosians, for example, can rest easily without worrying about getting rolled by the Breen or the Romulan Empire, knowing as they do that their planetary defenses can hold off any major assault, and even if they can't, their armies of super-soldiers make landing operation amazingly perilous.
Erm, wasn't the first American satellite launched by the military
Launched, but not developed or operated.
And if I'm not mistaken, lots of NASA's scientific mission were and are launched by the Air Force.
Again: launched, but not developed or operated. Moreover, the only reason to use military launch vehicles was because until very recently only Air Force ICBMs had the performance needed to put satellite payloads into orbit. As has been the case in the history of human affairs since the first milennia, actually: explorers always go to the people who have the ships and the armor, because nobody except standing militaries can afford to build them.
The advent of NASA changed all that, however, and the Saturn-I rocket set the new precedent. Because strategic nuclear warheads tend to be smaller than commercial or scientific payloads, the performance criteria for NON military launch vehicles is considerably higher, and the criteria for manned vehicles is higher still. That is a state of affairs that has never before existed in human history.
I believe it was explicitly stated that that rifle was developed by Starfleet Security but was made obsolete by some new type of phaser. And it worked so good only because someone added a transporter to it.
I thought it was developed FOR Starfleet security as an anti-Borg weapon? Ah well...
In space exploration, there is NO strategic advantage to it,
That is simply not true. It may to a degree be true today, because there's still nothing of significant economic/military value out there.
Economic value, yes. With even CURRENT technology it would be possible to extract enough platinum from lunar regolith to turn an immediate profit; overall, there's enough of it on the lunar surface to pay off America's national debt five times over.
But other claims to the contrary, the primary purpose of the military is to defend a country from attack by OTHER PEOPLE. The only people in our solar system right now all live on Earth, so all military assets in space are directed at maintaining peace ON EARTH.
Space colonization would slightly change this, and first contact with aliens would also change it a bit. But in the first case, direct weapons exchange between Earth nations and off-world colonies is extremely unlikely because of a lack of direct competition over resources; in the latter case, it's unlikely because of the lack of proximity, and because direct encounters between the two only becomes competitive when both are going after the same resources.
But in the future of Trek where you can discover a new mortal enemy or a new place for colonization or new members for your federation, it very much has strategic value.
While true, you're overlooking the very BASIC fact that Starfleet has never claimed or even hinted that it is doing these things for their STRATEGIC value. Unless I'm just delusional and for forty years we've been watching Star Trek episodes begin with "... its continuing mission, to catalog new resources, to seek out new enemies or new members for our Federation, to boldly colonize where no man has colonized before!"
That's just not what Starfleet is about. You may prefer to think they're lying about not being a military, but I have a SERIOUS problem with the idea that "Explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations..." is merely a marketing slogan for a force recon mission. I mean, I could see that for Stargate SG-1 or Battlestar Galactica (or hell, even a Babylon 5 spinoff), but Star Trek? I just don't buy that.
), or as I prefer to call them - and yes, I'm well aware there is no overt evidence for an organization of this name, and I don't care, cuz I like the sound of it anyway - the Starfleet Marine Corps.
It's the military of an entire planet. In particular, a planet that is just a hair's bredth away from becoming a Federation member, a planet that all by itself has more strategic importance than any other world in either the Federation OR the Dominion.
