YE: How could the UFP be losing the Klingon war?

[Vanyel]

Poor judgement by Starfleet in overall military strategy.

Early loss of key facilities near the Klingon boarder. (Think of that like the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The Japanese caused a lot of damage, but failed to destroy the fuel reserves there. Had they done that The US fleet would have had to retreat to the US mainland leaving the Japanese unopposed in the Pacific.)

As mentioned before, poor tactical training of officers.

The Klingons seemed to have pretty strong shields too, the fire of 5 torpedoes caused only "moderate damage" to one ship.

There could also have been early big victories for the Klingons, that pushed Starfleet on its heels. A position it couldn't recover from.

 

[Disruptor]

i think the alternate reality war just happened at a bad time for the Federation.
After the Khitomer Accords happened relations got worse again and the escalation caught the Federation on the wrong food.

They should've been eating their Wheaties(tm)!

 

[Hartzilla2007]

After the loss of Ben Sisko in The Visitor, nothing stopped the war from going on and the Federation wasn't destroyed but forced to give into Klingon territory demands and even abandoning DS9.

I'm not sure but I think the war between the Feds and Klinks started some time after that ep so in the alternate timeline where Sisko was MIA its possible the Federation gave up DS9 to prevent that war from happening then as everything seemed to be falling apart in the area.

 

[Holdfast]

Either poor doctrine or ineffective leadership by the Feds would give the Empire an edge, regardless of any production or technological sophistication on the part of the UFP.

It's possible to construct a scenario where the Federation civilian leadership placed too many constraints on Starfleet, limiting its ability to achieve its objectives. By the time they saw sense, the Feds could have lost enough economic edge that it became a more even conflict. Alternatively, the Feds could simply have tried to defend much territory simultaneously, leading to a similar rapid deterioration in their economic position. Finally, the Klinks could have innovated a few new tactics, and the Feds were slow to evolve their military doctrine to match.

In short, I think it's "hand-waveable" enough to allow for the storyline without breaking the suspension of disbelief.

 

[Sindatur]

Either poor doctrine or ineffective leadership by the Feds would give the Empire an edge, regardless of any production or technological sophistication on the part of the UFP.

It's possible to construct a scenario where the Federation civilian leadership placed too many constraints on Starfleet, limiting its ability to achieve its objectives. By the time they saw sense, the Feds could have lost enough economic edge that it became a more even conflict. Alternatively, the Feds could simply have tried to defend much territory simultaneously, leading to a similar rapid deterioration in their economic position. Finally, the Klinks could have innovated a few new tactics, and the Feds were slow to evolve their military doctrine to match.

In short, I think it's "hand-waveable" enough to allow for the storyline without breaking the suspension of disbelief.

Another scenario is the UFP may have had the Klingons on the ropes, so, the Klingons started engaging in tactics that were Morally Grey, and the Federation decided they would rather maintain their integrity, and therefore beat themselves by not "lowering their morals to Klingons' level"

 

[mswood]

If the Klingons were smart and focused the ships that they had for a massive cloaked sneak attack on the most important targets off the Federation and Starfleet they should have been able in one attack due such damage to the Federation that they would be hard pressed to recover from.

I mean have cloaked ships transports weapons of mass destruction down on targets. We know Klingons have had the ability to use there transporters while cloaked as early as Voyage Home, while its rare to have a ship that can fire weapons under cloak.

Simply have ships attack primary planets and ship yards, each one could beam time delayed warheads on multiple targets, and detonate at a set period. Thus causing wide spread destruction and chaos, leaving the Federation without much of its fleet or industrial ability to wage war.

 

[Emperor Norton]

Or perhaps it was just the weather...

I mean, here on Earth the sky is usually blue, but can be red, or grey depending on the time of day or the weather...

It was always green by the TNG era, though, regardless of whenever the Enterprise-D or whoever else visited.

If the Klingons were smart and focused the ships that they had for a massive cloaked sneak attack on the most important targets off the Federation and Starfleet they should have been able in one attack due such damage to the Federation that they would be hard pressed to recover from.

I mean have cloaked ships transports weapons of mass destruction down on targets. We know Klingons have had the ability to use there transporters while cloaked as early as Voyage Home, while its rare to have a ship that can fire weapons under cloak.

Simply have ships attack primary planets and ship yards, each one could beam time delayed warheads on multiple targets, and detonate at a set period. Thus causing wide spread destruction and chaos, leaving the Federation without much of its fleet or industrial ability to wage war.

So like a Klingon Tet Offensive?

Like Tet, however, if the UFP was prepared, it could be it back. Tet was a major tactical failure for the Vietnamese Communists, which devastated the Viet Cong and made it so that they were not a significant fighting force for the duration of the war after that. In this Klingon war, such a thing could happen with the Klingons; they waste their last on this massive conventional attack, only to be beaten back and have masses of ships and men destroyed in enough numbers to devastate their war effort.

However, let's continue this Vietnam line of thinking. If the Klingons are willing to never give in, to surrender masses of their population to the war, to send soldiers to the field as soon as they were old enough to hold a weapon and to have more children for the war effort, to fight with whatever they had till they were all dead, then they would be a dangerous enemy which could win.

 

[Knight Templar]

You guys are missing the obvious.

Captain Picard lied to the Captain of the Enterprise-C.

After all, look at the context of the discussion. He is trying to persuade her to take the ship and its crew back in time and face certain death and destruction. She is understandably reluctant. Picard can't force the issue anyway, so he pulls out the "one ship could've prevented this war (and saved the Federation)" argument.

Naturally, she immediately agrees to Picard's request.

Remember, we have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING beyond Picards statement about the way the war is going as evidence of how the war is going.

For that matter, Riker near the end refers to what was apparently a significant victory by the Enterprise crew "the pasting we gave them on Archer IV"

 

[tafkats]

A few more possibilities:

-- Picard has access to information that Riker doesn't. It's implied that the true desperateness of the situation is something of a secret; Picard lowers his voice before telling Garrett that "The war is going very badly for the Federatlon, far worse than is generally known."

-- The Enterprise did indeed win a recent engagement at Archer IV, but the overall picture is still bad. It could have been a fluke, or the intelligence Picard knows could be based on information about Klingon production capacity compared to Starfleet's, or some other circumstance that will come into play a few months down the road. In either case, Riker's line about Archer IV is delivered on the bridge in front of the junior officers; even if Archer IV was a fluke, he would likely try to use it to keep morale up.

 

[Knight Templar]

^Quite possible.

Yet I still would not hang the Federation losing as a fact on a brief statement by Picard.

One should also look at the condition of the "war Enterprise". Despite being involved in a war since it was launched, it appears completely unscarred with no lingering damage.

Remember in "Parallels" the Enterprise from the "Borg infested universe" was so severely mauled that a single torpedo blew it apart.

 

[Doug Otte]

Interesting ideas, Knight. I hadn't thought about it that way before.
Thanks,
Doug

 

[Vanyel]

It does sound like a good alternative. But there are bits if dialogue that would seem to back up Picard.

Riker:I'd hate to have to scrap her; Starfleet could certainly use another ship, even if she is old.

Tasha: You might not like the future, it's been a long war. The Federation has lost more than half of Starfleet to the Klingons.

Castillo: We were negotiating a peace treaty when I left.

Tasha: A lot of changes, Lieutenant. A lot of changes.

Guinan: Forty billion people have already died! This war's not supposed to be happening! You've got to send those people back to correct this.

Picard: Even their deaths could have prevented this war. If the Enterprise-C returns to the battle and its mission is a success, history will be irrevocably changed. This timeline will cease to exist, and a new future will have been created. I've considered the alternatives - I'll go with Guinan's recommendation. Dismissed.

Picard: I see. You realize that it is very possible the Enterprise-C will fail. We will continue in this time line in which case your life, hopefully, will continue for a long while.

Tasha: I know how important it is that they don't fail, Captain. That's why I'm requesting this transfer.

Picard: You don't belong on that ship, Lieutenant.

Tasha: No. Captain Garrett belongs on that ship, but she's dead. And I think there's a certain logic in this request.

Picard: There's no logic in this at all! Whether they succeed or not... the Enterprise-C will be destroyed.

Tasha: But Captain, at least with someone at tactical they will have a chance to defend themselves well. It may be a matter of seconds or minutes, but those could be the minutes that change history. Guinan says I died a senseles death in the other time line. I didn't like the sound of that Captain. I've always known the risks that come with a Starfleet uniform, if I am to die in one, I'd like my death to count for something.

I think that both Riker and Tasha, even if they are not privy to the same information Picard is, could see the writing on the wall from tactical reports.

 

[Ian Keldon]

In the episode "Yesterday's Enterprise" the alternate reality had it that the Federation was only a few months from losing the war with the Klingons. But how could this be? Decades previous, the destruction of Khitomer had devastated the Empire to such a degree that it was forced to sue for peace with the Federation, and to basically beg for food and aid

The better part of a century before.

and the (non-canonically sure) evacuation of Kronos

.

IS canon. They discuss the plan at Khitomer.

And Colonel West had said that the Federation could clean their chronometers.

That was with the pre-Treaty Starfleet with significant military assets. After the Treaty was signed, they largely demilitarized the fleet:

• Time - Phrase
• 00:08:51 An end to 70 years of hostility, which the Klingons can no longer afford.
• 00:08:58 Bill, are we talking about mothballing the Starfleet?
• 00:09:02 Our exploration and scientific programs would be unaffected, but...

STVI

By the time of Narandra III, Starfleet would have had decades of complacency built into the system.

In short, the Federation bought the myth of the "peace dividend".

But now it was to Federation itself, which suffered no event like that, which was losing and was going to fall in short order.

After a 22 year long war. I'd say that even the 'peace oriented' Starfleet made quite a showing.

 

[Captain Fine]

^Quite possible.

Yet I still would not hang the Federation losing as a fact on a brief statement by Picard.

One should also look at the condition of the "war Enterprise". Despite being involved in a war since it was launched, it appears completely unscarred with no lingering damage.

Remember in "Parallels" the Enterprise from the "Borg infested universe" was so severely mauled that a single torpedo blew it apart.

I don't think they actually showed battle damage on either vessel, just because they didn't do that back then.

They didn't have "Year of Hell" luxuries during TNG to show damage to the hero vessel.

 

[Unicron]

One should also look at the condition of the "war Enterprise". Despite being involved in a war since it was launched, it appears completely unscarred with no lingering damage.

Perhaps the "twenty years of war" with the Klingons wasn't necessarily a continuous war for that stretch of time, but several smaller wars chained together by failed attempts at armistice. It's possible in that case, the statements made by Yar (losing half the fleet) and Picard about the Feds nearing defeat could work just as well. There's no way to know for sure.

 

[Sci]

There's a very simple way to reconcile how even a weakened Klingon Empire could manage to decimate the Federation over twenty years:

Assume that whatever laws of war the Klingons had previously agreed to were thrown out the window.

For instance, it wouldn't take much to destroy an entire planet. Even a shuttlecraft travelling at high warp could ruin a planetary surface if it collides with that planet. Mass drivers are also a possibility. So is igniting a star to consume a solar system. And so are subspace weapons, established to have been banned under the Second Khitomer Accords.

Any of these kinds of weapons are available to civilizations with the Federation's and Klingons' levels of technology; it would seem that the Klingons usually shy away from that kind of total warfare, perhaps out of a sense that such attacks are dishonorable. But if a Klingon faction comes to power in the High Council that doesn't care about such things? Yeah, I could see Klingon sneak attacks decimating Starfleet's key shipyards and ruining populated planetary surfaces, and in a relatively short span of time.

 

[sonak]

There's a very simple way to reconcile how even a weakened Klingon Empire could manage to decimate the Federation over twenty years:

Assume that whatever laws of war the Klingons had previously agreed to were thrown out the window.

For instance, it wouldn't take much to destroy an entire planet. Even a shuttlecraft travelling at high warp could ruin a planetary surface if it collides with that planet. Mass drivers are also a possibility. So is igniting a star to consume a solar system. And so are subspace weapons, established to have been banned under the Second Khitomer Accords.

Any of these kinds of weapons are available to civilizations with the Federation's and Klingons' levels of technology; it would seem that the Klingons usually shy away from that kind of total warfare, perhaps out of a sense that such attacks are dishonorable. But if a Klingon faction comes to power in the High Council that doesn't care about such things? Yeah, I could see Klingon sneak attacks decimating Starfleet's key shipyards and ruining populated planetary surfaces, and in a relatively short span of time.

that's possible, though if the Klingons turned to those types of tactics, you'd have to figure that the UFP would retaliate in kind. The Federation may have its principles, but it wouldn't fight a war with hands tied behind its back if the Klingons had thrown out the rule book.

 

[Sci]

There's a very simple way to reconcile how even a weakened Klingon Empire could manage to decimate the Federation over twenty years:

Assume that whatever laws of war the Klingons had previously agreed to were thrown out the window.

For instance, it wouldn't take much to destroy an entire planet. Even a shuttlecraft travelling at high warp could ruin a planetary surface if it collides with that planet. Mass drivers are also a possibility. So is igniting a star to consume a solar system. And so are subspace weapons, established to have been banned under the Second Khitomer Accords.

Any of these kinds of weapons are available to civilizations with the Federation's and Klingons' levels of technology; it would seem that the Klingons usually shy away from that kind of total warfare, perhaps out of a sense that such attacks are dishonorable. But if a Klingon faction comes to power in the High Council that doesn't care about such things? Yeah, I could see Klingon sneak attacks decimating Starfleet's key shipyards and ruining populated planetary surfaces, and in a relatively short span of time.

that's possible, though if the Klingons turned to those types of tactics, you'd have to figure that the UFP would retaliate in kind. The Federation may have its principles, but it wouldn't fight a war with hands tied behind its back if the Klingons had thrown out the rule book.

The Federation may well use similar tactics against purely military targets -- igniting a star in a system that only houses Klingon Defense Force shipyards and starbases, for instance. But the Federation would never embrace genocide.

 

[Hartzilla2007]

There's a very simple way to reconcile how even a weakened Klingon Empire could manage to decimate the Federation over twenty years:

Assume that whatever laws of war the Klingons had previously agreed to were thrown out the window.

For instance, it wouldn't take much to destroy an entire planet. Even a shuttlecraft travelling at high warp could ruin a planetary surface if it collides with that planet. Mass drivers are also a possibility. So is igniting a star to consume a solar system. And so are subspace weapons, established to have been banned under the Second Khitomer Accords.

Any of these kinds of weapons are available to civilizations with the Federation's and Klingons' levels of technology; it would seem that the Klingons usually shy away from that kind of total warfare, perhaps out of a sense that such attacks are dishonorable. But if a Klingon faction comes to power in the High Council that doesn't care about such things? Yeah, I could see Klingon sneak attacks decimating Starfleet's key shipyards and ruining populated planetary surfaces, and in a relatively short span of time.

that's possible, though if the Klingons turned to those types of tactics, you'd have to figure that the UFP would retaliate in kind. The Federation may have its principles, but it wouldn't fight a war with hands tied behind its back if the Klingons had thrown out the rule book.

The Federation may well use similar tactics against purely military targets -- igniting a star in a system that only houses Klingon Defense Force shipyards and starbases, for instance. But the Federation would never embrace genocide.

Unless a rouge group is the one that does the deed and they just have to withhold the way to prevent it until trying to negotiate a surrender.

 

[Sci]

The Federation may well use similar tactics against purely military targets -- igniting a star in a system that only houses Klingon Defense Force shipyards and starbases, for instance. But the Federation would never embrace genocide.

Unless a rouge group is the one that does the deed and they just have to withhold the way to prevent it until trying to negotiate a surrender.

A shameful chapter in Federation history, yes -- but still not the same as embracing genocide as military doctrine and governmental policy.