Mobilisation capacity of the Federation?

[Big Phil]

There's really no good reason to justify the complete absence of ground forces in Star Trek - Space Supremacy doesn't justify allowing ground forces to atrophy; the absence of effective ground-based or orbital defenses to protect troops on the ground is clearly a conscious decision, not merely a side-effect of spacepower. While (in modern militaries) AAA defenses might not be sufficient to defend troops from a determined air attack, air forces are designed to gain and maintain air superiority against opposing forces, allowing the soldiers to do what they do best on the ground.

That is, unless we're supposed to believe that Star Trek militaries bombard planets from orbit, annihilate defending populations, and then simply occupy newly uninhabited planets with shipboard personnel. Of course, we've never seen this sort of genocidal warfare in Star Trek, but I suppose it is possible.

Just a question - in DS9 after the final battle against the Dominion/Cardassians, who was supposed to occupy and pacify Cardassia? Was the planet going to be vaporized, or were the Cardassian fleets merely to be destroyed and the planet left to its own devices?

[Darth Wong]

The only significant equalizer the invader has is space supremacy, and that's a big deal in Star Trek. Every ship carries large numbers of torpedoes in the mid-to-high megaton range. And they mount phasers that can be used as high-precision ground bombardment weapons or as wide-angle antipersonnel weapons that are safe enough to use for crowd control.

The US has nuclear weapons and can generally achieve air superiority over most campaign areas it is involved in. Why does it need such highly trained and equipped soldiers, then?

[CaptainChewbacca]

In memory alpha, I remember seeing some world that's a federation member who, in the event of attack, was tasked with creating large numbers of clone troops. I can't find it, thought.

[ray245]

Exactly! Even when all the talks about how air supremacy alone can win a war is popular and all that, no armed forces would agree to disband the presence of a ground army.

Of course, for all we know, the people who founded Starfleet might just be a bunch of science fiction fans who has never studied the concept of warfare ever in their life. One would think that when you are exploring and finding new species (that can be potentially dangerous), you would try and maintain some sort of emergency war measures such as having mobilisation capacity.

Although I have to wonder how much can Starfleet expand with new recruits maintaining all their ships during a war.

[Knife]

Well, not having boots on the ground type campaigns could account to all the loose confederation type alliances in the universe. "I blast your ships to dust, now your planets all belong to us." without troops.

[Samuel]

The only significant equalizer the invader has is space supremacy, and that's a big deal in Star Trek. Every ship carries large numbers of torpedoes in the mid-to-high megaton range. And they mount phasers that can be used as high-precision ground bombardment weapons or as wide-angle antipersonnel weapons that are safe enough to use for crowd control.

The US has nuclear weapons and can generally achieve air superiority over most campaign areas it is involved in. Why does it need such highly trained and equipped soldiers, then?

Because we fight wars of occupation, not wars of genocide. Given the close ranges ships fight at in Star Trek and the fact they all carry anti-matter, I'm amazed more worlds haven't had to deal with the problems of having a starship slam into the planet. Or given there shitty accuracy a proton torpedo smashing into the ocean. While the TNG Feds seem to mild mannered to do genocide as an option, simply fighting in order could wreak the planet quite a bit.

[tim31]

For Tim; sorry about not responding but Knife pretty much covered it.

Yeah, I know. It was more an OT point of order.

[Junghalli]

That is, unless we're supposed to believe that Star Trek militaries bombard planets from orbit, annihilate defending populations, and then simply occupy newly uninhabited planets with shipboard personnel. Of course, we've never seen this sort of genocidal warfare in Star Trek, but I suppose it is possible.

The pre-TOS Earth-Romulan might have been like this, given how it went by with nobody on the Earth side ever actually seeing a Romulan, and without Earth ever even getting their hands on a Romulan body intact enough to do a DNA test. Either that or it was fought entirely in space between ships, or the Romulans were using entirely non-Romulan ground troops (Remans?).

[Big Phil]

That is, unless we're supposed to believe that Star Trek militaries bombard planets from orbit, annihilate defending populations, and then simply occupy newly uninhabited planets with shipboard personnel. Of course, we've never seen this sort of genocidal warfare in Star Trek, but I suppose it is possible.

The pre-TOS Earth-Romulan might have been like this, given how it went by with nobody on the Earth side ever actually seeing a Romulan, and without Earth ever even getting their hands on a Romulan body intact enough to do a DNA test. Either that or it was fought entirely in space between ships, or the Romulans were using entirely non-Romulan ground troops (Remans?).

That may be, but conflicts seen on screen haven't been genocidal wars of annihilation, with the exception of the attack on the Founders home planet, and even that was designed as a surgical strike to eliminate the Dominion's leadership rather to wipe out the entire population.

[18-Till-I-Die]

I'm pretty sure I've said this once or twice before, but it fits here too...

It's possible these people are simply stupid, so they do illogical things because they don't understand why it's a bad idea. We make up all these really bad, out of left field rationalizations for why these people act stupid ("wars of genocide"? when has that EVER been said in ST canon?) but we ignore the very real possibility they're all simply dumb and dumb people do dumb things.

Now this is kind of a bitter pill to swallow, of course, because it makes the whole series kind of a joke, like Futurama or something. But even the DOOP had a ground army and troopships...and body armor, and helmets, and rifles, and artillery, and...you get the idea. There is no justifiable reason why Starfleet has no army. No logical reason, nothing even hinted at in-universe, and nothing that would make sense to even the most green and inexperienced military commander. No military, no nation, with any intelligence at all would ever do something as stupid as completely disbanding their army in favor of air and naval power. It defies any kind of logic.

And so, it makes sense only if you accept the people who WOULD do such a thing, like Starfleet, are just stupid. They did it because they're stupid and they don't know how ridiculous it is. And really...look at how they react in many, many situations...look at their concept of "militarization" and their disdain for military training and practice. They literally don't get it.

[Batman]

I was under the impression that that was a foregone conclusion really.

[Uraniun235]

It's possible these people are simply stupid, so they do illogical things because they don't understand why it's a bad idea. We make up all these really bad, out of left field rationalizations for why these people act stupid ("wars of genocide"? when has that EVER been said in ST canon?) but we ignore the very real possibility they're all simply dumb and dumb people do dumb things.

This road leads to "lol they're all retarded/hallucinating/high/psychotic". It has a certain simplistic appeal, but every answer is just going to be "dumb feddies lol", and if that's seriously to be the state of discourse on the subject then why not close PST and leave a sticky-thread saying "we're done discussing Star Trek, please report to Other Sci-Fi for yet another scintillating discussion on a bunch of fanfiction written about overpriced plastic models"?

Besides, "they're just dumb" is itself a silly rationalization - they're able to build starships, program computers, navigate the galaxy, and somehow keep a Federation of dozens of worlds together in relative harmony. Do they just have 'brilliant moments' that allow them to possess 24th-century magic technology? Is this all a grand larf held together by the sheer will of Q? It's bullshit!

What we typically ignore goes beyond rationalizations - we usually forsake the idea that at some point, it's absurd to keep trying to rationalize everything together, that what we call the Star Trek continuity is so broken and contradictory (with itself and with what we know about how things work) that suspension of disbelief cannot be reasonably maintained.


But once you bring that up, you're basically implying the question "what do we exclude from our consideration of what constitutes the Star Trek universe?", and nobody (at least, nobody here) wants to get mired in that because it will inevitably involve a lot of personal tastes and conflicting agendas.

So, instead, we get to rehash page after page of masturbatory "well maybe they did it because some pinko commie troop-hater wanted to spend more money on a bunch of BIG GOV'T SOCIALIST WELFARE HANDOUTS, as indicated in my fan-fic."

Okay, okay. Apologies to Steve. It's not that bad.

It's still silly, though.

[Samuel]

Maybe the don't want any troops because they are afraid of coups? I mean, we saw an admiral try to seize power, the military attempt to assassinate the president and start a war and I'm sure there are other examples. Maybe the Federation fears internal enemies more than external ones- after all, just because it does poorly in wars might not bother the populance who comprise the majority of the Federation. They could be nothing more than border conflicts.

Another possibility is that the military gets one budget and Starfleet decided to spend it all on spaceships.

[Coalition]

In memory alpha, I remember seeing some world that's a federation member who, in the event of attack, was tasked with creating large numbers of clone troops. I can't find it, thought.

Arcturians?

"A race of clones from the densely populated Arcturas [sic]. Fred Phillips and Robert Fletcher speculated that they provided the backbone of the Federation infantry – not least because, if needed, they could clone billions of new soldiers overnight."

Of course being able to clone the troops (however long that takes) and train them are two different things.

I google'd "'Star trek' clones", then followed the links from memory-alpha.

[Simon_Jester]

There's really no good reason to justify the complete absence of ground forces in Star Trek - Space Supremacy doesn't justify allowing ground forces to atrophy...

No, it doesn't. What it does do is provide a fig leaf for Starfleet admirals trying to defund their equivalent of the Marine Corps. They can assert (falsely, by and large) that they don't need large-scale training and equipment budgets for ground forces, because the money would be better spent on starships. Think about the US Air Force's campaign against the A-10 for an example of this kind of thing going on.

It doesn't mean Starfleet is right to let the ground forces rot into an inept, ad hoc type of naval infantry. That's a bad decision for a lot of reasons. But Star Trek space support is capable enough that Starfleet leaders can pretend to be right. They're in denial about how bad the situation on the ground is, and ship support enables that denial by being just good enough to upgrade Federation ground ops from "horrible suicidal mess that we need to fix immediately" to "not one of our strong suits, but we can worry about that in next year's budget."

The denial won't break until they run into a competent enemy on the ground in one of the many situations where ship support cannot save them. And to date, they haven't.
______

The US has nuclear weapons and can generally achieve air superiority over most campaign areas it is involved in. Why does it need such highly trained and equipped soldiers, then?

Because we want to be better at ground ops than they are. Even with space support, they suck; they just don't suck quite badly enough to bring the issue forcibly to the attention of their own leaders as something they have to fix immediately.

Also, their space support does have three advantages over US air support:

1) Ship phasers set to stun make a good area-effect nonlethal weapon. It's a useful thing to be able to do for counterinsurgency work, where your main limitation is that you can't just shoot everyone. The Feds can just shoot everyone, because their nonlethal weapons are better than ours. And it doesn't take good ground troops to deal with an enemy you've already knocked unconscious.

2) Trek starships have better loiter time than aircraft; they can hover over one region for hours or days in a way that recon satellites and close air support craft cannot.

3) Trek ships have sensors that work relatively well in the absence of jamming. If you're already in control to the point where "occupation" is the right word for what you're doing, you can probably keep anyone from setting up large jammers. In which case the Trek ships have full sensor capability, which gives them an advantage in situations like trying to pick out guerillas hiding in a tunnel network.
_____

Another possibility is that the military gets one budget and Starfleet decided to spend it all on spaceships.

That's more or less what I was getting at. In Star Trek, ground troops aren't very useful without ships (because most wars are interstellar), so the fleet winds up as "senior service" by default. Once that happens, the fleet admirals have an incentive to say "our ships render heavy ground forces irrelevant, so spend the money on ships and not ground troops," even if that's a lie. Which I think it is.

The same thing happened (to a lesser degree) to the British Empire during the Victorian period- one of the reason their army tactics weren't up to snuff during World War I was that they weren't prepared to fight a major ground war against a technologically competent enemy.

[Uraniun235]

But in an environment where the government is unwilling to spend enough to provide adequate coverage of the fleet to begin with, let alone commissioning an entire fleet of ships just to ferry around troops, it seems ineffectual to build a Federation Army when they wouldn't be able to get anywhere. It still makes far more sense for worlds to raise and equip their own armies for defense.

You can say "well then they should just build more ships so they can have a solid fleet presence in addition to being able to enact Normandy IN SPAAAAACE", but who's to say that the Federation (or any of the other Trek powers for that matter) can actually afford the outlay of resources this would require? They had a hard enough time as-is replacing the losses at Wolf 359 and during the Dominion War, where they were still using Excelsior-class starships.

[CaptHawkeye]

For much of history the Armies of many nations would often only allow themselves to get into proxy battles. Gentlemen's agreements were sometimes drawn up on both sides limiting the use of each side's total forces in some way so as the prevent the battle from becoming a showdown of true strategy and war. Losses were often kept minimized and victory was usually declared by one side even if both of them suffered pretty minimal casualities and barely fought at all. Overall, it was usually just posturing with the pretext of "honor" or "chivalry" or some other akward code of War Formalities. It really wasn't until Napoleon and Frederick the Great rolled in that the concept of "Total War" began to stick. Besides that, Armies were no longer as fragile as they had been for thousands of years, and losses were easier to replace.

It may be that the Star Trek galaxy features a similar mindset on a local level. IE: Battles between Alpha Quadrant powers would be decided in space by ships. Battles of which are almost always a formal engagement involving minimal losses. Victory usually being declared when one side puts more dents in the other's ships. If the battle was going to be decided in space, what would be the point of operating a massive, well equipped Army that was virtually gauranteed to never see combat with an opponent seriously motivated to achieve strategic objectives? Local defense militias were probably seen as enough to deter pirates and terrorists attempting raids on surface settlements.

It seems to me that war is a very formal affair in Star Trek. Both sides would dislike prolonged engagementes on strategically important planets as the loss of too many personel and ships would just leave both opponents open to being picked apart by their many unsavory neighbors. The Quadrant Status Quo is simply too well balanced. Nobody has the resources for a prolonged war of attrition with a power even 1/2 its strength. Everybody's forces are just too fragile. It's just like how Europe was for hundreds of years.

I think we've always over estimated the AQ's ability to replace ships and equipment as Uraniun pointed out. The Federation WAS still using Excelsiors and fucking Mirandas weeeell into Voyager. They even brought the Constitution OUT OF RETIREMENT at the end of Voyager because they were so strapped for ships to fight an incoming Borg Sphere. The reality may be that no one can stomach losses of equipment and personel in Star Trek other than the paticularly strong powers like the Borg or Dominion. And they're seperated from the AQ by immense distance.

Edit: Actually now that I think about, "Total War" as a concept existed long before the gunpowder age. Indeed the Roman Empire was known for its dazzling military campaigns and conquests during its time. But unlike many nations before and even after it, the Roman Empire could actually afford this sort of war.

[Samuel]

How wealthy are the Feds and the other powers? The lack of diversity in their ranks, the small fleets, the inability to produce large space structures, the need for land based colonies... all of these imply very poor productivity compared to what we would expect.

[open_sketchbook]

I think we all know that the real reason there is no Federation army is because Star Trek was made on a shoestring budget and is ultimately about space ships, and there simply was never time, money, or real incentive to make the necessary costumes, body armour, whatever. On average they had about a week's prep for each episode's costume, makeup and backgrounds, and costumes like that don't come cheap; Firefly had to make do with the leftover armour from Starship Troopers and the only reason that even happened was because Joss Weadon knew a guy. The number of times a Starfleet Marine force would have had a place in the series is minimal, making it an unreasonable and irresponsible act to create such a force. Ultimately we're dealing with a restriction more of the medium rather than of bad writing or anything like that.

Possibly, in universe, there is the fact if you wipe out all the enemy space assets, then they can't mess with you anymore, they can't launch ships, you can lock them down forever and they simply can't do anything about it. You could live knowing you'd never be a space power again, or you could join your conquerors. I don't think the Federation actually wants to conquer anyone; they just want to render them harmless, which one CAN do from space.

[Marcus Aurelius]

I think we all know that the real reason there is no Federation army is because Star Trek was made on a shoestring budget and is ultimately about space ships,

That's a very sweeping statement. Compared to other space opera style sci-fi series of similar scope only TOS and the first season of TNG were made on a real shoestring budget. Still, there are examples of ground armies in those other non-Trek series besides Firefly.

The number of times a Starfleet Marine force would have had a place in the series is minimal, making it an unreasonable and irresponsible act to create such a force. Ultimately we're dealing with a restriction more of the medium rather than of bad writing or anything like that.

I simply do not agree, especially if we are talking about TNG era Trek. There would have been numerous opportunities to use proper ground troops in Next Generation, DS9 and Voyager.

Possibly, in universe, there is the fact if you wipe out all the enemy space assets, then they can't mess with you anymore, they can't launch ships, you can lock them down forever and they simply can't do anything about it. You could live knowing you'd never be a space power again, or you could join your conquerors. I don't think the Federation actually wants to conquer anyone; they just want to render them harmless, which one CAN do from space.

That's like saying that you only need tanks if you want to conquer something... (I actually know people who think so, but does not make it any more sensible position.)

[open_sketchbook]

Actually, another thought comes to mind. Could the Federation, or indeed any power in the Alpha Quandrant, get enough transports together to make ground-based military invasion of another planet possible? Invading a planet would involve hundreds of millions of soldiers and support personal at the least, including transporting them weeks or months across interstellar space, where a single wide-angle phaser strike from orbit could irradicate an entire landing site. How the hell is an organization that boasts a few hundred combat ships supposed to invade a whole planet? It's not like invading a country; it's more like invading all the countries. With the time it takes to move in troops you'd have to have them moving before you even begin the fight for orbital superiority or risk your troops falling afoul of enemy reinforcements; of course if you don't win that battle you've committed soldiers for nothing. It may be that in the Trek universe conventional armies are quite simply unfeasible and have been for so long the concept has eroded from most cultures. The Federation, which doesn't do much conquering, would have almost no need for ground armies if this was the case.

[open_sketchbook]

I was sorta reiterating but I brought up another point with it; is ground based warfare on any real scale even possible in Star Trek? And more importantly, would the Federation bother? The sort of numbers required; hundreds of millions at least, even if they could get them to a warzone, which they can't, could they stomach the casualties, the years and decades of fighting, the inevitable scorched earth policies enacted by the enemy, public pressure against the war... by the end of it, they may as well simply bomb the planet from orbit anyway! Ground warfare would be a sinkhole for money, people, talent and time that would all be better spent elsewhere.

[Big Phil]

I was sorta reiterating but I brought up another point with it; is ground based warfare on any real scale even possible in Star Trek? And more importantly, would the Federation bother? The sort of numbers required; hundreds of millions at least, even if they could get them to a warzone, which they can't, could they stomach the casualties, the years and decades of fighting, the inevitable scorched earth policies enacted by the enemy, public pressure against the war... by the end of it, they may as well simply bomb the planet from orbit anyway! Ground warfare would be a sinkhole for money, people, talent and time that would all be better spent elsewhere.

Not if you want to capture the infrastructure of a planet intact. The Romulans reasonably expected to capture Vulcan with several thousand troops (perhaps because it is demilitarized), so to argue that hundreds of millions of soldiers are required is silly. The only in-universe answer that makes sense to me is Star Trek powers made the decision that ground warfare was unnecessary because spacepower would allow for the annihilation of ground-based forces. i.e., the Curtis LeMay of Star Trek won out over everyone else and Star Trek nations only engage in total war (destruction of planetary populations) and never engage in more limited wars.

[Junghalli]

How wealthy are the Feds and the other powers? The lack of diversity in their ranks, the small fleets, the inability to produce large space structures, the need for land based colonies... all of these imply very poor productivity compared to what we would expect.

We know their ships are dependent on at least one apparently rare and valuable wonder-material: dilithium. It's possible that this creates a major bottleneck in the ability to build starships.

I remember in one Trek novel (Prime Directive I think it was called) dilithium was stated to be a form of crystal with a molecular structure that extended into "the fourth dimension" (the way it was described it sound like that's probably subspace). It's totally non-canon, but if we were to speculate that it's accurate it's not hard to imagine that much of their magitech might be dependent on this stuff. Heat dissipation? They use dilithium to channel the waste heat into subspace. Subspace radio? They use dilithium to put radio signals in subspace where they can go faster for some reason and retrieve them from subspace (this one is actually the use given in the novel). Warp drive, forcefields, artificial gravity, mass lightening? They do something funky in subspace which causes warping of realspace, which requires dilithium. If a lot of the technologies they depend on are completely dependent on this stuff, and it's really rare, its scarcity could be a huge obstacle to building giant fleets of FTL starships.

[open_sketchbook]

The idea that three thousand people could conquer a planet of 6 billion plus is so absolutely absurd it doesn't even warrant discussion. They COULD cause some major havok, transported in to make surgical strikes on power plants, government facilities, and spaceports, but they could not conquer the place. I doubt you could hold the city of Ottawa with 3000 troops if we didn't want you to be here.

Think for a moment the number of troops we needed to take Iraq, remembering that Iraq was sporting mid-20th Century equipment against the most modern force in the world. Now multiply that for the entire world population, account for the additional casualties of an opposed orbital landing and the increased timeframe to take the whole planet, and we can start talking about occupational forces.