capped
I WAS IN THE FUTURE, IT WAS TOO LATE TO RSVP
Member # 709
posted
the way the DW was presented, it was supposed o represent the upcoming end of Federation civilization.. if it were a very short battle (like the Borg invasions) i could accept low casualties, but since it dragged on for two years i think the numbers should reflect the disastrous nature..
Registered: Sep 2001
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posted
It's the mechanism of Trek-style space war that makes me disbelieve in massive casualties. Even if all of Starfleet (let's say 10,000 ships, with 500 crew and 5,000 troops on each/shore personnel backing each) was lost at once, that would still *only* be roughly on par with what we managed to do on our own planet in a full century of war and misery.
We need a clear mechanism by which people would die in great numbers. Trek basically offers two: orbital bombardment, or massive punitive surface slaughter of a population already subdued. Yet why did the heroes NEVER mention anything like that? They spoke of the thousand-people-a-week casualties as if those were a bad thing, or of the loss and retaking of a planet without mentioning the population. Only the bad guys spoke of losing millions, for some weird reason.
It is entirely possible that billions were vaporised when the camera looked the other way. But it smells to high heaven. Why did the heroes look the other way, too? Why did they pay *zero* attention to such losses?
It would be quite plausible for the Dominion to want to sterilize the entire quadrant, saving perhaps just a few planets for spoils-of-war type compensation. The hundreds of billions predicted in "Statistical Probabilities" would then make sense. But from what we heard, this never came to be. Nobody mentioned a Dominion intent to erase all life. Nobody mentioned a planet bombarded to such an end. Weoyun's designs for Earth came as a big surprise to his compadres, who thought that the planet would be conquered. Why would they think that, if the modus operandi of the Dominion was to kill kill kill?
And the other side "played fair" by all accounts. When Damar worried about massive casualties, those were troops he spoke of. It sounded more like the Western Front falling in WWII, with Hitler getting all his troops mindlessly slaughtered but with relatively light associated civilian casualties (never mind those civilians that he relabeled as "troops"). And quite unlike the Eastern Front falling...
Frankly, I'm surprised that millions would have died in the border wars as per "Journey's End". "Borders" are supposed to be rather empty in Trek, with all those agrarian colonies that fit in a single matte painting, colonies whose fates can be swayed by a single starship or even a single away team. How did they scrape together the millions?
The war with the Klingons in "Yesterday's Enterprise"... Now that I could accept as claiming billions of lives. From the sounds of it, human species was to be eradicated there (and probably aliens sympathetic to it, too). But "the sounds of it" were so very different during the Dominion war. Were Sisko and pals so detached from reality that the issue never arose in dialogue, that the emotional burden never manifested?
quote: It is entirely possible that billions were vaporised when the camera looked the other way. But it smells to high heaven. Why did the heroes look the other way, too? Why did they pay *zero* attention to such losses?
Maybe they weren't told. A morale sort of thing; you don't tell your troops that X thousand/million were wiped out in one strike, especially towards the beginning of the war. For example, during Dunkirk a large troop transport was destroyed carrying thousands and the incident was covered up until a few years ago.
-------------------- "I am an almost extinct breed, an old-fashioned gentleman, which means I can be a cast-iron son-of-a-bitch when it suits me." --Jubal Harshaw
Registered: Feb 2002
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posted
I made much the same observations and have the same problems as Timo. It must have to do with the "looking glass" view that Star Trek presents. Everything happening on camera is supposed to have a very limited scope (single ships with small away teams, Earth colonies with only of a dozen settlers, anyone who dies on camera is made a big deal). That lies in the nature of the medium. This doesn't necessarily get along well with the scaled up figures. Suddenly there are hundreds of starships in the background and billions of casualties are mentioned. Anything that doesn't have immediate consequences on our heroes may be extreme.
What remains to explain, is the discrepancy between the "Dominion want to kill everyone" statement (which for all we know was true), but that never anything like that was shown or mentioned, nor had any consequences. Remember the hystery in "Homefront/Paradise Lost", although no one had been actually harmed? But after the war had started, knowing or even witnessing how the Jem'Hadar slaughtered innocent people, there was nothing like that. For instance, where were the horrified survivors from Federation colonies?
-------------------- Bernd Schneider
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Yes, in a sense, DS9 might not have been the ideal vantage point for the war. Being so close to Cardassia, it actually sat in the eye of the storm most of the time. No refugees would have come through DS9, since there were no planets between Bajor and Cardassia. The admirals sitting at Quark's wouldn't consider planets to be of strategic interest in the style of war they fought. Even the bold Chin'toka assault would to them be like Gallipoli, yet another trench front where nothing much happened even when thousands died weekly.
OTOH, imagine the war on other fronts. Dominion fleets roaming within UFP space and striking at random, with the Feds trying to hunt them down... If slaughter did take place, it would happen when Starfleet by definition *wasn't* there. Fleet people wouldn't speak of massacres, but of aftermaths. Which, considering Trek weaponry, might have been relatively sterile. Billions lost could be mere statistics to Starfleet personnel.
And admittedly there's always the possibility of information warfare. Still, DS9 couldn't have been in a *complete* blackout regarding UFP homefront losses. There were many "alternate" information channels in and out, including Quark's and Garak's secret ones, Jake's civilian ones, Klingon rumors, even Bashir and S31. And Adm. Ross seemed to be in on the big picture more than a mere theater commander would be.
IMHO, it wouldn't really hurt the Trek history if the Dominion War was treated as "the one that might have been". Wouldn't it be refreshing if the heroes actually won the war, instead of just losing less than the other guys? Perhaps Starfleet did what it was supposed to do, and heroically died in heaps so others could live?
posted
I'd imagine there were strikes on Romulan and Klingon targets by Dominion forces too....it's not like Gowron to admit defeat or the Romulans to show weakness of any kind to a potential advesary.
Another thing to consider is that the federation has been at relative peace for a looong time: most wars were settled almost exclusively by starfleet and did not incurr casualties on Federation member-worlds: just colonies.
Recall how shocked everybody was at the deathtoll from the Wolf 359 battle, and that was only 11,000. All starfleet. At casualty figures of 10,000 each week, there would be near hysteria among the general populace and crushed morale within starfleet itself. Add to that the shock of an attempted coup by Admiral Leyton and the temprorary martial law on Earth and the fall of Betazed to dominion forces and you've got a recipe for disaster.
I agree that the war was shown on a limited view from the DS9 perspective. The Dominion was trying to show the unalligned alpha powers that they could rule in a benign way by using Bajor as it's example.
All told, I'd imagine the total deathtoll was in excess of a couple- three million tops between the alpha powers - Not including the Cardassians.
Oddly enough, the Breen were likely the big winners when it comes to losses (although their military strength is unknown and definitely far less than the major powers).
I wonder if Benteen was cashiered out of Starfleet or brought back when the war stared going badly and starfleet needed everybody it could get? Anybody know if the Lakota survived the War?
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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I must say that the numbers of 2-3 million dead are EXTREMELY low, in my opinion. I believe the casualty figures from Cardassia were - what, 800 million? And I don't think the Dominion has much cause for concern for putting down rebellions on worlds it has occupied. "Ok, listen, some Betazoid killed a Jem'Hadar yesterday, so now we're going to execute 10,000 of you as a lesson, righti-o!"
Registered: Sep 2000
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posted
And I'd guess the Romulan liberation of Benzar would not have been a very clean one either. Probably more something along the lines of last year's Russian theater hostage situation.
posted
Yeah, you're right about Cardassia: I ammended my post to reflect that. I'm just pointing out that while LOTS of people died, the typical federation citizen is not jaded to deathtolls so high that they become almost arbitrary numbers....like we unfortunately are. We hear reports of casualties in excess of ten thousand every year by natural disaster alone. And starvation. And disease. So, because the Federation has not had to deal with any of our problems in centuries, they're shocked by what many (assholes) in our military would consider "acceptable losses" in a major battle during wartime.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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quote:Originally posted by Bernd: But after the war had started, knowing or even witnessing how the Jem'Hadar slaughtered innocent people, there was nothing like that. For instance, where were the horrified survivors from Federation colonies?
Survivors? What survivors? If anyone got off those colonies in time, which would have been before the Jem'Hadar fleet gained orbital superiority, they wouldn't have been able to witness anything. Those who were left behind got a taste of Jem'Hadar efficiency, and dead men tell no tales.
-------------------- "God's in his heaven. All's right with the world."
Registered: Apr 2001
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I agree with you to a point - but even in the "enlightened" age of TNG/DS9, high casualties aren't unheard of - In "Journey's End", Picard references "millions" of casualties during the Cardassian border wars -- and those have usually been considered little more than than a series of involved skirmishes.
Registered: Sep 2000
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posted
Considering Picard's attitudes throught the TV series, I wouldn't be surprised if there were only between 1 and 2 million casualties in the whole of the Cardassian conflicts, and he'd call that "millions" to make it sound worse. He could also have been including both sides' losses in that figure. And remember that the Cardassian conflict lasted at LEAST 20 years, since the raid on Setlik III was supposed to have taken place a good number of years before TNG -- back in the late 2340's, according to the Chronology.
As for the Dominion War, has anyone ever taken a look at the Star Charts and (mentally) overlaid those outline maps of Dominion-occupied territory on top of a map of the Alpha Quadrant? I did that briefly a while back, and according those (admittedly very speculative) images, the Dominion cut a huge swath of territory across the region rimward of Earth, all the way out to the Klingon Empire. That would suggest at LEAST several dozen member worlds were under the gun, and probably colony worlds numbering in the hundreds. Or more.
Remember in the sixth season, how they somewhat frequently mentioned threats to Vulcan, Andor, and Alpha Centauri? They had to have been making serious advances into the Federation core territories in order to threaten those planets -- even not relying on Star Charts, that would be a reasonable assertion to make, IMO.
A big question to ask would be, how cleanly would Starfleet (or Klingons or Romulans, for that matter) be able to clear out a Jem'Hadar occupation force on the surface of a heavily-populated planet, if the Dominion decided to hold their ground and make a protracted fight out of it? What if they chose to adopt a "scorched earth" policy? Not even necessarily on the scale of the destruction of Cardassia, of course, but still very damaging.
And so, I would even suggest that the majority of the Federation losses could quite possibly have been accumulated on the ground -- and that would seriously drive up the casualty numbers. Surface warfare really seemed to be a weakness of Starfleet in the 24th century, based on the operations we've seen. Wouldn't the Jem'Hadar gleefully take advantage of that?
-------------------- “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” — Isaac Asimov Star Trek Minutiae | Memory Alpha
Registered: Nov 2000
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posted
IMO, when dealing with surface combat involving colonies and worlds with populations that can reach the billions, to accumulate millions of combatant losses isn't that outrageous an idea, much less when including civilian casualties. Remember how many billions of deaths did those clinically-enhanced brainiacs in DS9 estimate, if the war was to fight out to a Federation defeat?
-------------------- "God's in his heaven. All's right with the world."
Registered: Apr 2001
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quote:since the raid on Setlik III was supposed to have taken place a good number of years before TNG -- back in the late 2340's, according to the Chronology.
In "Tribunal", O'Brien bumps into a former shipmate of his on the Promenade. The guy doesn't recognize O'Brien, so the Chief tries to jog his memory - "We served together, on the Rutledge, eight years ago." We later learn that this person was a Cardassian surgically altered to replace the real Starfleet officer who was captured on Setlik III, and that he was released from Starfleet not long after his recovery for failing fitness reports.
Anyway, the point is that this puts Setlik III at a year before TNG's first season.
capped
I WAS IN THE FUTURE, IT WAS TOO LATE TO RSVP
Member # 709
posted
there are a couple conflicting dates for O'Briens career in general.. that one puts Setlik the latest, some are much earlier.. does anyone have some info on the subject?
Registered: Sep 2001
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