It would make sense for the UFP to concentrate its defences near its clustered homeworlds, since probably none of the outer holdings can be protected directly anyway. Another area of importance would be the part of the border surface that lies directly between your homeworld and that of the enemy - wide-flung "hail Mary" maneuvers probably don't pay off in space warfare. Most of the border could be left unattended, since even message buoys would be in too short a supply to adequately patrol it. Enemy incursions would be met with near-coreworld defences and retaliatory fleets.

It's not as if the British Empire controlled the seas by monitoring, much less occupying every square nautical mile of them. Big ships need harbors, and harbors can be blockaded, or traffic to and fro preyed on. In turn, merchant convoys can be escorted. A credible defence could result from a fleet that could theoretically patrol/occupy just a small fraction of the volume.

In my other reply I forgot about the warp-corridors which supposedly have a lower "subspace drag coefficient" but these are offset by the warpfactor 5 speedlimit that was imposed on all vessels in "Force of Nature". This makes an 8000 ly wide Federation even more unlikely, IMHO.

But it's not an Empire. Starfleet's main duties within the borders largely consists of trasnportation, and research (say, in the gaps between member systems - there's a lot there they don't know about). And, of course, public relations. This, by the way, is distinct from their duties ON the borders, which consist of guarding and expanding said borders (in a non-belligerent way).

Starfleet's punch comes in the suggestion of physical force - walking softly with said big stick. You may invade this sector which is free of any of our ships, they say, but bear witness that we WILL retaliate, bringing in ships from all around, so that the border almost seems to recoil against the intrusion.

Another factor: if the area you cannot defend is 2,341 ly from you garrison, and all the major players' homeworlds are clustered near Earth, then the undefended area is impractically far away from the *enemy* as well. The foe can only take it, not keep it. And single planets are not of much strategic value if they lie in deep space - the planets themselves can be blockaded, but they cannot be used to blockade trade routes or anything.

A Trek empire potentially *could* fight by picking enemy planets one by one with those small six-ship fleets, trying to get them faster than the enemy gets his. But spreading the fleet out to do this privateering would weaken homeworld defences and allow the enemy to perform a strike that REALLY mattered. Starship fleets could be used like MAD-style deterrents to prevent hostile takeover of far-flung holdings. And the better deterrent would probably be the big strike against the homeworld, not the numerous small strikes with six-packs of ships.

First of all this concept wouldn't work at all if these border areas were millions of square light years in the case the Federation were thousands of ly across. This would require tens of thousands of ships and outposts on either side in this border region alone. One might object that the two territories touch only in a small area, but then the question is why there is a border conflict at all. The Romulans would have had a century to conquer all the remaining space in between, as would have the Federation, not to conquer, of course, but to find new members and found new outposts. Therefore the border areas as well as the territories need to be several orders of magnitude smaller.

Timo: It is obvious that this vicinity has been created for dramaturgic reasons, and if the overall territories were actually that large it would be an incredible coincidence that the homeworlds are all so close to each other. One suggestion was that the Federation, Romulans, Klingons are something like European countries founding colonies in Africa. This would imply the borders of the motherland/fatherland (which do you prefer?) would be well-defined, whereas the colonies are spread throughout a larger region. The Federation, Klingon, Cardassian and other colonies wouldn't probably form a uniform three-dimensional territory, but it doesn't matter that much because neither side is going to risk a war about it. Only the Romulans are most probably isolationists and hide beyond their Neutral Zone. Actually, this would be one more reason to move the Klingons and Cardassians closer together that Bajor is actually located "above" the Federation.

And really that border patrol is the perfect example of how I see Starfleet policing the Federation. There are going to be certain points which make obvious places for border posts. Here you find the Deep Space stations, monitoring posts, and so forth that we've seen. The mobile element of the border guards, the starships, arrange their patrol routes around these anchoring points, varying the routine for security, and according to intelligence reports.

And so it is in the rest of the Federation. Starbases are placed at strategic points, ships fill in the gaps according to whatever duties they're assigned at the time.

True, the Federation is at war, but come on, one fleet at DS9, some at Earth and several more at other key systems. Either they are really replicating entire ships, which no one believes than can, or the less important systems and areas of Federation space are left virtually defenseless.

Think of "Best of both worlds". In the German version of the episode Shelby says that they will have rebuilt "the fleet" in one year. What exactly does she mean by this? Is she talking about the entire Starfleet or just these 39 ships lost at Wolf359?

(Of course, it could be that Riker was just bluffing to scare the Kes/Prytt.

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"There will be an answer, let it be..."
Motto of the USS Sutherland