There could have been an outside chance of the Human race winning the war or maybe the ‘Battle of the line’ They could of used guerilla tactics for it would be very hard for the Minbari to counter even with superior firepower. The Starfuries were nearly on par with the minbari fighters. Why did only 250,000 people get killed and not millions more, I mean, it was a fight to the death.I expected more.
You have seen the rest of the series haven’t you?
nope not a serious fan, I have just watched this and thought the Alliance military could of used it’s resources more wisely.
Since the beginning of the war the humans found themselves outclassed and outgunned. The starfuries were inferior to minbari fighters in almost every way. When you add in the Minbari’s ability to jam targetting systems they become even better.
By the time the Battle of the Line came Earth was already doomed. The battle wasn’t a final effort to protect Earth it was an effort to buy them time to evacuate as many people as possible.
Marc
The Minbari could have been stopped though by sheer force of numbers. I mean 20,000 ships ain’t no serious threat. They could have had a Vietnam mentalilty and implemented that.
They could have attacked small groups of minbari ships with a superior amount of ships to compensate the loss and their inferior technology.These offensive would have resulted in a halt to the Minbari offensive or a widespread slowing down.
If you watch the whole series, plus ‘In the Beginning’ it is pretty obvious that Earth Alliance is outclassed in pretty much every way. The Mimbari have both superial tactical and strategic mobility, better sensors (Earth Alliance ships were reduced to using the Mk 1 eyeball), plus it seemed like they had a heck of a lot more warships than Earth did. (IIRC there is one scene where you see two masses of starships approaching - look one way and there are hundreds of starfuries (fighters), look the other and there are hundreds of mile(s) long Mimbari ships.
In ‘In the Beginning’ it seems that the odds were pretty much always against Earth as the Minbari chose the time and place of the battles. Earth Alliance tried pretty much everything they could think of but were just waaaaay outclassed. Even by the timeframe of the show they were still incapable of targeting Mimbari ships (until Mimbari, Vorlon and Shadow technologies were integrated)
Guerilla tactics don’t do you much good when the enemy has no need or intention of occupying your land. The Minbari had already made it to Earth with only the Battle of the Line to stop them. And they won that, effectively. Had they not then surrendered, they could have simply sat in orbit and bombed Earth into a radioactive cinder. There was nothing left to stop them. At that point the war’s pretty much over, even if the hadnfuls of remaining humans keep hitting them with hit-and-run attacks.
Still doesn’t mean that they couldn’t have lost. Or brought the war to a halt.
The Earth alliance deployed their ships in the sense that they knew that the battles would be on an equal footing.
They as I still implore, that the enemy because of their sheer size would be slow, as the smaller force would be fast, moblie and able to hide. They could hide I know but it would still be hard for Minbari to root out small individual forces around, say an asteroid field or moon. This would be sucessful in frustrating them. Because Earth is fighting this holy war why didn’t they use every god known weapon they had? All they used was 1 nuke, what about chemical or biological? Why didn’t a psi cop just root out that formula out of his head?There should be no rules to this sort of fighting
The industry can be geared up to behind the lines to supply the front, this didn’t seem to appear in the war, it seemed they were fighting something as easily as the gulf war.
We did win it!
The Minbari surrendered. 
::::ducking and running::::
Babylon 5 was a fictional show so it is a bit difficult to maintain a meaninful debate over whether the Earthers could have defeated the Minbari. The only information we have to go by is what is in the series, movies, and books. So while I guess we could say they could of, should of, would of, we all know they didn’t and why.
Marc
We’ve won if we had Kirk!!!
::Runs away fast, chased by flaming torches and pitchforks::
From what I remember, the minbari had said they would kill every last human. That is why Dehlin wanted to see a human before they became extinct.
Nah, don’t think the Minbari would have cared that the humans could have made themselves more difficult to kill. They wanted to crush us, but they didn’t care about the details. Remember when Narn was bombed by the Centauri? That same episode, it was mentioned that when the Minbari went to hit Earth, they just bypassed colonies on Mars, Europa and Io.
The humans couldn’t have won any other way than Minbari surrender. Of course, they put up a good fight, but in all the fighting they only managed to destroy ONE Minbari ship.
The only way the humans could have avoided loss (aside from the established course of events), would have been to avoid the war itself by destroying the Gray Council’s ship (which they were only able to hit as an unintended surprise attack). Then no one would have known who made the attack, the Minbari would have plunged into their eventual civil war without leadership, and perhaps been destroyed themselves at the wrath of the Vorlons, who would have lost two of their own on that ship.
[Enter B5 Geek mode]
Well… actually, the humans managed to destroy more than just one ship. However, Sheridan’s destruction of the Minbari ship the Black Star was the only clear-cut victory in the war. Other times when Minbari ships were destroyed it was at a far grater loss of human forces.
Ahem. Well, nevertheless, any way you slice it the Minbari had the Earth * completely * out gunned. The odds of the humans beating the Minbari were about the same as me beating a tank with a slingshot.
[Exiting B5 Geek mode]
Was there any particular weakness on the Minbari ships that the Humans could have capitalised on?
Because the weakness seemed to be underneath where the fins were.
It isn’t really a weakness you can exploit when they blow you out of space before you get close.
Marc
I still think the Humans could of won there has to be a way of slowing them down.
Look, there was NO WAY for Earth to win that war. Let me give you this analogy:
I give you and 100 other people one (1) paintgun each. I send you off into the woods to stop 1000 tanks, and 10,000 infantry with night-vision, fully-automatic guns, and sniper-rifles, and all that good stuff. Oh yeah, they also have kevlar EVERYTHING! And it is at night so you can’t see. And the weapons they are using are designed so that no matter what you cannot use them…they are just too different.
Now, they are moving in a striaght line towards your house, crushing everything in their path. No real strategy, so you can use all the tactics you want. Do you think you could stop them? No. Sure, a few infantry could be taken out if you lept out and went to hand-to-hand combat, but then you would die from all the other guys with guns shooting you! That’s about what it was like for earth. The best they could do was to throw everything they had straight at the Minbari in an effort to slow them down slightly before being annihiliated.
Are you sure? I would barely even call the Black Star incident a victory (although the humans sure did); the Minbari destroyed almost all the EA ships just by jumping in from hyperspace, and Sheridan only beat them with a strategically placed minefield.
I think it’s clear that the EA were able to destroy some Minbari flyers, but for the actual big ships, it’s stated that Sheridan was the only human captain to even survive against the big ships, and even that was done surviving with just with a lone, disabled ship.