Spike TV recently aired the TGN episode in which Spock slips off to Romulus in order to drum up support for a Vulcan/Romulan reunification movement. The Romulan military, of course, wants to take advantage of the situation to invade and conquer Vulcan by force.
The episode ends with the Romulan war bird blowing up the Vulcan ships that carry its invasion force, rather than have them try to make a run for the border, in order to avoid the risk of their army being taken prisoner.
This seems to be a major feature of Romulan military policy. If a commander fails/loses a battle, the punishment is death by blowing up the entire ship with all personnel on board.
Seems to me that this would be a counterproductive policy. I can see the preferring of death to being taken prisoner, the Klingons have a similar philosophy, and a Klingon warrior will commit suicide if taken captive with no hope of escape. But to destroy an entire ship’s crew and complement, or kill off an entire army is just ridiculous.
Even the greatest general will lose a battle once in a while. When that happens, they would analyze the situation, find out what mistakes they made, learn from them so they could be victorious in future battles. You can’t do that if you and you are dead. Even if you’re not killing off your army, as the Romulans seem wont to do, by demanding death after a single failure in battle, pretty soon you’re going to have a dearth of experience generals/admirals/commanders to plan tactics and strategy, keep up troop morale, etc.
Execution for a pattern of losses that gives evidence of incompetence, I can see, but I really don’t get how the Romulans could maintain any kind of military control over an empire when they would execute commanders or even entire armies at the first sign of failure. Eventually, you are going to run out of experienced officers and people who were of an age and able-bodied enough to serve as soldiers. Even the Klingons understand the concept of strategic retreat and living to fight another day.
I dunno. That’s pretty much what happened to the French military towards the beginning of the Revolution and during the Terror, and France is still around.
They were (a) aided by considerable help because the tech of the day favored massed armies of ill-trained troops and (b) they were not really under heavy assault at all.
A better model would be the Russians in WW2, where Stalin had shortly previously cut off the army’s intellect. Any soldier who was captured (and the nature of the fighting meant thousands were) was sent to the gulag. Even those who escaped did, since it was assumed they were spies. It killed the army’s morale and led to millions more deaths, as Stalin could only enocurage soldiers by threatening them with death.
In the episode in question, I think the Romulans were more concerned with preventing their ships from being captured than their troops. They’ve always been very secretive about their technology. In one TNG episode, a Romulan admiral defects across the Neutral Zone in a small ship to in order prevent a planned war he’s sure the Empire will lose. While the admiral is lying in sickbay and the officers of the Enterprise are debating whether to trust him, Picard says, “At least this has given us a chance to get a look at Romulan technology close up.” Then the ship blows up – the admiral planted a time bomb. Not even a defector will betray the Empire’s techno-secrets.
Aren’t the Romulans modeled on the Romans (Romulus=Founder of Rome)? Rome had an almost bottomless supply of manpower. For example: when Hannibal invaded, the Romans sent 20,000 troops to stop him. They were annihilated. Then they sent 40,000. Those were also destroyed. Finally they sent 80,000 to fight at the battle of Cannae. Same story; only 10,000 survived. Even after that they had no trouble raising large armies and sending them overseas. The Romans often lost armies of 50,000+ without it making much of a dent.
It’s been a while, so maybe I don’t remember the episode that well, (and two ships worth of men probably wouldn’t be enough to take over a planet), but weren’t the ships too slow and lightly defended to escape? So the ships were blown up because they would have been captured if they weren’t, and like you said, it’s known from the series that the Romulans prefer death to surrender.
Didn’t the romans also have a policy of sometimes Decimating their armies(that is, killing 1 out of every 10 men) or killing the commanders for failure?
I saw a documentary on Hannibal a while back on the History channel, and I found myself wondering where Rome kept getting all those soldiers. IIRC, at the time, the Roman army was still pretty much composed of Italians (it wasn’t until later that they started using barbarians) Even after Cannae, they still managed to come up with an army, although after that, they were waging a war of attrition, basically cutting Hannibal off from any potential supply bases and wearing his army down. If the Romans had kept trying to engage Hannibal in pitched battles, I don’t think it would have been too much longer before Rome’s army consisted of old men and boys who weren’t old enough to shave.
Seems to me that a war/conquest-minded nation could keep coming up armies composed of their own people only for so long. If you had enough territory under your control that you could conscript, bribe, or otherwise persuade people from conquered nations/planets to join your military force, then you could absorb a lot of losses and still field a substantial army. However, AFAIK, the Romulan military consisted entirely of Romulans. I haven’t seen any indication in any of the Star Trek series that I’ve seen that the Romulans use conscripts from races that they’ve conquer
IIRC, decimation was usually a punishment of the army had engaged in some form of dishonorable conduct (cowardice, desertion, mutiny, stuff like that). Also, I don’t think Rome would execute a commander for losing a single battle, unless it was an obvious case of incompetence. And, anyway there’s a difference between killing every tenth man and blowing up your entire army or ship’s crew and complement. One is a brutal method of keeping an unruly in line. The other, you don’t have an army anymore.
Seems to me it was a recurring theme on all the Star Trek shows that the Romulans were far from perfect in their military strategies. In the very first episode to feature Romulans, the commander criticizes their military leaders for pursuing unsustainable goals, but his sense of duty is too strongly ingrained for him to defy orders. I don’t think the writers were trying to suggest that the Romulans’ strategies were sound; I think they were portraying them as flawed.
I dunno. I think it’s pretty realistic to portray a culture that refuses to learn from past mistakes. I would say there’s a lot of that going on in the world today.
In Nemesis, it’s revealed that Shinzon, a human, was a gifted leader that led at least a dozen Reman engagements against the Dominion during the Romulans’ year in the war.
But therein lies the rub. The Romulan Empire employed unsound strategies, pursued unnattainable goals, refused to learn from past mistakes…
and didn’t collapse.
I just realistically can’t see an empire that employs the policies and methods used by the Romulans continuing to expand, or even managing to sustain itself for any length of time. In “Balance of Terror” we see that the Romulans are using unsound strategies, and yet, eighty years later, in TGN, the Romulan Empire is still going strong.
Aesiron I’ve never seen Nemesis, but I don’t think a single commander indicates general policy, unless the Remans were in fact conquered by the Romulans. I had always been under the impression that Romulus and Remus were brother planets that were colonized by the same Vulcan offshoot group.
Unfortunately the excellent Diane Duane novels about the Rihannsu (“Romulans”) cannot be considered canon because they’re based in TOS era and they are now contradicted by the TNG and DS9 continuity. But anyway, the Duane novels picture an intrigue-mad political and military structure in which successful commanders - if they want to survive as commanders - win or otherwise ensure the personal loyalty of their officers and crew. Especially since higher officers often come from the elite noble classes, they build an almost feudal system of vassels and underlings. I could see that if Commander X was disgraced, it might be presumed that all his cronies would have to be purged as well.
Come to think of it, depsite their self-aggrandizing nomination of Empire, the Romulans may not have been very powerful at all. We never really see much outside a few small fleets; their best work has been done trying to sneak past or otherwise trick their enemies. Only then, if at all, do they use force.
You think that’s bad? According to that episode, the “invasion force” consisted of 2,000 troops. For all of Vulcan—a major and founding member of the Federation.
By my rough estimates, that would be like China invading Great Britain with 20 guys.
This either means
a) The Romulans really have a rotten military strategy.
b) The Vulcans are all pacifists, and the Federation wouldn’t have the stones to send Starfleet in to liberate the planet. (Actually, maybe this one isn’t too farfetched)
d) The writers had a brain fart on this detail.
Or,
d) The Romulans have some of the most incredible shock troops in the history of the galaxy. Like Daxamites in Heinlein’s power-armor, hopped up on Ss’Jabroka.
Maybe that’s why they destroyed the invasion force…they didn’t want to let a fully armed force of these guys back anywhere near the Empire’s core worlds after losing their opportunity for a planetary conquest. :eek: