Believe me, I’ve known plenty of battalion and brigade commanders (the equivalent of a starship commanders) just as eager to lead from the front, charging enemy positions, kicking down doors, the works. It’s said that the most lethal position in the Israeli army is a lieutenant colonel of a combat unit in a shooting war - roughly half of them are taken out ofaction within the first two weeks.
In other words, it’s a matter of military culture. I could definitely imagine a military organization in which the commanding officer is expected to lead landing parties.
By the time of TNG, Starfleet recognized the folly of having the captain lead each landing party (by then called an “Away Team”), and the first officer typically led them, unless either (a) there was some compelling reason for the captain to go, or (b) it was known to be an almost-totally-safe milk run (and even then, only after some kvetching by the first officer).
Because I expect at least some sanity and realism. If in a technothriller novel set on Earth it depicted there being only 50,000 soldiers in China it would be laughable and stupid. Ditto for this.
Also for the Star Wars Galaxy, much of the Galaxy is unified by the fact that humans are the dominant species.
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I think you’re missing the point. If you are telling a story about a battle from the Civil War, you would be describing scenes of formations of thousands of soldiers marching at each other. Modern wars aren’t fought like that. The same ten thousand soldiers might be spread over hundreds of miles in small squads and platoons.
In fact, I find the “epic” battles of the Star Wars prequels with their swarms of clones and robots packed into the screen to be utterly ridiculous vision of futuristic warfare. Compare those films with the Battle of Hoth in Empire Strikes Back. That battle was “minimalistic” in a good way. The scale of the battlefield is so large that you can’t see it all at once. You have the Imperial Fleet in orbit. The Rebel base protected by a impregnable shield preventing nuking from orbit. The big Ion Cannon that took out one of the destroyers. The Empire probably only had a half dozen AT-ATs (and some supporting AT-STs) but they were several hundred yards apart, not packed in a ridiculously tight formation. Rebel infantry and artillery dug into trenches as you would expect, not charging at impregnable laser firing tanks Braveheart style.
The point is that the battle probably involved thousands of Rebels and tens or hundreds of thousands of Imperials, but you aren’t seeing them all massed up together.
A little too “minimalist” - the movie Aliens. I mean do you really need a starship the size of an aircraft carrier that serves no other purpose than to deploy a single platoon of Space Marines? Especially one that can’t provide any support to the ground forces because they left it abandoned in orbit?
Considering it is a whole planet and the majority of Rebel troops are on Hoth I’d expect the battle to be larger even if its simply because for the Rebels to be a credible resistance movement it needs at least a few million troops for the main force plus various cells scattered across the Galaxy.
Actually, I thought it was hard to get a sense of the scale of the Sulaco; it might not be all that big. In any event, Bishop showed that he could control it remotely, as when he used his laptop computer to bring down a second dropship. Presumably he could also have controlled its weapons remotely, too, either with the laptop or (had it not been destroyed) from the armored personnel carrier.
Maybe, as I’m not that much of a Star Trek Fan. But isn’t the Federation a representative body of planetary governments, akin to the UN being a representative body of nations? That is what I meant.
And further, the UN has no aircraft carriers because its members spend all their weapons money on themselves, plus I’m sure they have no interest in funding a large military force not under their own control. Which is why I am not surprised that the UN has no carriers, and I wouldn’t be surprised either that the Federation has a far smaller military force than some might expect.
They’re ambiguous about it. I think I mentioned upthread that Vulcan has an embassy on Earth, which would seem to make the UFP more like the UN than the US. On the other hand, in Ben Sisko’s time we see a Vulcan Starfleet starship, and its crew is clearly in the same hierarchy as Sisko; its captain was Sisko’s classmate at the Academy.
I think the UFP is more of a confederation than anything else. They cooperate in terms of dealing with powers and issues outside their group; Starfleet, in other words. But they don’t have the same level of integration as United States currently operates under. I imagine it’s possible, for instance, that a marriage on Vulcan might not be recognized on Andor. I also expect that there are different spheres of influence within the Federation. Earth and its colonies form one group; Vulcan and its colonies form a second; Andor and its colonies a third; so on. The Earth-Vulcan groups are closer to one another than either is to Andor, but nonetheless they don’t agree on everything and aren’t expected to.
At 78,000 tons, that would place it in size somewhere between an Iowa class battleship and a Nimitz class aircraft carrier. But given the relative small size of it’s crew and aircraft complement, I would assume a much greater percentage of it’s bulk might be dedicated to propulsion, life support, weapons and whatnot.
Still, remote capabilities or not, it seems incredibly dangerous to me from a tactical standpoint not to have some sort of crew aboard the ship during a military operation. One dropped laptop, a disabled transmitter or jammed signal and the the ship is just sitting there useless in orbit.
Actually I think NATO would be a better analogy. The UN doesn’t have any sort of permanent military support structure, and UN military missions are put together higgledy-piggledy from member nation donations. Since half the members of the UN hate the other half, the composition of military forces is often highly political. The members of NATO are truly allies (if often at odds), there is a permanent military structure, there is some attempt at standardization of equipment, and a NATO academy, if not yet existing, isn’t wildly improbable.
I dunno about that. The starships purportedly go around exploring and practicing science, and use force as the last resort. The last resort seem to happen every week, though.
But going with the NATO analogy…
Does NATO have any military forces of its own, or are forces contributed by members as needed based on mission requirements? My guess is the latter, and I’m pretty damn sure NATO has no carrier battle groups. So my example holds even if the acronym changes – it may be the member planets have vast militaries of their own, but the Federation only has a miniscule force of its own.
Ah, I see. Thanks. From that article, “…it is noted in other reference material that as a troop carrier, the Sulaco could carry up to 20,000 tons of cargo, with up to eight UD4L Cheyenne dropships and has sufficient life support capabilities for 90 crew and passengers (with up to 2,000 possible in hibernation for short term trips).” So that explains what a lot of that mass is for. Your argument about remote control is well taken.
As to the Federation, I agree it’s a little ambiguous (i.e. the writers of the show haven’t, over the years, been entirely consistent). There’s a Federation President who is the CINC of Starfleet, and we’ve been shown no Federation member which maintains its own armed forces since the UFP’s founding. Starfleet is a single, unitary, uniformed military and exploratory service with its own chain of command, and it answers to no individual world. Sarek and others are referred to as “ambassador,” true, but there is a Federation Council which appears to function as a sort of legislature. There was passing reference, in DS9 I think, to a Federation Supreme Court. The Federation resembles the USA more than the UN or NATO, all in all, IMHO.
I browsed around looking for info on the NATO military command structure, such as here. There is a NATO supreme commander. I think the military forces are attached to NATO, but still are basically national, but the Enterprise is an Earth ship, and there was a Vulcan ship mentioned in “The Immunity Syndrome.” So, while it may not be an exact analogy, it is pretty close - much closer than the case of the UN, where there is no commander except for a specific mission. Clearly no exploration mission, though. That is actually a fairly odd use of one of your top military vessels.
Kirk mentioned once that the Enterprise was under the authority of the “United Earth Space Probe Agency,” but that was to Capt. John Christopher of the USAF, to whom he might have been less than truthful. All other references to Kirk’s superiors were to Starfleet Command, clearly a Federation entity. And the ship mentioned in “The Immunity Syndrome” had an all-Vulcan crew, but was also a Starfleet vessel, the USS Intrepid.
