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[CX]

"To seek out new life and new civilizations" seems pretty plain to me. If Gene had meant "To kick alien butt" he woulda said so. Personally I find enough conflict with alien of the week without having a neverending war going on. But that's just me.

You remember that part of my rant where I expressed my annoyance at how some people seem to reduce the military to just the tip of the spear? This is one of those instances. Yes, the military has that function, but it has historically also provided humanitarian aid and has been the leader in the research and development of new technology. It also has an exploratory background which goes back to the age of sail, and the Americas were still referred to as the "New World".

Good points, but I still disagree. Clearly you seem irritated, at least that's the impression you give.

You have no idea how many times I've had this argument with a fellow Trek nerd, although usually it's someone who just despises the military in general, seeing it as a purely belligerent force and being completely unable to see their heroes as being part of a military force. So it's not you specifically, but it is an old topic, and frankly your insistence to ignore what to me is completely obvious does tend to fray my nerves. BTW, if you all thought I was irritable before, the medication I'm on makes that worse.

Not my intent, by the way. But I think you missed my point, or perhaps I didn't state it clearly enough. My point is that at the time of ENTERPRISE, Starfleet was NOT designed to be a military (and no one associated with Starfleet thinks of it as a military), even though it shares many organizational aspects of a military. I certainly believe that by Kirk's time, Starfleet IS for all practical purposes a military organization, especially once the MACOs have been absorbed by Starfleet.

I just see all of this as ineptitude on the part of the show-runners and the writers, just like every other thing I consider to be a brain fart. Just look at Janeway and Archer, they are both huge brain farts. Calling the organization "Starfleet" was a brain fart too, because it created confusion that could have been avoided. Pretending that an obviously military organization isn't a military is another brain fart. Creating the MACOs was actually a somewhat good idea, but it became a brain fart when they ended up being so completely cringeworthy in how they were presented. Seriously, there are so many times that they all should have died due to their incompetence at even very basic combat techniques, and I can recognize this as a former Air Force cadet.

But to me, the UESPA of Archer's day is the near-future equivilant of NASA, ESA, NASDA and Roskosmos combined into a global civilian-based space agency. NASA today, is NOT a military organization, even though many of its astronauts (and even some of its leaders) come out of the military, still hold their rank and the actual crews are designed around the military command structure. NASA is a government-run, civilian space exploration agency. It seems to me that the goal of the UESPA was basically the same as NASA: To further human exploration into deep space by developing, operating and supporting advanced warp-capable starships.

None of those organizations have security personnel stationed aboard their vehicles or orbital installations. They also wouldn't provide for the defense of this planet the way Starfleet was shown to. If an alien invader was coming, you'd call the Air Force, not NASA. In fact, the reason why we even have NASA is because there's a treaty prohibiting the militarization of space. Otherwise I'm sure the USAF would be at the forefront of orbital research, continuing the path they were on in the late 1940s and early '50s when the organization that would become NASA was formed and started taking over these functions. The very fact that Enterprise was sent to deal with the Xindi shows that Starfleet is acting as at least a branch of the UE military (ignoring the stupidity of sending only one ship). Second, civilian research vessels tend to go unarmed. The only time civilian shipping has ever been armed was during the age of sail, and during the world wars. Do you see large caliber weapons or torpedoes on modern cargo ships or on research vessels like the Keldysh? They tend to have a few small arms on board for the crew to protect themselves against pirates, but that's it.

The military component at the time was considered as an afterthought only.

A military is still a military.

Keep in mind, we know that Reed almost joined the Navy at one point before Starfleet, so there ARE still traditional military services on Earth at the time (the MACOs would be another, and we can presume there are more).

That's another line on the show that made me cringe. Just what would the point of there being a Royal Navy be on a united planet? Who are they going to combat? I can see still having something akin to the coast guard to protect civilian shipping against piracy and to provide aid, but I kind of doubt these are traditional navies that we think of today if the planet is united.

I'm not going to bother going into the rest of it since I'd essentially just be repeating myself and probably get a headache doing so. I'll simply reiterate that all the things you listed - "science, alien cultures, space flight ops, engineering and diplomacy" - are pretty much already covered by the modern military with obvious exceptions since we don't exactly have alien cultures to study. Hell, when I was looking up how to spell the name of the Keldysh, I found all kinds of things about oceanographic ships operated by the US Navy. I know from my time in AFROTC that the USAF has plenty of opportunities for science and engineering majors. I was actually looking into going into research and development myself as an engineer.

So again, I'll ask (rhetorically), what makes more sense? A military force expanding its scientific and exploratory roles, or a civilian organization arming itself and acting a a military force when called upon to do so?

[Zane Gray]

Well... brain fart on the part of the series creators or not, and whether it makes logical sense or not, what I've described SEEMS to me to be how Starfleet is/was envisioned in the Enterprise/Archer-era. And when you think of it that way, everything else we've seen Archer do is easier to understand. Now, whether it makes SENSE or not is a whole other debate.

Keep in mind, I'm not defending it, I'm just trying to see things as they are in the series and the books. I simply believe that Starfleet and the UESPA was a civilian outgrowth of contemporary space agencies, that basically over time (especially after the Xindi attack) begain to replace and/or absorb the terrestrial Earth military forces, thus becoming the Starfleet of Kirk and Picard's time. The whole Royal Navy thing could either be a part of the United Earth terrestrial military forces, or simply a token force continued for tradition's sake. I would imagine that in the previous 100 years, there's been a lot of consolidation of military forces into new joint United Earth forces, but I would imagine a LOT of them had trouble disbanding out of a sense of history and tradition. Can you imagine current and former U.S. Marines and their leadership being happy about the idea of the USMC disbanding entirely, to become something else (MACOs perhaps) subservent to the United Earth Government? Not likely! Although that's what it would seem has to happen for the purposes of continuity with Trek history as established in Enterprise and the later series.

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

My view can be boiled down to "if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck". They could call Starfleet the Girl Scouts and if it performed the duties we've seen it do (any era) it's a military.

Soviet Russia abolished the police - a name they thought smacked too much of Czarist times - and instead created the militia, a name it still retains to this day. It doesn't in any way change the fact that the Russian militia is the police force of Russia.

*****

As for the history of Starfleet/UESPA we just don't know the origins. I can theorize that Starfleet was an outgrowth of the UESPA, an organization that originally was something of a planet-wide NASA. In fact, I tend to believe that United Earth Starfleet was formalized when they saw a need for a more robust military organization - and that was before the Xindi conflict (for no other reason than that Starfleet existed before said conflict). UE probably saw the need to protect colonies and shipping and stuff like that.

There might even have been a war previously. Remember the Kzin from TAS? Coto had wanted to do a Kzin episode for ENT's fifth season. Well, imagine an Earth/Kzin war in the first half of the 22nd century that was the catalyst to militarize UESPA into Starfleet.

[Zane Gray]

Well... I'm starting to think this is a semantic argument more than anything else, that's not worth continuing. We seem to be arguing nuances - two sides of the same coin. As far as other wars, from canon all we really know is the one with the Xindi and the one with the Romulans. And again, all I'm doing is trying to describe Starfleet as it seems to be in Archer's era based on the series itself, and its continuation in the books. Keep in mind, that pretty much everything we've seen in Enterprise has been shown as, or written to be, a precursor to the same entities in Kirk's era. I think the producers' goal was to show things as they were in the beginning, and Manny Coto's goal was to start to show the gradual evolution toward things as they are in Kirk and Picard's time. You interpretation will obviously vary.

[Aquarius]

I apologize because I've largely avoided looking at any of the other posts in this thread. I just got this book, so you all are way ahead of me, and I'm too tempted to look under all that spoiler code!

I just wanted to stick my head in and say...last paragraph of page 42...squee!!

I now return you to your regularly scheduled thread...