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The is what happens when you get too many tree-huggers in power. You end up being worried too much about "no kid left behind" and you fail to prepare for what might be coming.

Hate to burst your bubble, Jim, but "No Child Left Behind" is an initiative of the right wing, not of the "tree-hugging" left.

The Feds did have a bit of warning about the war. It was almost a year from first contact to war.

But yeah I agree that the Federation gives a small percent of its resources to starfleet.

Teaos wrote:The Feds did have a bit of warning about the war. It was almost a year from first contact to war.

This means two things:

#1 - The Federation wears opaque rose-colored glasses in assuming that they will be able to avoid hostile confrontation with any species/nation they encounter, and refuse to prepare for that eventuality; and/or

#2 - They're in worse shape than we thought militarily, because they had a year to prepare and were still as outclassed as they were.

The Dominion was not a resonable threat though.

Look at the amount of ships starfleet had compared to it known enemies.

At the time of DS9 it would have been able to take on an win against any of the known threats around bar maybe the Borg which are so damn unpredicatbale tis hard to judge preparedness.

There is no way they could possibly know that a HUGE galactic power would show up on their door step. It is not in anyway resonable to say they should prepare for that. Clear and present danger. The Dominon was neither of these things.

Starfleet was at a good power level for all known threat. And given the vastness of space new enemies do not just pop up. They might be discovered on the far fringes of space but you would have lots of warning.

According to your own post, they had a year of warning about the Dominion, and a fat lot of good it did them.

And "adequate for the time being" is never adequate.

What the hell can you do in a single year? For all we know they did incress everything as much as possible but as has been stated you cant just snap your fingers and make extra ship yards and starships.

There strength was not just adequate for the time being. It was adequate for all present and forseeable dangers to the federation. The Dominion was such an extreamly hugely unlikely thing to happen it would have been irresponcibal if not financially imposssible to keep starfleets strengh high enough to fend of a supposed threat like that.

Teaos wrote:What the hell can you do in a single year? For all we know they did incress everything as much as possible but as has been stated you cant just snap your fingers and make extra ship yards and starships.

My point exactly.

There strength was not just adequate for the time being. It was adequate for all present and forseeable dangers to the federation.

For practical purposes, these are the same thing.

it would have been irresponcibal if not financially imposssible to keep starfleets strengh high enough to fend of a supposed threat like that.

How so? It could only be deemed irresponsible if it would tie up such a large majority of UFP resources that other areas would suffer. We have no evidence, or even suggestion, that this would be the case.

The UFP was already aware of a major "clear and present danger" in the Borg. We've heard of races in the Delta quadrant that were able to hold off the Borg, so it's not impossible. If one were to adopt a defeatist attitude when it comes to a race so powerful, why go into space in the first place?

And they responded to the clear and present danger of the Borg by building the Defiant class and bringing out a whole new class of flag ship brimming in SOTA tech.

My point exactly.

Whats that point? Doing everything you can isnt good enough?

For practical purposes, these are the same thing.

No Adequate for the time being means you can combat anyone who is currently your enemy. Adequate for the future means against all foreseeable enemys. The Federation had both.

How so? It could only be deemed irresponsible if it would tie up such a large majority of UFP resources that other areas would suffer. We have no evidence, or even suggestion, that this would be the case.

You can say all you like about hw you think starfleet is stupid but why would they not have every possible ship they can. Going to war time production is something you can do for a few years not indefinatly.

Could the Dominion have been stopped earlier by blockading the wormhole? It would have been easier keeping the Dominion bottled up on the otherside of the wormhole rather then allowing them to build shipyards and cloning facilities in the Alpha Quadrant.

However, the Dominion does have a vast fleet, and Starfleet would be hard pushed to fight off a massive invasion - at least until the minefield was invented.

Could say a fleet the size of the one seen in "Favor the Bold" hold off a full on Dominion Invasion? Granted it took some time to assemble, but if advance warning of a Dominion attack was given?

Starfleet still had hope of no war and keeping the wormhole open to them as it was a huge asset.

Also I think it technically belonged to Bajor so it wasnt their call.

But yeah it would have been smart.

I think Teaos may be right that there was a jurisdiction problem with pre-emptive blockade. Starfleet is definitely an organization of Law more than it is an organization of Good (to drag in the D&D alignment grid).

That said, the wormhole is disgustingly easy to blockade. It has such a narrow opening that you can't pass a whole fleet through at the same instant. Instead, they come out in sequence, and if you have completely surrounded the wormhole opening, you can concentrate overwhelming fire on them before the rest of the fleet comes through in support. How much of the incoming fleet you could destroy this way depends on just how fast you can pour ships through the wormhole, which I don't know for sure.

There's also the factor that coming out of the wormhole, you have to get a scan of your surroundings to find targets in the area, which takes some non-zero amount of time. Blockaders have their sensors fixed on the wormhole--you wouldn't even need human intervention, just have all ships programmed to fire on anything that came out of the wormhole.

The self replicating mines were prehaps the single smartest idea we ever saw in DS9. They worked perfectly until some glitch gave them away.

kostmayer wrote:Could the Dominion have been stopped earlier by blockading the wormhole? It would have been easier keeping the Dominion bottled up on the otherside of the wormhole rather then allowing them to build shipyards and cloning facilities in the Alpha Quadrant.

They tried to solve the problem perminantly by sealing the wormhole in "By Inferno's Light" - it failed thanks to the Changeling Bashir, and ended any possiblility of sealing it. From the start, the Federation should have been upgrading DS9's defences in the way they did prior to "Way of the Warrior", and ideally should have sealed the wormhole - either as a result of the initial Jem'Hadar contact ("The Jem'Hadar"), the discovery of Founder infilitration ("The Adversary"), or the discovery of the extent of Founder infiltration of the major powers ("Broken Link", "Apocalypse Rising"). Feasability studies on mining the wormhole were probably being carried from the failure of the attempt to seal the thing, and what we saw in "Call to Arms" was only the finishing touches.