Starfleet -- Great White Fleet or Peace Corps?

This is one of those questions that keeps being batted around whenever Trekkies get together...

Starfleet is big. It has a lot of powerful ships.

Just how "military" is it?

Consider the Enterprise in TNG. It is one of the most powerful vessels militarily in the UFP. It has enought firepower to take on whole flotillas of lesser planets. It also has families aboard, has done grain and medicine shipments, and the command structure is more on the level of "Suggestions?" than "That was an order, not a request!"

Is the primary purpose of Starfleet, then, to act as defense of the UFP or to act as diplomats, merchant marine, and scientific study platforms? Why isn't Starfleet divided into different branches, with differing desing philosophies for vessels based on whether they are military or survey vessels?

I know there is no right or wrong answer here on this topic, but I'd love to see some ideas batted around.

:D

If you're suggesting that multi-role ships are less effective than specialized vessels assigned to specialized branches of Starfleet, I agree with you. But you have to remember, Trek is a work of fiction, and they can tell a wider, more entertaining variety of stories if they focus on a ship which can be assigned to very different missions every week.

As for how military the organization is, I think it varies from ship to ship. Remember when Captain Jellico assumed command of the Enterprise-D, he was a much more hard-driving, by-the-book CO than Picard.

I tend to agree with Sarg that the tone of a vessel depends on its captain, hell I shudder to think what a ship with Tiburion captain is like :(, course then again it might just be the happiest and most relaxed ship in the fleet :D. However this produces two types of officers one who stay around forever turing down command or growth postions in favor of the "good ship loilpope" instead of moving on with their careers giving all the service the best of there capabilities.

Overall, I use a more military tone for TOS/TMP periods. I think Starfleet, in general, got more warm and fuzzy throughout the 24th C, but this turned about fast with the dominion War.

It's still most a captain thing, but that's one of teh big conflicts in the post DS9 game for us: the hawks that have come up through the DW vs. the doves -- the ones that are older Starfleet and think that defense is a big-mouthed diplomat.

On the other hand my post-DW game has had a big anti-militant backlash both in the Fleet and in UFP in general. The general perception is that "we" stuck our noses into the G quad, got told to leave, refused, got a ship blown up, refused to take the "hint", and started a war. After all, if they had simply gone home and set up some, fairly moderate, defenses on the home side of the wormhole they could have likely prevented the whole war.

As a result of this view SF is finding it difficult to rebuild as quickly as they would like.

FASA always used to describe Starfleet as more of a Coast Guard with a research wing. It kinda fits.

In TOS, I think Starfleet was more militant, especially with continual troubles with the Klingons and the return of the Romulans after 100+ years.

With the Romulans withdrawing again after the Tomed incident and eventual alliance with the Klingons, I think Starfleet felt it could afford to ease its military side (especially after the end of the Tholian war) and focus on research and diplomacy.

The Dominion War, of course, has challenged that thought process. I think that with the Tholians, there was no serious threat to the very existence of the Federation. But in the DW, there was a distinct feeling that if the Dominion ever won the war, even marginally, the Federation would have been so crippled that it could not survive.

I see the Federation of 2378 as one that is struggling with the balance between a military Starfleet and a return to a more peaceful stance. The doves, for the most part, are still in control...these are the same officers who served most of their careers in a time of peace, and there's probably a strong push from them to return to what they consider "equilibrium."

But the younger officers see a different Starfleet, one that needs to be the point end of the spear, so that another Betazed will never happen.

Starfleet exists with two co-existent purposes 1.) The Peaceful exploration and discovery of space and 2.) Providing for the Safety and Defense of the Federation and its citizens from all threats.

We can see that the defense portion dominated the 23rd century after the exploration and discovery potion more than likily dominated the 22nd century. The 24th was at first dominated by the exploration part but then gave way to the military side starting sometime in the 2350's woith the cardassian war with a minor remergence of exploration in the early 2360's. Of course since about 2367 the military has dominated Starfleet.

It is intresting to note that in the FASA version of Star Trek that Starfleet was indeed divided into seperate branches. They had the exploration command and the military command, if my memory serves me right.

FASA's Starfleet looked very much like the US Navy in the way it departmentalized itself. Military Operations, Colonial Operations, Merchant Marines, Galaxy Exploration, Starbase Operations, etc. Then you added in your branch commands (Corps of Engineers, Medical Corps, etc.).

To that we could add type commands: Constitution-class program, Cruiser groups, Destroyer-Frigate squadrons, Escort squadrons, Merchant Marine Fleets, etc. :) Considering the special nature of the Constitution-class starships, I decided to make them a separate type command.

You could add layers of bureaucracy.... :)

I see the Federation of 2378 as one that is struggling with the balance between a military Starfleet and a return to a more peaceful stance. The doves, for the most part, are still in control...these are the same officers who served most of their careers in a time of peace, and there's probably a strong push from them to return to what they consider "equilibrium."

But the younger officers see a different Starfleet, one that needs to be the point end of the spear, so that another Betazed will never happen.
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As a career military man myself, I've always had trouble with this topic. That said we have to consider the thoughts of and driving
force behind trek is it's creator Gene Roddenberry. In his own words he wanted Star Trek to be a sort of wagon train to the stars.Also one must consider the time in which the show was released the 1960s or in the hart of the Vietnam war with the prevailing antiwar sentiment of the time. Everything that followed stemmed from that initial development. The other chief reason was simple,it was very difficult technically to portray big space battles on a shoe string TV show budget. With the advent of really good CGI technology. And more importantly the coming of other very war like and action packed shows like Bab 5 was the main reason for the big battle finale of the later trek shows like DS9.