While the odds of Starfleet or the Federation going land war: Cardassia is very remote (we really seem to lack any form of standing forces under our direct control, we'd depend on member states for that) we really don't need to invade to win, just trash their orbital infrastructure and play whack-a-mole with their shipping. given the Cardassian known (or presumed) bottlenecks, if we defeat them, or at least neutralize most of their fleet, they are done.
The thing is, to neutralize most of their fleet we'll have to cut well into their
space. Even if we don't physically occupy planets we have to occupy
space. We'd have to destroy or capture multiple layers of outpost and starbase defense networks, blow up a lot of ships. And bear in mind that due to the way repairs work we will, on average, have to fight and overcome each individual enemy ship
twice or even more times to finally destroy it.
The Cardassians may reasonably hope that even if they lost a series of major battles on the borders, the political support just wouldn't be there for the Federation to keep fighting the war all the way up to the orbitals of Cardassia Prime and make demands of the Union government at torpedopoint. And that they could probably offer any peace treaty on terms even slightly more favorable than "status quo ante bellum" and expect much of the Federation government to want to accept. In which case they might, say, lose Bajor and their mining colonies in the Gabriel Expanse, but they wouldn't be worried about getting destroyed as a functioning government.
Basically, from the point of view of the Cardassians, the strong pacifist faction within the Federation acts as a 'hedge' against the risks normally associated with fighting a war.
Normally in war, if you win you can theoretically win everything, but if you lose you can theoretically lose everything. This makes war very undesirable if the odds are even slightly against you. And even if the odds are for you, you may be a lot more worried about "lose all" than you are eager over "gain all."
But against the Federation, the Council's inclination to accept minor concessions in exchange for peace will tend to reduce the amount the Cardassians can "lose," because they can give up a little in order to end the war early. As a result, they may reason that a moderate chance of gaining a large amount is better than an equal (or even slightly greater) risk of losing
only a small amount.
Well, it highly depends on how the Obsidian Order reads on those events and what they pass on to the military...
I say this because we don't know and can't know that sort of thing and hoping our adversaries will be as smart and unbiased as we want them to be. And this is not me talking shit about their intellect or impartial thought, just that while we should hope that... we should also keep in mind they might not.
To be fair, fascist governments have a long history of underestimating opponents and picking unnecessary fights that they shouldn't have sought out; read Eco's essay on "the eternal fascist" for more on that subject.
Ah, but is it rich in Bulk or Special? and at which ratio? if they start strip-mining the place, that is not going to sit well on the Bajorans. Canonically, Bajor was a resource sink for cardassia, a costly occupation.
Yes, but it only became one AFTER the Cardassians started brutally extracting large amounts of resources from the planets. They did a lot of strip-mining and toxic industry there, for instance. Remember that the Occupation lasted for roughly fifty years in canon.
While we certainly can't intervene directly, and the Bajorans have yet to feel the boot long enough, but perhaps we could have some of our member states, try to get a covert approach to Bajor? I mean, in canon Bajor was Cardassia's Afganistan... and as ill advised it was all in retrospect irl, we might want to help the bajorans help themselves?
I mean, would depend on the wording of Celos, but we had some unofficial leeway about that, iirc...
So, at the very least we should try keeping some eyes on Bajor.
Some intelligence regarding the situation on Bajor would be helpful. We
explicitly promise not to disrupt the status of Bajor, but that promise is predicated on the promises the Cardassians made, and they may not intend to keep those. Also, we have reason to think the Bajoran Occupation got worse over time; it may honestly not be that bad right now, with a genuine functional Bajoran government that has considerable popular support being 'advised' by Cardassians, and with only a few religious fanatic holdouts seriously opposing the new regime.
Come to think of it, that's... pretty much what Afghanistan was like for the Soviets at first.
Actually, just thought of something, we should try to foucs our EC around the Cardassian Territories, we should try to check their expansion potential and contest it, at the very least, by the release of propaganda to any species within those areas.
Course, only the most veteran EC crews should be allotted to the furthest areas, for obvious reasons
That's... not a bad idea. That is, after all, more or less what we we did with the Explorer Corps from about 2305-08, and it was very successful at curbing Cardassian expansion before they could 'get to' the Indorians, the Apiata, or the Seyek. We particularly dodged a bullet with how well the Explorer Corps handled the Apiata, as Briefvoice's recent omake illustrates.
Right now our explorers are pretty busy, in particular because of the Licori War, but I definitely agree we should try to poke out past Seyek space and try to get contact with the species in that region before they get snapped up. We know what we have to do in order to try to 'push around' the Cardassians' coreward flank, but their rimward flank is pretty much unexplored territory.
About this, will we need to do anything to reclassify Excelsiors as Explorer, Light once our new Explorer, Capital (Ambassador Class) starts to come on line? if so, how will we need to do this?
WHY would we need to? What is the purpose of doing this? The only reason we have these ship roles is to formalize things we need Council approval for. We don't need Council approval for the
Ambassadors because we already have it.
