Another thought that occurred to me about the Cardassians sending a fleet around to infiltrate and hit our rimward flank from Lecarre space...
If they do send a force like that, they have to worry about repair options. Look at the kinds of shipyards our affiliates and member races have,
here. I doubt either the Lecarre or the Dawiar have more than, say, half a dozen starship berths, simply because they couldn't possibly fund enough construction to justify having more, even given the need for reserve capacity for repairs.
Plus, I don't think we've
ever seen any indication of a Dawiar or Lecarre ship big enough to classify as an explorer. If they even have a berth big enough to accomodate a 1.2-megaton
Jaldun, let alone a 1.5-megaton
Kaldar, it'd probably be the single biggest, heaviest berth type either species owns.
It's likely they only have one or two such berths each. And (again) going by the typical 'generic' designs we've seen kicking around the quadrant from minor species, even if the Lecarre or Dawiar have been building up their armed forces avidly (we know this for the Dawiar and can reasonably infer it for the Lecarre)... they're almost certainly focusing on building much smaller and cheaper frigates more in line with their own economic capability. Which, again, probably leaves them with a lot of berths too small to accomodate a Cardassian cruiser.
As a result, any Cardassian fleet fighting a protracted conflict on our rimward frontier would have serious problems getting its ships repaired. As soon as they had a difficult run-in with a powerful enemy force (say, the
entire Qloathi navy), the battle damage cases stack up and cannot be repaired in a timely fashion.
And whereas we can tow damaged ships away from a war in the Licori or Gabriel Border Zones and get them repaired easily at a berth halfway across the Federation through secure territory... the Cardassians don't have it so easy. Their supply route runs invitingly close to Seyek/Qloathi space, and either of those races would see a relatively easy, cheap victory in ambushing a damaged warship under tow back home at low to medium warp.
...
So they want to repair ships on site, and towing them away to be repaired in Cardassian space is costly, time-consuming, and risky... but the local fleet bases can't handle their ships very well.
To get around this, they'd have to prebuild repair berths in Lecarre space, berths the Lecarre themselves cannot use, and that the Cardassians probably can't use
to build ships without attracting our attention. This would require years of advanced preparation and significantly increase the risk of the whole operation being discovered.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea for us to try and figure out if the Cardassians are building a secret fleet repair base somewhere to rimward of us. But if they
aren't, that strongly indicates they aren't planning major fleet operations down there. They might detach a squadron to put some steel in the Lecarre's backbone and encourage the Dawiar to not just declare neutrality and have done with it. But I wouldn't expect a big fleet consisting of multiple task forces.
