Remember that unless the crisis forces her resignation, Sousa will retain her ability to make deals without expending PP. Might be good to think on which faction would benefit most from closer Yrillian ties?
Historically, making such deals tends to result in us having to give up something else. I believe that last snakepit we used this to arrange a humanitarian aid convoy to Celos (which may be helping us now by decreasing the number of 'accidental guerillas' willing to fight against us on Celos). Thing is, we had to make a deal with Stesk and the pacifists, and part of the deal was an agreement to let them spend some of our political capital for us.
Sousa can definitely make bargains, but the bargains will come with a price.
The problem is your scenario at no point requires them to have active contact with telepaths now, just at some previous point. Once they've developed the training regime and proved it works they don't actually need (and probably definitely don't want) to continue testing it by having people rummage around inside their senior officers' heads who aren't even good Cardassians. It's also entirely possible it was developed against a wartime enemy using POWs or the like to test.
Yes, I came to that conclusion later, if you read the rest of my posts on the subject.
That said, are you at least willing to grant me that this
might actually be a reasonable concern? That if the Cardassians are hard to read telepathically as a result of some training regimen that many of them undergo, at least
maybe we should be on the lookout for evidence of Cardassian telepaths, or of a group of telepaths affiliated with the Union in some way?
I just don't want us to get complacent here. The numbers game suggests that the Federation can overrun the Cardassians without too much trouble, if we are able to mobilize the bulk of the member world fleets. A lot of us have gotten, I think, a bit too relaxed about the outcome of a possible war, or for that matter of another ten years of sniping and skirmishing like the last seven years or so have been.
Thing is, the size of our fleets is probably a matter of public record in-setting, or at least reasonably accurate estimates can be made. The Cardassians have to
know we are rapidly getting bigger than them, a lot bigger, and yet they're still willing to crank up the pressure.
So we should be willing to think a little outside the box. What resources might the Cardassians have, that lend them extra confidence? Maybe they have hidden affiliates- but thanks to Captain Mrr'shan and the
Enterprise, we'll soon have a pretty good idea what's going on there. Maybe they have some kind of secret weapon that they didn't have in canon, but which lends them confidence (e.g. cloaking devices or psychics). Maybe they've got a special
political angle- say, they've managed to suborn members of the Federation Council without the Betazoids knowing it, somehow.
It might be that all this speculation is pointless, the Cardassians have essentially nothing important that we don't know about. In which case we know the full measure of their strength and they are willing to take aggressive, provocative steps towards a rival twice their size, in limited hopes of gaining much of anything as a result.
But we should at least pay attention to what we see happening in game, and see if any hints drop foreshadowing unexpected developments.
