Rogers Interview
Interview with an Admiral
written by: Iminathi Dlamini
aggregated and recommended by: The Martian Chronicle
selected and forwarded by: Federation Broadcast Service
Approaching politics as a second career has a long and honorable tradition on many worlds. On the one hand, a career outside government can provide valuable experience and context when making political decisions. Less idealistically, I have yet to see the political career whose launch didn't benefit from preexisting fame. Until, perhaps, now.
Solomon Mark Rogers recently announced his candidacy for mayor of Olympus Mons, the largest city on Mars. As all but the youngest of my readers will remember, Rogers once held the rank of Admiral and the post of Commander of Starfleet, arguably one of the most powerful offices in the entire Federation. With no prior experience in traditional politics, Rogers will be making the argument that if he can run Starfleet, he can run a city. Yet that argument may well be undercut by the cloud under which he departed his six years in the Admiralty office. Forced to resign by the Federation Council, Rogers has been dogged by rumors of malfeasance, misappropriation of funds, and even accusations that he refused to accept the authority of the Council to dismiss him and had to be talked down by his subordinates.
No charges were ever filed and no court martial or inquiry was ever held. At the end of the Common Era year 2300, Solomon Rogers vanished into the obscurity of civilian life. He refused all interviews and was quickly eclipsed by his successor Admiral Vitalia Kahurangi, who is credited for an incredible decade of expansion for both Starfleet and the Federation as a whole. Now Rogers is seeking to renter public life, and if he hopes to leverage his Starfleet career to convince voters to entrust him with political power, he can no longer avoid questions about the end of his Starfleet career.
I made this argument to Rogers shortly after the announcement of his candidacy, and he agreed. He informed me that one of his projects for the past decade has been assembling an autobiography covering the entirety of his Starfleet career, but that voters shouldn't have to wait for that to get their questions answered concerning its end. The interview was conducted one-on-one, and Rogers was not provided any of the questions in advance.
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I meet Rogers at his home. He has a small table and some chairs set up in the garden where we can talk. There's lemon water on the table and the smell of lilacs from the garden's flowers. Rogers looks healthy and relaxed, somehow younger-seeming at nearly 80 than the exhausted-looking man who resigned fourteen years ago. After some small talk about the garden we get to it.
DLAMINI: Why did the Federation Council force your resignation as Admiral of Starfleet?
ROGERS: (laughs) You don't screw around, do you? Well the letter I got used the phrase, "The President is thankful for your service, but believes new leadership will be able to reflect the changing priorities of the Federation Council with regards to Starfleet." Of course, what that really means is that I wasn't demilitarizing Starfleet the way they wanted. They were entirely correct about that.
DLAMINI: So the Council was right to fire you?
ROGERS: I disagreed with the Council on the degree to which the Starfleet needed to be militarily prepared for threats beyond the Federation's borders. I tried to convince them of my point of view, and I failed. Maybe if there had been some of those Amarki councillors I would have had better luck, but back then poor Hans Carmichael, rest his soul, was just about the only one sticking up for me. Eventually things got to the point where I had to resign.
DLAMINI: That sounds biased to me. You didn't nobly resign rather than than follow orders you couldn't in good conscience carry out. You were asked to resign.
ROGERS: The Commander of Starfleet is expected to push back against the Council. You're not doing your job if you don't tell them things they don't like hearing. I was hoping that by showing them some results, they'd start to accept the arguments I was making.
DLAMINI: Results like the Ares cruiser?
ROGERS: I never should have let the design team tag it with the name of a god of war. I think I lost two or three Councillors from that alone. But yes, the Ares project among others.
DLAMINI: I'd like to come back to the Ares shortly, but first can you be a little clearer on the nature of your disagreement with the Council?
ROGERS: I'm going to ask you to think back to nearly 20 years ago. It's 2395, and the Khitomer Accords are shy of two years old. We're also less than two years out from Fleet Admiral Cartwright... a goddamn traitor! Starfleet didn't even have a Commander for two years. The President had everyone from Rear Admiral on up reporting to him personally, until every senior officer could be investigated for complicity with Cartwright. I won't say it wasn't necessary. It was. Sometimes, though, necessary things can still produce terrible results.
DLAMINI: You're saying it was bad for Starfleet?
ROGERS: It was a disaster on every level. Normally we have more candidates for Starfleet Academy than we can handle. Not those two years. In fact, we were bleeding personnel. Lots of resignations and early retirements. The Council cut funding so that resources could be redirected. I'll tell you something that hasn't made it into the public record yet, but is almost due for automatic disclosure under the twenty-one year rule. The Federation Council held a serious debate about disbanding Starfleet in its current form and reconstituting it as nothing but a coordination office for member world fleets. I know for a fact that Jim Kirk had to personally appear before them in closed session and beg them to reconsider, just weeks before he died. We'll both be able to read a transcript soon enough.
DLAMINI: And into all of this you step.
ROGERS: Right. Into all of this I step. Immediately I get hit with demands. First, the Council wants the return of the Five Year Mission of exploration. That was how Kirk sold them, you know, talking about the glory days of the Constitutions and their five year mission of exploration. Oh, and speaking of the Constitutions, they're all to be decommissioned. An obsolete and outdated class.
DLAMINI: You're saying the Council ordered you to decommission the Constitutions?
ROGERS: Well... I take some of the heat for that one. The initiative was started before I took command, but I kept it going. With a crew and resource shortage on my hands, I needed a bigger fleet of smaller ships, and those old Connies were crew hogs.
DLAMINI: This is a fascinating history lesson, but we seem to be veering away from what got you fired.
ROGERS: You need context. All right, so my funding has been cut, and I have to divert my Explorer production into five year missions. At this point I'm wondering, what exactly am I supposed to defend the Federation with? The Council tells me I don't need to worry about that. The new mission of Starfleet is peaceful exploration. We signed a treaty with the Klingons, and it's been a 100 years since the Romulan ceasefire.
DLAMINI: You disagreed.
ROGERS: I disagreed. Who knew if the peace with the Klingons was going to hold? Hell, it's twenty years later and I'm still not sure it's going to hold. They signed the Khitomer Accords out of desperation. As for the Romulans, their ambassador was part of Cartwright's plot to create a war between us and the Klingons. Sure they disavowed him afterwards, but name me one person who believes that. We know there are still powerful factions within the Romulan Star Empire that believe it's their right to take back Vulcan. And if not either of them, well, with Five Year Missions back on who knew when we'd run into some aggressive, imperialistic
Union out among the stars that doesn't respect anything but force.
DLAMINI: Are you claiming to have predicted the existence of the Cardassian Union?
ROGERS: Not them specifically, but there was a good chance something like them was out there.
DLAMINI: So you felt the Federation Council was leaving Starfleet without the resources to defend the Federation.
ROGERS: Right. They cut Starfleet and the member world fleets were a j- Were not prepared to take on that responsibility in Starfleet's place.
DLAMINI: Were you going to say they were a joke?
ROGERS: I have a lot of respect for UESPA, the Andorian Guard, and the others.
DLAMINI: I'll let that one go. So you built Miranda class ships nearly exclusively.
ROGERS: We needed something cheap, easy to crew, and capable of throwing a punch in naval combat. Council hated it, wanted some Oberths or to exchange them for squeezing out an extra Excelsior, but Mirandas met the need.
DLAMINI: The need to counter a hypothetical threat.
ROGERS: Starships take years to build. An assessment of needs years down the line is always hypothetical. This is also when we transitioned over to building Starfleet ships only in Starfleet-owned shipyards. I had to make a decision between a second Excelsior berth at San Francisco and a two smaller berths at 30 Eridani A. I took option number 2.
DLAMINI: Let's return to the subject of the Ares.
ROGERS: All right. Starfleet needed a cruiser cheaper than an Excelsior, but better armed and tougher than a Constellation. It needed a Renaissance, but the technology wasn't there yet. I tried to build one anyway.
DLAMINI: Let me tell you what's been reported by rumors and off-the-record statements, and then you can respond. Fair?
ROGERS: Fair.
DLAMINI: You, Admiral Rogers, told the Council in 2296 that you wanted to build a light explorer that would be almost as good as the Excelsior in all roles, but it would cost fewer resources to build and require fewer crew. In fact that's not rumor; we actually have access to your original proposals. The Council bought into it and even ordered a special two megaton limited use berth built in Martian orbit for the construction of the prototype.
ROGERS: That was actually the core of what became Utopia Planitia, by the way.
DLAMINI: Noted. However you couldn't deliver what you promised. With the technology of the day, it was impossible to fit Explorer power generation, tactical systems, and operational systems on an 1800 kiloton hull. Instead of admitting failure, you doubled-down. You tried a "concurrency" program where the prototype would built even as the design was being completed so that cutting edge technology could be incorporated. This resulted in chaos in San Francisco as repeated revisions caused massive construction delays and entire sections of the Ares had to be stripped and rebuilt. Most damningly, you resorted to pulling resources from the Excelsior program to the Ares Heavy Cruiser program, slowing down Excelsior production.
At this point Rogers nearly interrupts me and then visibly restrains himself.
DLAMINI: Finally in 2300 the Council gets fed up and investigates. They find out you lied to them. They were promised a light explorer and garrison flagship, and what you were building was a highly militarized design mounting firepower equal to an Excelsior's at the expense of almost any true science capability. They had your resignation about a month later. Now, care to respond?
ROGERS: For the good of Starfleet and the Federation I stayed quiet after my resignation and didn't try to make a public fight of it. I have to say, though, that the 'we could have had more Excelsiors' canard is the one that ticks me off the most. Simple logic ought to dispel it. When I was Commander, there was only one berth in the entire Federation capable of building Excelsiors. That berth was constantly busy in Excelsior production the entire time I was Commander of Starfleet. You don't need to be a Vulcan to run that math.
DLAMINI: You were the one who didn't request an extra Excelsior berth, though.
ROGERS: Because I felt there were other production priorities. So the only part of the 'Excelsior resources' story that is technically true is that it used to be Starfleet policy to maintain a strategic stockpile of resources for repairing a heavily damaged Excelsior. I tapped into that stockpile for work on the Ares. What no one seem to comment on is that Kahurangi completely abandoned any such resource conversation policy in her expansionist drive.
DLAMINI: Fair enough. But what about the rest of the story? How can the voters trust you won't lie to them like you lied to the Council?
ROGERS: I'm not going to say I didn't make any mistakes, but I never intentionally lied to the Council. If I was deceiving anyone, it was myself. I really believed that we could make it up eventually, that the needed technologies were just around the corner. If we could just get the Ares launched, the sensors and labs could be upgraded on a refit.
DLAMINI: You named Romulans and Klingons as potential antagonists that the Ares was needed to depend against. Both of them use cloaking devices. Sacrificing sensor technology in favor of extra torpedoes and phasers doesn't seem-
ROGERS: I'm not going to defend how the Ares turned out. It was a mistake, and I've thought about it a lot over the past decade. What I'm promising the citizens of Olympus Mons is that I've learned from that mistake. Believe me, never again will I let myself get so wrapped up in a project that I start engaging in self-deception about what's actually possible. If I'm elected mayor, I promise a clear-eyed pragmatic government.
DLAMINI: Arguably though, the Ares was just the culmination of your general strategy for Starfleet. Are you also prepared to admit that was a mistake?
ROGERS: What do you mean?
DLAMINI: You were convinced the Romulan reaction to Khitomer would be a move against the Federation, but until the biophage incident forced them out of it, the Romulans seem to have been returning to isolationism. I'm not saying you should have predicted the biophage, but even absent that you read them wrong. As for what was right, Admiral Kahurangi's strategy of the past decade, continued by Admiral Sousa this decade, has been expansion. Rather than trying to churn out Mirandas, you could have taken opportunity of Khitomer to expand the Federation's resource base and obtain allies so to industrially out-compete everyone.
ROGERS: Well that's certainly the Expanionist take on recent history, and I can't deny it's been successful... but it's also been very risky. We've nearly crept to the edge of war the Federation was unprepared for several times. The integration of so many new species into the Federation has left us without any buffer states. You have to ask yourself if Sousa's Starfleet is making commitments that it won't be able to keep if called upon. Do we have the forces to be fighting both the Arcadian Empire and in the Gabriel Expanse? Might we be better off if a few less Excelsiors had been built in exchange for a nine or ten more Mirandas?
Rogers sips some water.
ROGERS: I was wrong to run the Ares project the way I did, but I wasn't wrong about the need for a more combat-capable cruiser. I get as sentimental about the Constitution class as anyone, but it's a sign of failure on the part of Starfleet that we had to rush a design nearly as old as I am back into production just to have a reliable cruiser. My friends in Starfleet tell me that was Heidi Eriksson's idea, by the way. If you see her on the street, you should shake her hand. I give even odds that the threat of those Connies helped tip the balance to keep the Cardasian Union from declaring war on us.
DLAMINI: That's certainly a Hawkish take on recent history.
ROGERS: Touché. Listen, I took a Starfleet that had its morale and the trust of the Federation shattered, and I pulled it back together. I built some ships, recruited some good people, and I handed Kahurangi a functional organization. I'm proud of that, and if what she did isn't what I would have done, she was at least able to do it with the Starfleet I handed over to her.
DLAMINI: One more rumor I need to ask about. Some people say that you refused to resign when directed to do so. You tried to bluff the Council, and your senior officers had to talk you down.
ROGERS: No one is more disgusted than me about what Cartwright tried to pull. It was nothing less than a coup attempt, and it's no lie to say it nearly destroyed Starfleet. So when 'rumors' say terrible things about me, I try to be understanding. I was the first Commander after Cartwright. It's only right that everyone was being more vigilant than ever.
DLAMINI: So you deny that you refused to resign.
ROGERS: I- did not respond to the Council's letter with the promptness I should have. I spent too long trying to hit up my political allies and seeing if there was any way to salvage the situation, when I ought to have damn well known that if things had gotten to that stage there was nothing to do but go in peace. In my defense, I'd never been asked to leave a position... failed at a job, I guess you'd say, in my entire life. It was an alien experience and a humbling one. Maybe knocked some unnecessary pride out of me.
DLAMINI: You seem to have made your peace.
ROGERS: I spent a life in Starfleet, and once I took some time outside it I learned a lot about myself. But it's not in my nature to sit around in retirement. Now that I've worked out my own issues, I think I have something to contribute in government.
DLAMINI: So about the position you've selected to contest.... You're aware that the office of Mayor of Olympus Mons has been a springboard to United Earth or even Federation level government in the past. In fact, it was held by the current Federation Councillor for Mars, Josef Nkumba.
ROGERS: (smiles) Was it?
DLAMINI: I also note your mayoral term of office would be up just in time to run for the Mars Council seat. On the Hawks ticket perhaps?
ROGERS: It would be wildly premature to talk about that. I haven't even won this election yet, and my focus is completely on this city.
DLAMINI: Early polls look good for you, though. No comment at all?
ROGERS: It would be nice to see the Federation Council chambers again. Maybe someday I'll go to Paris and take the tour. Or something.
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And with that most unsubtle reply, my interview with former Admiral Rogers concluded. Time will tell if there is more to his career with the Federation.
@OneirosTheWriter I know you don't do a lot of omake rewards anymore, but if when you run the 2318 election the Hawks candidate should happen to win Mars according to your dice rolls...
