Christmas Ape wrote...
"What if we lose" has prevented precisely zero wars in history. It is always a possibility in war that your side will lose. Should that preclude you from trying to defend your right to existence?
Wouldn't this be attempting to prove a negative? If a war had been averted because somebody asked the question, "What if we lose?" how would anybody ever know about it? History doesn't record the wars that
weren't fought.
The whole concept of deterrence is based on a country intimidating its enemies from attacking it by forcing them to confront this question. By arming yourself to the teeth, you force the other side to consider the possibility of defeat if they were to attack you. If this deterrence works, then "What if we lose?" has effectively prevented war.
Except that you can do that from orbit, assuming it comes to that. I'm not pretending the worst case scenario of an irredeemable race is going to be pretty. I'm not pretending the cost will not be cruel.
But it is a cost paid by human civilians at least once a year, every year. And they pay it for the rest of their wretched, desperate, terrified lives - often shortened drastically in the only mercy they will ever be offered.
Except that we can't. We're a signee to the Citadel Conventions prohibiting the use of orbital bombardment on garden worlds. If we initiate war with the Batarian Hegemony and then proceed to begin nuking perfectly-habitable planets, we could rightly be called war criminals.
Apparently not horrific enough to require action. So how many is too many? We are losing credits and lives right now. Every year. Give me the numbers in this devil's bargain; when will we discover that committing to doing nothing was the more costly decision? Is there such a thing for you? Is there a certain level of attrition every we need to just "get used to" as the cost of interstellar colonization? If so, how high is it?
If the "action" we're talking about is attempting genocidal war with a space-faring civilization capable of inflicting a tremendous amount of harm on us in retaliation, then no, the situation doesn't require action. The batarians aren't picking off entire Alliance colonies anymore - they're preying on isolated human colonies, many of which likely aren't even affiliated with the Alliance. We don't need to resort to all out war to stop the batarians from raiding Alliance worlds (if they're even doing it anymore). Less extreme retaliatory actions like that at Torfan proved effective in the past at pushing the batarians back.
Yes. A line must be drawn; this far, no further. No more. Every citizen taken without reprisal emboldens them to do it again. Every undefended colony fattens their pockets and places more humans in brutal, relentless misery until an exhausted death toiling for alien masters. Better to be dragged down into dust, nails and teeth slicked with the blood of the enemy, than to simply slip beneath the weight of history as a people who would not stand for their own.
We don't need to engage in a genocidal campaign to draw a line in the sand. It's the equivalent of using a sledgehammer to kill a fly. This may sound harsh, but I'd rather risk continued raids on frontier colonies and continue with a more measured response indefinitely than attempt to exterminate every batarian in the galaxy. The Alliance can't save or protect everyone. As humanity continues to expand further and further, remote colonies will continue to be hit as the Alliance fleet finds itself increasingly overstretched. We can't declare a crusade on everybody who picks on a human colony.
I'm afraid you won't be able to panic me by waving a knife menacingly at Earth; in all wars costs are paid, and if they're reaching Earth and Elysium then we're losing anyway.
Not necessarily. There aren't fixed battle lines in space that the batarians have to fight through to reach our most important population centres. The batarians only need to get a few good-sized vessels within FTL-jump range of a vital human world like Earth. Once they've done that, they can just activate their FTL drives and hammer their ships right into our planets.
Consider what would happen if in a last ditch attempt at revenge the batarians scrape up every space-faring ship they can get their hands on and throw them all at Earth like the Japanese kamikazes did to Allied warships in the Second World War. If even one of them got through, we'd be looking at hundreds of millions of casualties at the very least and property damage amounting to billions of credits. Isn't this price a bit high just to stop the batarians from abducting a few dozen human colonists every year?
I'm not against retaliation for batarian attacks on
Alliance targets. But the response has to be measured and proportionate to the scale of the threat. Genocide or total war is not a measured response.
It should also be considered that many of these batarian raids may be on colonies like Horizon - colonies founded by humans who knowingly and intentionally strayed out of Alliance space. Why should the Alliance be obligated to protect people who are deliberately trying to avoid having anything to do with it?
The Alliance has only limited resources and shouldn't be wasting them on fighting a major war against a third rate power that poses little threat to humanity's survival or core interests.
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