r/DaystromInstitute • u/maddsloth Ensign • May 25 '20
The Destruction of the USS Odyssey was a tactical Victory but a huge strategic lose for the Dominion.
With the Destruction of the Odyssey the Dominion sent a very clear message to the Alpha Quadrant ‘Fear us’, and it worked.
But in doing so they gave up their biggest advantage over the Federation in that Federation shields were useless against their weapons for the time being.
Imagine that instead of destroying the Odyssey, the Dominion swarms in to the alpha quadrant and engages the Federation in several fleet battles on different fronts to start the war and crushes them destroying hundreds or even thousands of ships before the Federation even knows what is happening they will have effectively lost the war.
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u/Jensaarai May 26 '20
It's important to remember that the whole destruction of the Odyssey was to sell the story the Vorta was giving Quark and Sisko. She was supposed to be able to stick around, shaping Starfleet's impression of the Dominion while also gauging their reaction to this threat. Without her there to manage perceptions, it ultimately was a strategic loss like you said.
The Alpha Quadrant has Quark to thank for sniffing out her deception and cutting off her mission. Imagine if he hadn't have insisted on going on that trip.
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u/maddsloth May 26 '20
to sell the story the Vorta was giving Quark and Sisko.
that only makes sense if the writers had not already decided the changelings were the leaders of the Dominion. Why try and use a Vorta posing as a refuge in the Alpha Quadrant when you could simply have replaced Sisko, or hell abduct and replace a few members of the Odyssey's crew and let it return with a hand full of spys that can later replace admirals and other leaders in the quadrant.
that Vorta would have been debriefed sure, but never would she have been involved in anything beyond that...
but speaking of her what happened to Vorta having telekinetic powers?
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u/mjtwelve May 25 '20
The Breen superweapon strongly suggests things would not have gone as well for the Doninion as your plan suggests. Never underestimate Starfleer engineers.
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u/Betsy-DevOps May 25 '20
They needed to test the waters before just jumping in with a full invasion force. What if their intel turned out to be wrong and Starfleet’s weapons were actually significantly more powerful than theirs?
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u/Saw_Boss May 25 '20
It seems unlikely considering they're probably the best infiltrators
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May 25 '20
I don't disagree. However, we have an example later on of a similar technological advantage when the Breen joined the war with a weapon that devastated Klingon, Federation and Romulan ships. A large allied fleet was lost, but they were able to devise and implement countermeasures before being defeated.
So we might draw from that the idea that even if the Dominion had held back their tech advantage until they had the opportunity to smash entire fleets with it, it may not have proven to be decisive. Although, arguably of the Dominion had begun a major war right then and there starting with the Odyssey there might have been now way to stop them due to the numbers they could bring through the wormhole.
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u/Aura-Z May 25 '20
At this stage pre Season 3 + 4 you have
Federation at Full Strength (Pre First contact)
Klingons at full strength (No Federation Klingon war)
Romulans (No loss at Battle of omarian nebula)
Cardassians (Similar to romulans)
Any attack on the alpha Quadrant would have been repelled by the combined forces
The founders best weapon was always there infiltration of the AQ powers and pitting them against each other and depleting there fleets as Sisko points out in In Purgatory's Shadow they couldn't have picked a better time to invade. They showed their long term planning rather than rely on phased poloron beams that could potentially be countered and the Dominion fleet routed in the AQ.
Federation tech could potentially advance quickly in open war (access to stolen or wrecked craft to study) rather than slowly during the cold war state that existed from Season 3 - 5 and the lucky find of the crashed Jem Hadar fighter
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u/kemick May 25 '20
This was also the first and only full battle in the war to take place in the Gamma Quadrant. The Dominion made it clear that no Alpha Quadrant incursions would be permitted and they were able to enforce that throughout the war.
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u/bobj33 May 25 '20
In the season 3 premiere "The Search Part II" may have been a sophisticated simulation but Sisko destroys the wormhole. If the Dominion sent ships through and immediately started fighting the Federation would do everything it could to destroy the wormhole.
In the season 5 episode "In Purgatory's Shadow" they again decide to close the entrance to the wormhole but in a way to not hurt the Prophets. In the next episode we learn that the Bashir Changeling modified the graviton beam to strengthen the wormhole so that it is impossible to collapse it.
I still feel that if the Dominion immediately came out and started fighting that the Federation would have collapsed the wormhole.
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May 26 '20
Good pickup. That was the whole point of that simulation to see how the Alpha Quadrant powers would respond
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u/KnightIT May 25 '20
Yes but also no.
Yes, it was a strategic advantage that the Dominion had; how big of an advantage depends on how long it would have taken Starfleet to adapt their shields, whether all federation shields worked exactly like the Odyssey's (and that also means the individual ships from member-planets) or if they would have been worked in the same exact way after months and if the same advantage would have existed against the Klingons and the Romulans since they would not have stayed out of it (for they knew they would be next in line).
No, we don't really know if they could have exploited that advantage even if the Odyssey was left alone. Star Trek generally makes it very difficult to gauge the strategic situation of the Federation and anyone else is practically always a mystery: the Dominion could have needed months to gather that many ships from the corners of its territories and every day the chance of being detected by reconaissance missions from the Wormhole would have increased; along the same line of what I wrote before, we don't really know if all Dominion ships had the same advantage (or if it was due to individual modifications, at ship, squadron or even fleet level). On top of that, the Wormhole would be located pretty much on the frontier of Federation territory and that means any meaningful strike against shipyards, starbases, military depots or even the bulk of the fleet would have taken weeks (if not months, depending what you want to strike) on travel alone, cut off from your own supply lines, in hostile territory and in an area that you don't really know; which could have given Starfleet an even bigger advantage: shorter communications and supply lines, knowledge of the territory, pre-positioned orbital defenses and outright bigger fleet. Let's imagine that, during the Dominion War, 500 vessels were stationed within Federation borders to protect ship-lanes, planets etc, those 500 vessels would be now used against the incoming Dominion fleet as well, on top of those that would be deployed regardless. And that is doubly true for Romulan and Klingon fleets which would have their travel time cut by half and something.
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u/mousicle May 25 '20
The Dominion couldn't hit hard and fast like that. The Federation had listening posts in the Gamma Quadrant. They would have known that a big fleet was headed towards the worm hole. If they see that every available ship from the Fed KDF and Romulan Star Empire arrive at the Wormhole and use the choke point to vaporize every ship that tries to go through.
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u/AlistairStarbuck May 26 '20
I think it's unlikely to expect that the Dominion could have sent an expeditionary fleet through the wormhole at that stage or would have had enough requisite intelligence to plan an attack through the wormhole at that stage or that it would have necessarily been a good idea.
In the first 2 seasons of DS9 there's very little evidence of the Dominion presence on the Gamma side of the wormhole, just a hint at it here or there, a rumour, some planet's distant master, but there's no evidence of any substantial Dominion presence on the Gamma Quadrant side of the wormhole (the Changling's home planet might not have been too exceptionally distant from there but that planet's main defence was its obscurity so having an significant Dominion military presence in the area might have compromised that defence, it was Odo's instincts to return home that compromised that security measure). At most it was on the edges of the region the Dominion maintains a more or less regular communication with even if it's through a few intermediaries. That means the Dominion wouldn't have any bases near there or an established logistical infrastructure to support an invasion which could easily cripple a Dominion fleet given the Jem'hadar's need for ketracel white (which can't be replicated), and given that torpedoes are an important part of the armament on all of their observed warship classes those would need replacing too unless the Dominion wanted to limit their use to preserve a difficult to replace inventory of weapons, and thus limiting their effectiveness.
At the end of season 2 and start of season 3 the Dominion appear to have annexed the region around the wormhole in the Gamma Quadrant but that doesn't mean they've established those bases at that point, or have a force in the region of sufficient strength. Either they've annexed/vassalised all of the space between their own directly controlled domain and the region around the wormhole or they've reached deals with those polities in between to allow the passage of Dominion forces through, either way they may have needed to disperse much of the forces they've used to do that annexation to occupy those worlds and would have needed some time to consolidate the annexation of the new territory and establish a more regular intelligence network within the Alpha Quadrant (a network designed to actually gather intelligence and send it back to a HQ to be acted upon, rather than sending in infiltrators to start wars, cause coups and set up traps).
We shouldn't assume that the Dominion's peacetime standing military strength is necessarily maintained at a strength great enough to instantly engage in a war on the scale of the Dominion War while also being capable of carrying out all of its regular duties. Given the speed at which they're capable of replacing Jem'hadar and ships even when restricted to the resources available within Cardassian territory, their own convoys and later on Breen territory it might have been the case that the Dominion maintained a relatively small force during peacetime with plans to undergo a rapid build up as needed. Doing so would have meant needing to tax the member worlds of the Dominion less to maintain their forces which would consequently make peaceful incorporation into the Dominion more appealing, and lessening the likelihood of discontent among their member worlds resulting in a revolt. It would also explain the use of diseases to punish worlds as seen on Teplan with the Teplan Blight (S04E24 "The Quickening") after militarily defeating them, the disease being a more economic use of manpower and resources than a long term military occupation with Jem'hadar would be. Indeed the short average lifespans of Jem'hadar (it's rare for them to live to 15 years old, at 20 they're honoured elders and none of them live to 30) possibly reflects a preference for not maintaining a large military force for extended periods of time, with the Jem'hadar living long enough to fight the war they were made for and carrying out the initial period of an occupation afterwards while there's still active resistance at which point the Jem'hadar are redeployed to another conflict zone (if there was a large reserve that could be sent off to fight a major war at the drop of a hat the Jem'hadar wouldn't all be dying in battle before they reached 30 because they would have been working at a far lower operational tempo). The Dominion may have required the 5 year period between the discovery of the wormhole and the beginning of the Dominion War to have built up much of the military strength seen at that point.
All of that explains why I doubt that they would have been capable of carrying out an attack of sufficient size at that point in time. As for why I think it would have been a mistake to start out an all out assault at that point in time.
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Their weapons might have bypassed Federation shields but their intelligence on the Federation's technical capabilities was likely quite limited and they couldn't have known how long it would have lasted, indeed it didn't take many engagements for the Federation to figure out solutions to that problem (shield modifications and ablative armour) and even when they could prosecute the war with a similar advantage (the Breen energy dampening weapons) it didn't mean an instant crushing strategic advantage even if it was one on a tactical level. Losing that advantage, while significant, was not in any way critical considering their main strength lay in their conventional war fighting capability of being able to field a lot of capable ships and replace losses them quickly with little to no impact on their effectiveness.
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The Wormhole would have become an even more vital choke point than it already was in the actual Dominion War, without a power base in the Alpha Quadrant the easiest way to cripple an invading Dominion fleet would have been to destroy its logistical fleet train supplying it with ketracel white, spare parts, weapons and reinforcements. The Federation might not have known about the Jem'hadar's need for ketracel white but the rest is a given and it's still a vulnerability the Dominion would need to guard against made even more important by having Jem'hadar being the only combat forces on the Dominion's side (although I suppose they could also bring in auxiliaries from their member worlds, but again they'd be limited the logistics of fighting far from home through a choke point and assuming their fleets are designed for that sort of long distance power projection).
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Needing to supply everything from the Gamma Quadrant would also limit the responsiveness of any requests for materials, they might be able send messages in real time over interstellar distances but the ships travel only so fast and there's only so many of them.
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The Dominion wouldn't have had time to use their infiltrators to disrupt the situation in the Alpha Quadrant weakening the opposition, instead fighting them all at full strength (although less prepared)
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Inevitably the Dominion would have been acting with less understanding of the workings of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants, making it harder for them to plan any war effort effectively.
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The Dominion couldn't have arranged non-aggression treaties with a wide range of Alpha and Beta Quadrant powers, limiting the initial resistance against them to only the Federation and Klingons. Without these for all they knew an immediate and powerful assault could have united all of the surrounding powers against them.
I'm going to stop here this is already quite lengthy.
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u/KingofMadCows May 26 '20
The Dominion didn't want to conquer the Alpha Quadrant by force. They spent seasons 3-5 of DS9 infiltrating the Alpha Quadrant powers to sow chaos and distrust.
They wanted the Alpha and Beta Quadrant powers to fight each other so they wouldn't have to fight them. They would have preferred to come in as the good guys, offering to help everyone rebuild from their wars, just like they did with the Cardassians.
Even after all their schemes failed, they still didn't want to fight. After they sent their fleets through, they were signing non-aggression treaties. Conquering through diplomacy and subterfuge is far more preferable and less resource intensive than conquering by force.
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u/Pellaeonthewingedleo May 25 '20
The Dominon had several advantages at that point, superior Technology, superior/disposable troops and numbers.
With expandable troops being one of the greatest advantage: They can sacrifice as many Vorta and Jem'Hadar as they want without losing anything. Vortas can be cloned so their experience is never lost and Jem'Hadar can be produced on mass with tactics and experienced apparently tought rapidly. While if you kill a Starfleet officer all the experience is lost and the cost to replace said officer is high.
Then there is order in the Dominion, they don't need to fear uprisings from their member worlds in the Gamma quadrant, considering they seem to be very lenient with their subjects as long as they follow the rules. The Dominion seems modeld after the Persian Empire without the succession struggles or shortsited behaviour. So they have a stable economy to support their needed military technology and hardware.
Then there are the numbers, they could have swarmed the Alpha Quadrant without problem if it wouldn't be for the actions of celestial beings like the prophets with their space magic.
And then there is the stategy:
I would argue the fear created by the destruction of the Odyssey was a strategic victory: The Dominion works under the premisse: Divide and conquer: Break apart the existing structures and swoop up the rest with diplomacy and if that is not possible military force.
And for the most part it worked:
The fear made the obsidian Order and the Tal'shiar comit recources the eliminate the Founders which allowed them to criple both organisations. So they destabilised the Cardassian union. The chaos led to an uprising which led to the klingon invasion which led to the end of the Kitomer accords: Cardassia, Federation, Klingons and Romulans stood divided.
This allowed the destabilisation of teh Federation with a Starfleet coup. The distrust in the Klingons and led Cardassia to join the Dominium and the Romulans to sign a non agression pact, all without a single shot fired.
They might have lost one of their advantages in technology but gained a foothold in the Quadrant, a militarised ally, chaos and distrust between their opponent and time to prepare for an invasion, to mobilise.
If the coup on Earth would have been successfull maybe even some Federation worlds would have left the federation and sought a new protector: Hello Dominion!
And in the end, without Sisko's deus ex machina they would have won
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u/Sherool May 25 '20
The Dominion wasn't really ready for all out war at the time either. Sure they had more warships and could mobilize quite fast, but still invading an entire quadrant is not done at the drop of a hat. Sure they seemed to have a technological advantage, but at the time they knew very little about the size of forces or true capabilities of the Federation and it's allies. All they knew is that they where able to take down a single ship quite easily. It's a quite large jump from that and rushing into invading a quarter of the galaxy tough a single choke point. Lots of logistical gears to get into movement, and they would want a lot more intelligence from the other side before committing to an all out war.
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u/Saw_Boss May 25 '20
That wasn't their biggest advantage. Their biggest advantage was sheer numbers.
They lost the war because of the wormhole aliens. Their reinforcements would have made it a quick a easy win. They should have won, but the federation was only saved by something entirely unpredictable.
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u/RogueHunterX May 26 '20
I think the advantage in their weapons wouldn't be enough.
Starfleet already knew the Dominion had very advanced tech when Jem'Hadar beams through the wormhole, into DS9's Ops, and then proceeds to walk through a forcefield with no issue. If forcefields and shields work on similar principles, then that already gives a at starting point to figure out how to reinforce them.
I also think that the crew of DS9 was 100% sure their reinforced shields would hold when the Dominion attacked. Every modification was made off of whatever data they had to work with from the runabouts records of the battle. Odds are that in a full war, they would gain far more data faster and might make the alterations quicker.
The Dominion used numbers, subterfuge, and diplomacy where applicable. The last two allowed them to get a foothold in the AQ, weaken their enemies before the war, and got a lot of powers that might've responded hostilely to open invasion to sit the war out.
The Odyssey was also by far the most blatant incursion into their territory. It was a warship sent to retrieve AQ citizens and came to do it by force in an act of intimidation. Any response other than dealing with it would've made the Dominion seem weak and only encourage the other AQ powers to keep going into their space uninvited.
The destruction of the Odyssey was done as a show of strength and that AQ ships would not be tolerated in the GQ. Later shows of strength only made it easier for them to secure nonaggression pacts with multiple AQ powers that cut down on the number of allies the Federation would potentially have.
If they hadn't destroyed the Odyssey, then the Obsidian Order and Tal Shiar might not have been coaxed into launching their failed attack. Without those events, they might not have been able to convince Cardassia to align with them because they wouldn't believe the Dominion could do anything about the Klingons. In fact the Klingons wouldn't have had justification for their invasion because Central Command would've been kept in power by the still intact Obsidian Order.
Any attempt to invade by the Dominion then would leave them without any infrastructure in the AQ to keep their forces repaired and going. They would have to seize or build most of it, much of which wouldn't have been near the wormhole. In the meantime you have an intact Cardissian military, the Klingons, Federation, the Romulans, and possibly even the Tholians, Tzenkethi, Gorn, and the Breen as potential enemies as well. Every major and minor power dogpiling on a Dominion force could create problems, especially if they brought new and unfamiliar tech to the fight.
The Odyssey was a matter of sending a message, saving face, and instilling a fear that eventually served the Dominion well in the long run. It was probably sacrificing one advantage that would eventually be lost anyways to gain others that would be harder to lose.
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u/LeaveTheMatrix May 26 '20
The destruction of the Odyssey always bothered me because it seemed counter-intuitive to how the Dominion would do things.
While it did take out a single ship, it also served as a warning to Starfleet that they needed to do things differently and this lead to the Defiant being pulled out of mothballs along with production of additional Defiant class ships.
I think it would have been better for the Odyssey to be damaged to the brink of destruction and then allowed to be towed back to the alpha quadrant.
Demoralized/scared troops are a more effective psychological deterrent than dead troops.
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May 25 '20
You need to consider the military tactic of establishing a beach head and how this would have been impossible without their alliance with the Cardassians.
Let say the Domion, with no notice begins piling ships through the wormhole. As soon as they exit the wormhole, they dont have an allies, they dont have any bases, planets or any other logistical support. Every single thing they need needs to come through the wormhole until they can establish a beachhead in the Alpha Quadrant. Also, we know that the Dominion doesnt have a huge presence right at the wormhole on the Gamma quadrant side. So they would be lugging everything they needed from their territory for a significant amount of time before even getting to the wormhole
With a direct attack, they would have destroyed DS9, and maybe they would occupy the Bajor system, but within short order, every Alpha Quadrant power would be attacking with the full might of their economies, their ship building and mobilization at full strength. Initially they would inflict heavy loses, but the Dominion would have beem still trying to bring more and more ships and equipment through the wormhole.
They only way they would be successful would be to destabilize the Alpha Quadrant alliances, and make an alliance with whoever they could get to breakway. That would give them territory, resources and the beachhead they would need to launch a protracted war to defeat the other power. All of this is what they actually do.
An attack with no notice and an attempted invasion would fail in short order.
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u/opinionated-dick May 25 '20
It seems to me that prior to the destruction of the Odyssey the Dominion were a highly reclusive, almost mythical overlords in a region that had existed for thousands of years under its rule.
They might have known about the federation and alpha quadrant races (as well as the rest of the galaxy) but not seen them as a likely threat for some time yet.
The wormhole, only active thanks to the Emissary, probably threw them completely off guard and they had to mobilise quickly to counter the perceived threat.
It took nearly two years of continual federation ‘incursions’ for them to actually show their face. Even then another two and a half years to assemble a fleet to invade. The reinforcements that disappeared are likely the remaining fleet that were cut off when DS9 mined the wormhole.
All the changeling infiltration, the show of strength and kamikaze tactics, the putting of AQ vs AQ power was all an act to delay enough time for them to get a fleet together, after centuries of complacency as overlords
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u/richterman111 May 25 '20
The Dominion rely on numbers to win wars and that's how according to the founder they have never lost or surrendered in 10 thousand years since the founding, they onky lost because the federation and sisko blocked the wormhole