Breen attack on Earth - foolish?

[Robert DeSoto]

Do you think the Breen attack on Earth was worth it? It's not like they managed to defeat Earth or even attempt to land ground troops. Yes, they bombed Starfleet Headquarters for a bit, but they didn't destroy it. And the majority of the Breen attack force was destroyed by Starfleet.

Was it worth sending so many ships and Breen troops on a suicide mission just to damage Starfleet Headquarters?

I understand the effect on Federation morale to bomb Earth. But this isn't like one Xindi soldier in one ship that got sacrificed. This is a whole bunch of Breen warships that could have been used to fight off the final invasion of Cardassia.

When the invasion began, I wonder if the Breen generals thought to themselves. Shit, maybe we shouldn't have wasted so many ships on a pointless attack on Earth. You know, just in case the Federation came up with a defense against our energy dampening weapon.

I think it was kind of dumb. At least when the Borg attack, they have the ability to destroy Federation Fleet. And they have on board the drones to beam down to Earth and assimilate the Starfleet security forces.

 

[black_dranzer]

It was probably intended to be more of a statement than a proper attack: bear in mind that at this point the Federation Alliance had taken Chin'toka, it was pretty much a stalemate...the attack could have been just to send a message to the Federation that no, you're not safe, even on Earth, even in Starfleet Headquarters (which was the main target of the attack, and probably set back Starfleet for at least a short period).

I also doubt they used the energy-dampening weapon, the way I interpreted it was that the Second Battle of Chin'toka was the first time the Alliance had ever seen the weapon, and since they had no counter for it I would presume the Breen attack on Earth wouldn't have been repelled with such little damage...

That's my take on it, anyway! May not be right but........

 

[od0_ital]

The Breen didn't want to leave any doubt about their intentions. As Martok pointed out, not even the Klingons attacked Earth durin' the two hundred years of hostilities between the two powers. So, by hittin' Starfleet Command, the Breen got a two-fer.

"Oh, shit!" Starfleet said. "They attacked our headquarters out of fuckin' nowhere!"

"Oh, shit!" Klingson said. "The Breen may have bigger balls than we do!"

Plus, it may have been part of the deal to join the Dominion, like a cover charge.

"Fine, ya want to play on our side, ya gotta do what no one has done since the (retconned) Xindi! And this time, don't target the wang!"

 

[Jono]

We have no idea how many Breen ships were used or what type. They might have been converted freighters which is why they got so close to Earth and maybe why they didn't seem to do much damage as they had low powered weapons to avoid detection. Or old obsolete vessel with skeleton crews. They might have not lost anything much in the end.

We also don't know what kind of losses Starfleet took in the attack. Maybe a fleet was devastated during the attack as well or some of the shipyards in orbit. They would have probably killed some high ranking officials at Starfleet HQ. You can't just replace an admiral with decades of experience and tactical skill.

The attack is a largely unknown factor. All we know is that the Breen attacked, took some losses and killed people on Earth. Pretty vague.

 

[Timo]

Suicide strikes like that have happened in the real world, out of political pressure. In the Doolittle Raid of 1942, there was domestic pressure to attack Japanese targets; insignificant numbers of mediocre aircraft flown by relatively inexperienced crews were expended for great political gain but no military gain. In the Dambuster Raids of 1943, Stalin put pressure on Churchill to do at least something to prove that Britain was fighting Germany alongside the Soviet Union; somewhat more significant numbers top-rate aircraft flown by expert crews were expended for very modest political gain and no military gain. Which of these better describes the Breen raid of SF HQ?

The pressure on the Breen probably was external - the raid brought no direct benefits to the Breen Confederacy, and indeed probably cost them some political capital, so more Dambuster than Doolittle. The target had some military validity, so again more Dambuster than Doolittle. We don't know if the attack called for special technology that could frighten and confuse the enemy with its mere existence, but both Dambuster (the special bombs) and Doolittle (medium bombers launching from a carrier) did. We don't know if the attack called for veteran crews, but if it did, then more Dambuster than Doolittle.

Apparently, the Breen did not utilize their energy dampers in the SF HQ raid, or at least our heroes failed to notice any such use. Perhaps this could be evidence that the Breen were unhappy to launch the raid, and while Dominion pressure forced them to proceed, they didn't commit their best technology.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[TheLobes]

Cant we just shorten the question to 'Breen- foolish'? Nothing about the Breen made any sense, a real low point of that pretty awful last season. We can make excuses about how and why they did it, but lets just face the truth. The writers didnt know how to up the ante in any other way! This is, of course, the same episode that gave us the totally pointless destruction of the 'Defiant'.

 

[RyuRoots]

I always took it as a morale hit more than anything else. Hitting right at the heart of your foe's forces successfully, even if briefly, is bound to shake them up when they see that place as their safe haven.

 

[timelord1010]

When I watched the episode I always thought a better target would have been the ship building yards orbiting Mars but for pure shock value attacking Earth raises the stakes.

What bothers me with Trek in general is the Federation has all of these super weapons and time travel. I think long before the Federation is close to defeat someone would go back in time and just block the wormhole.

 

[od0_ital]

^

That's when the temporal police introduced in VOY come in & say, "that wasn't supposed to happen."

 

[TeutonicNights]

What kinda bugs me about it is that they could just have warped into the sun with a bucket of protomatter aboard.
But maybe that's just not the Breen way.

 

[Brolan]

Raids like that are intended to force your enemy to draw forces off the front line for home defense.

 

[Saito S]

I'm with those who've put forth the idea that it was about dealing a symbolic and psychological blow more than it was about dealing lots of actual damage. Plus, don't forget, it's reasonable to assume that at any given time, there is a fairly high concentration of high-level Starfleet Admirals within the buildings that were hit; no doubt several of them were killed. Not that it would be SUCH a blow to their strategic capabilities; Starfleet of course would have plenty of other admirals around, but coupled with the morale-crushing aspect, and the fact that some of the survivors of the attack would probably have a hard time getting "back to work" after going through what they did, and it all adds up.

We also are never told just how many Breen ships take part in the mission. It stands to reason that it wasn't a HUGE number; getting a massive fleet all the way to Earth unopposed seems unlikely. I'd wager it was just enough ships to quickly inflict the kind of damage we saw, and that some form of trickery (anything from an informant in the Federation government to sabotage of local detection systems) played a role in allowing the op to succeed.

Cant we just shorten the question to 'Breen- foolish'? Nothing about the Breen made any sense, a real low point of that pretty awful last season. We can make excuses about how and why they did it, but lets just face the truth. The writers didnt know how to up the ante in any other way! This is, of course, the same episode that gave us the totally pointless destruction of the 'Defiant'.

You are entitled to your opinions of season seven and the Breen, of course; I happen to disagree.

But I've never understood this whole "Let's face facts, people!" attitude that I see often in posts - such as yours - that are, in fact, dealing entirely in subjective matters. There is no "truth" to face. I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm not "making excuses". I liked the Breen, I thought they were interesting (if a bit underdeveloped), and I love season 7.

When I watched the episode I always thought a better target would have been the ship building yards orbiting Mars but for pure shock value attacking Earth raises the stakes.

If one assumes (as I tend to) that something along the lines of what I put at the top of my post is true, that the Breen didn't have a large strike force since too many ships would make it impossible to get them into position undetected, attacking something like a shipyard may not have been practical. Doing enough damage to such a facility to make any kind of real difference to Starfleet's tactical capability may have simply taken more firepower than they could have on scene, whereas with an attack on Starfleet Command, the goal (which, again, isn't physical damage, but morale damage) is achieved simply by having enough firepower just to blow up a few buildings.

What bothers me with Trek in general is the Federation has all of these super weapons and time travel. I think long before the Federation is close to defeat someone would go back in time and just block the wormhole.

Except they don't have those things. At least, that's what the writers want us to believe every time they threaten the UFP.

Borg invasion? Go back in time and warn Starfleet about the Borg decades in advance.

Sisko went back in time and changed history by getting Gabriel Bell killed? Figure out what year he and the others are trapped in, take the Defiant for a spin around the sun (a la TVH), and beam em' up before any damage can be done.

Dominion winning the war? As you say, go back in time to any number of points to help alter that outcome.

Really, the creators of Trek have introduced FAR too many ways to time travel over the years; these must simply be ignored in order to make some stories work. It's not that different from how certain abilities or technology that should make a problem easy to solve are also conveniently ignored in an ep to create tension. Mind you, I'm not letting them off the hook for THAT, either; it happens far more often than it should.

What "super weapons" are you referring to, though?

^

That's when the temporal police introduced in VOY come in & say, "that wasn't supposed to happen."

I never liked them. I didn't like their depiction of the 29th century, and the idea of temporal police from the future that actually zip around time and space doing the Quantum Leap thing is just silly.

 

[indolover]

It was a morale attack, more so than a tactical/strategic one. And it worked. Even the Klingons (by way of Martok) said that even they never considered attacking Earth, when they and the Federation were enemies.

War is complex, and also to a large extent depends on psychology as much as brute force. Think of Bliztkrieg, Sherman's March to the Sea, etc. These acts were about demoralising enemies into submission.

 

[Robert DeSoto]

ok there is no dispute that the attack was to affect Federation morale, not so much for any strategic or military value.

my question was, is it worth it, sacrificing perfectly good warships on a morale mission? Especially in retrospect when those warships could've helped defend against the final invasion of Cardassia?

The Klingons never did this, not even the Jem'hadar and we know how crazy they both are. But their commanders never thought that such an attack was worth it. The Jem'hadar concentrated its forces around Chintoka. The Klingons sent their forces to Organia and Archanis. These were targets that held strategic value and they had a reasonable chance of defeating Federation forces both in space and in ground combat.

As Martok says, there is no doubt that the Breen have balls to launch an attack like that. But was it worth it?

 

[Myasishchev]

Cant we just shorten the question to 'Breen- foolish'? Nothing about the Breen made any sense, a real low point of that pretty awful last season. We can make excuses about how and why they did it, but lets just face the truth. The writers didnt know how to up the ante in any other way!

I agree that this was the major reason the Breen were thrown in--the writers realized very late that once a war starts to be won, the danger to the political unit that's winning that war decreases very rapidly. No one fears for Britain or the Soviet Union's continued existence in 1944. On the other hand, in a war story, our principal investment is supposed to be in the individual soldiers whose danger, unlike their collective parentlands, does not decrease, no matter how close to victory they are. Take Saving Private Ryan: we're not worried that Nazi Germany is going to actually win.

The problem with totally fictional wars, especially in Star Trek where the political units are virtually characters themselves, is that the creators probably feel like they need to continue the threat to the "hero" government right up until the climax. You see the same sort of thing in Babylon 5 (edit: although, there, the hero government is made of the heroes). The impression is also present in Return of the Jedi, which is made to feel far more like a siege of Berlin because of the death of its Hitler analogue, even though it's only a severe defeat more along the lines of a Battle of Stalingrad.

Anyway, I always assumed the Breen actually did seriously damage and disrupt the shipyards, since as was pointed out, why bother with an attack on Earth's solar system? We never see the Utopia Planitia yards, we only see Starfleet Command and a ruined Golden Gate bridge. That seems unlikely to have been their primary target to me: given that they were capable of hitting the Earth, it would have been trivially easy to devastate the Earth with the weapons they had, if they had wanted to. But no one in the Trek universe ever seemed to really want to cross the line into population targeting.

It makes sense, too, since killing populations does not reduce the number of starships the enemy can field, exposes one to reprisal attacks, and the Dominion clearly wanted to exploit those populations anyway. On the other hand, the Allies had no desire for conquest, only self-preservation, so probably only maintained the decorum of not wiping out whole cities from orbit for as long as the enemy had a means of reprisal.

 

[TheLobes]

But I've never understood this whole "Let's face facts, people!" attitude that I see often in posts - such as yours - that are, in fact, dealing entirely in subjective matters. There is no "truth" to face. I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm not "making excuses". I liked the Breen, I thought they were interesting (if a bit underdeveloped), and I love season 7.

I'm with those who've put forth the idea that it was about dealing a symbolic and psychological blow more than it was about dealing lots of actual damage. Plus, don't forget, it's reasonable to assume that at any given time, there is a fairly high concentration of high-level Starfleet Admirals within the buildings that were hit; no doubt several of them were killed. Not that it would be SUCH a blow to their strategic capabilities; Starfleet of course would have plenty of other admirals around, but coupled with the morale-crushing aspect, and the fact that some of the survivors of the attack would probably have a hard time getting "back to work" after going through what they did, and it all adds up.

We also are never told just how many Breen ships take part in the mission. It stands to reason that it wasn't a HUGE number; getting a massive fleet all the way to Earth unopposed seems unlikely. I'd wager it was just enough ships to quickly inflict the kind of damage we saw

Okay, I see your point about there being no real facts, but my problem is that you basically are making excuses here! You use the phrases 'reasonable to assume', 'stands to reason' and 'Id wager that'! These arent really phrases that should be used in response to such a huge event as the Breen attacking Earth with new superweapons! In the Star Trek universe, this is probably the biggest event in Earth history in a long, long time, far bigger than the Borg scare. But it didnt really matter in the show, there didnt seem to be any consequences at all, so what reason was there to put in apart from to 'up the ante' somehow, because the writers were out of ideas? I referenced the loss of the 1st Defiant on my other post, and it was exactly the same thing. To quote Ira Steven Behr:

"We wanted to kill the Defiant as a statement on how tough the Breen were. We thought that would rock the characters and the audience."

Yeah, sorry, but just destroying the ship only to have it come back a couple of episodes later is just bad and lazy writing. Either actually get rid of the Defiant, or come up with someone better that makes more sense. It would be like killing off O'Brien, then the next episode Bashir comes in and says he bought him back to life. Cheap and clumsy.

My memory is a little hazy on the last season, but I cant really remember anything the Breen did that couldnt have been done by the Dominion or Cardassia. Just let the Dominion develop that weapon and thats pretty much it, I think. The reason they were 'underdeveloped' is because they were bought in at the last minute and thereafter had no real impact on the story.

When you have to look at a huge event like this, and then put forward your own personal ideas about why it was done and what effect it had, then Im afraid youre just making excuses for bad writing. As far as Im concerned, this just makes it easier for writers to write more terrible shows, because they know its just going to get accepted. The number of times some Voyager fan sticks up for Janeway not just setting a timer to blow up the Caretakers array, and not strand them in the Delta Quandrant, cos of some technobabble rubbish is incredible to me. People shouldnt make excuses about this sort of thing. Sometimes bad writing just happens, I get it, nothings ever perfect, but it doesnt have to be lazy writing as well, and thats what the Breen attack was.

 

[Timo]

my question was, is it worth it, sacrificing perfectly good warships on a morale mission? Especially in retrospect when those warships could've helped defend against the final invasion of Cardassia?

It doesn't seem that even a hundred of those Breen ships would make a difference one way or another, really. Those things are small, and in the big battles they are pitted against the smallest and weakest Federation or Klingon assets: Mirandas, Defiants, Birds of Prey. For the reverse case, Starfleet probably wouldn't hesitate with sending all of its remaining Mirandas on a suicide strike against a Dominion target if that made the enemy hesitate with some strategic maneuver, and thus potentially saved billions of lives.

As for the defense of Cardassia, the Breen would have had relatively little reason to seriously contribute to that, if Cardassia's fate depended on Breen help. If Cardassia is about to fall, the Breen will probably want to bail out because this also marks the defeat of the Dominion in the Alpha Quadrant. And the harder Cardassia falls, the happier the Breen will be.

However, if the fall of Cardassia is actually unlikely, if the Dominion forces will be triumphant and the invaders will be massacred (much like Sisko, Ross and Martok seemed to fear), then it makes perfect sense for the Breen to "bravely" remain in defensive positions. They gain political points with that, without necessarily committing too much of their forces.

When the Dominion rep signed the peace or truce accords, did the Breen suffer any consequences? Their own representatives were present, as were Cardassians and Feds; it's difficult to tell which of those were winners and which were losers, and impossible to tell which were affected by the treaty and in what ways.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[indolover]

There are a number of things we don't know:

- The strength of the total Breen fleet. Perhaps only 100 ships were sent to Earth, and the total Breen fleet was 10,000 ships, who knows? To the Breen government/military hierarchy this may have been an acceptable loss.

- Breen culture. For all we know, suicide strikes are part of Breen culture/custom. Maybe attacks on morale are part of Breen fighting strategy or culture. We hardly know jack about the Breen, apart from brief mentions in TNG and Voyager.

- In strategic planning, all likely eventualities are considered. But the Breen may not have forecast/predicted the Federation would devise a counter-measure for the weapon. Or that the Female Changeling had no apparent options outside of consolidating in Cardassia and letting hell unleash after a giving while, should her plan to involve the Breen faltered.

 

[Timo]

We should probably also consider the reasons why the Dominion did not approach the Breen sooner.

Everybody else seems to think that the Breen are worse backstabbers than Romulans; the Dominion might have decided this was an accurate description. The Dominion had cast its hopes on the worst enemies of the Breen initially, so approaching them now would carry immense risks. It would always be in Breen interests to see the Dominion lose, and lose so badly that Cardassia would fall with it and never rise again.

Given this basic premise, it's no wonder that the Dominion would put the Breen to a test first, with the raid on SF HQ. And rather fitting, logically and dramatically, that our heroes would first mistake the Breen for a threat and a turn for the worse in the war, even though their joining the Dominion cause was in fact a sure sign of impending Dominion defeat!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Nightdiamond]

I think it was foolish.

The Breen ended up losing more in the long run. They lost an entire fleet attacking Earth-lost a few more in the final battle.

The damage was said to be repaired a year later.

And then they ended up surrendering along with the Founder.

Now they are surrounded by powers who either hate them or see them as traitors.

They got nothing out of it.

All that for noth'in...

One thing, if they had the energy damping weapons, it's hard to see how they were stopped at all when they attacked Earth.