The Cardassian War was worse than you probably think.
I wrote a lot about the Maquis with every intention of posting quite a bit more about it, but then I got cold feet. Its actually been a while since I watched some of the critical Maquis episodes. In some instances, I haven't seen them since they aired. So I decided to go back and rewatch some of them. I started with TNG 7x20 "Journey's End." Where I expected a very strident lecture on the evils of forced relocation, I found something deeply nuanced and something that also reframed how I understood the Federation's conflict with the Cardassians.
If you're in a hurry, the big revelation was that, per Picard, millions of people died in the Cardassian - Federation War.
If you haven't been part of debates about what the scale of the Star Trek setting is or are more attuned to more recent series, millions may not actually seem that many people. Star Wars and 40k fans are probably squinting and wondering what all the fuss is about.
So let me provide some additional context. This is going to be mostly Doylist in nature, i.e. "meta" commentary.
Millions of people equals thousands of Galaxy-class starships. At a time when we'd seen not more than two Galaxy-class starships on screen at the same time and per the Next Generation Technical Manual (which was quasi-canon at the time, essentially given high regard by creatives working on Trek but always subject to being overruled if the needs of the story dictated) there could be as few as five Galaxy-class starships active at the time, but perhaps eleven including the initial batch of six and assuming the six framed out but not completed hulls were built to completion and subtracting poor Yamato.
Just a few seasons before, the loss of 39 ships and 11,000 personnel at Wolf 359 was considered a pretty devastating loss.
If it were strictly Starfleet and Cardassian military personnel, millions would be staggering losses representing the equivalent of thousands of starships or some mix of ships and major stations or ground forces. My gut tells me that given the way TNG seems to be a smaller scale setting than Trek would later be depicted, this wasn't intended to be solely military losses but also inclusive of and maybe even disproportionately falling upon civilians. Given that the Federation doesn't directly target civilians as a general rule, I do have some theories on how this might come about: namely by making space warfare messier than its generally presented: Star Wars and The Expanse have both done great representation of how conflicts that play out in space can still result in collateral damage to civilian stations and planetary settlements.
Notably, later series like DS9 and Discovery will do a "soft" retcon of Starfleet to include as many as 7,000 ships in the 23rd century and perhaps around 30,000 in the 24th century (citation: Ron Moore & extrapolation based on fleet size quotes) but while this isn't a hard retcon in that it doesn't override firmly declared facts and figures, it also doesn't seem like these larger numbers were ones TNG was operating with when it threw a mere 40 ships at the Borg or had Starfleet yet again being unable to avoid pulling ships out of dock mid-refit and stuffing Enterprise crew on them to catch the Romulans smuggling arms to House Duras.
Regardless of how the numbers breakdown, this was anything but analogous to a protracted series of border skirmishes and raids ala the colonial theaters of various European imperial wars, which full disclosure, was my working mental model for understanding this conflict.
So why does this matter for understanding the Maquis?
I think it matters for understanding the Federation's motives in signing what most fans and many in universe characters feel is a "bad" peace with the Cardassians. This wasn't a vanity war that super powers sometimes find themselves in where they'll fight for years in some corner of the globe that is strategically irrelevant to the imperial heartland but has somehow gained incredible psychological significance in the minds of defense planners, politicians, and yellow journalists. This is a conflict that cost the Federation quite a bit of blood for planets that are described as having been settled for at most a few decades and, at the very least, we've never really heard anyone from the Federation complain about a lack of satisfactory M-class planets.
Of course as represented by the North American Indians (TNG's term, not mine) that had settled on Dorvan V, from the perspective of the colonists, they had roots and distinctive cultural identities that they desired to have respected and felt warranted their own planets. From the Federation's perspective, these are people who have barely settled their worlds and one world should be as good as another. If you run the numbers through "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" then this starts looking even more tilted towards the Federation's perspective.
Now the counter argument is the bog standard opposition to authoritarianism and violent revisionists argument. This is the argument that the moral responsibility for avoiding catastrophic loss of life is on the one who is the first to use violence to try to advance their interests, at least at the level of astropolitics. In this framing it is not the responsibility of the Federation to mollify the Cardassians by conceding on irrational fears or immoral demands.
A cynical reading of this argument might find within it the notion that the Federation should just do what it wants, as long as its consistent with the Federation's values, and if the Cardassians have a problem with it up to the point of attacking, then the Federation should fight back and not stop until it reaches Cardassia and overthrows the military junta in charge or at the very least, removes any Cardassian presence from Federation borders and denudes Cardassian capacity to strike across the border.
The idea here being that conceding to the Cardassians rewards them for their willingness to use violence to achieve their goals, which further incentivizes them to use violence, and arguably did incentivize them to use violence as evidenced by accusations of poisoning wells and damaging infrastructure to drive ex-Federation citizens off the worlds that were ceded to the Cardassian Union.
But this argument has always contained within it the implicit assumption that the Federation had the capacity to rollback Cardassian warmaking capability and to keep up pressure on the Cardassians until the Cardassians cry uncle. A war in which millions died and where the Federation is trading away planets is not one that seems to imply the Federation had the capacity to hammer the Cardassians until they relented or there was a deficit of will to fight this war to the hilt, recognizing that pushing the war all the way to the orbit of Cardassia Prime would result in Union space being ungoverned and insecure until the infrastructure and ships were replaced.
Anyone who has watched the outcomes of the Global War on Terror or the various civil wars and revolutions that have happened in recent years should be very cognizant that a lack of order and security often results in problems being exported to adjacent regions. Problems meaning traumatized and impoverished refugees seeking safety and sustenance in places ill equipped to provide for them materially and often with some or a lot of mutual incoherence and mistrust happening at the cultural level as norms clash. Problems also meaning unaccounted for military equipment finding its way into the hands of revolutionaries, terrorists, and pirates who pursue their own goals and survival needs through the use of weapons on anyone who has something worth taking.
The United States did not kill a million or more people in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other MENA region countries through the use of weapons from 2001 to date. Iraq from 1991 to 2001 didn't have a million excess deaths* because of bombs detonating in people's homes, those deaths resulted from damage to infrastructure and internal supply chains because civilization is actually rather fragile and even people we regard as "less developed" are not meaningfully closer to nature and more resilient than we in the WEIRD category. If anything they exist in a more delicate state because they are often living on more marginal and stressed land with infrastructure that lacks redundancies or substantial state capacity to move people and resources around quickly to address sudden need.
*It should be noted that while these figures are widely quoted, the methodology has been questioned. I would encourage readers who want to get their historical facts correct to examine the evidence and decide whether Iraq sanctions are something one wants to use in a context other than describing the potential consequences of a fictional war.
When considering how to deal with Russia and its invasion of Ukraine, there are moral debates about how hard to press the civilian economy. Namely because so much of the infrastructure and daily necessities of life in modern countries count as "dual use." As in there are legitimate civilian uses that it doesn't seem productive to deny people: transistors are essential for access to information - both state controlled but also outside channels, and operate everything from thermostats to live saving medical equipment. The distinction between a transistor appropriate for running an insulin pump and one for a hypersonic missile is increasingly blurry.
An analogy could easily be drawn to isolinear chips and replicators. We in the fandom often assume that the Federation's ability to be precise in its application of lethal violence is practically omniscient and omnipotent, and that with its august technology, it has been liberated from having to make hard decisions. Yet if the Federation wants to destroy the warmaking capability of the Cardassians, how "deep" into the Cardassian infrastructure does it need to go?
Can you imagine Captain Picard sleeping well at night after calling a senior staff meeting to debate the legitimacy of striking a fusion reactor in a dense urban area that has been unplugged from the civilian grid and hooked up to an industrial replicator pumping out photon torpedo thrusters?
Further, the moral and political science assumptions of the Federation seem to rule out the idea that Cardassian civilians suffering and dying is an appropriate form of justice for Federation lives nor does suffering seem to predictably and reliably lead to revolution. Historical evidence is at best mixed and perhaps even damning. Try wrapping your head around the idea that Russian forces continued to fight their foreign enemies in WW1 at the same time as different Russian formations were fighting each other during the civil war that broke out as a direct consequence of World War 1. In short, while the war had certainly radicalized much of the public, there was still a lot of anger and blame directed to those who had been killing Russians before Russians were killing Russians.
So what is the Federation to do?
Keep fighting a war it probably wasn't technically losing but definitely didn't seem to be winning?
And perhaps the Federation couldn't win without paying a cost in both Federation and Cardassian lives, many of whom might be noncombatants, that was unpalatable?
What was it supposed to do after Wolf 359?
Postscript:
A bit more about the plot of the episode itself. "Journey's End" is probably one of the best TNG moral dilemma episodes. There are critiques to be made obviously. That the Indigenous people depicted seem to be a bit generic to the uneducated eye and do not claim a specific tribal / national identity feels weird at the end of 2024, but it also provokes an interesting discussion about the degree to which there isn't already a lot of syncretism among peoples who have experienced massive depopulation and loss of political agency, whether through intentional genocides, loss of territory, or disease. Its not hard to imagine this "North American Indian" identity found on Dorvan V being a syncretic identity that emerged in the 2100s once interstellar colonization really took off. Its strongly implied to be a "fresh start" movement that was itself controversial and many indigenous North Americas opted not to join them; but its membership could be plausibly drawn from many cultural identities.
However, the moral dilemma at the heart of the episode is handled with exquisite care and steadfastly refuses to make anyone objectively the bad guy. Every Federation character, even hardline consequentialist Admiral Nechayev, is respectful to the people of Dorvan V and mindful of their historical trauma even as it recognizes that the Federation's own interests are largely incompatible with respecting their demands.
Even Gul Evek, the named Cardassian leader of the show, relents after an impassioned plea from Picard. Evek admits to losing two out of three sons in the war and speculates that if the Dorvan V inhabitants leave the Cardassians alone, they will be left alone. Evek was convincing at least to this member of the audience. The framing felt hopeful rather than like everyone was being asked to swallow a Targ dung sandwich.
In checking to make sure I spelled his name correctly, I've become aware that Evek becomes a recurring character and I'm intrigued to see if there are clues to be found as to whether you could argue that he was lying or that events took on a life of their own and Evek was simply proven wrong. Its possible that Dorvan V was largely spared but the Obsidian Order or other elements of the Cardassian government decided to act in places it thought the Federation wouldn't be paying as close attention and the radicalization of the Maquis in turn radicalized Evek.
After all, since that the Cardassian Union was in effect waging a proxy war in the Demilitarized Zone, it would take little to convince some Cardassians that a guerilla movement with ex-Starfleet in almost all command roles and using Federation hardware represented a Federation proxy war with top level support. Which would in turn require the Federation to at least make some efforts at combating the Maquis in order to sell the Cardassians on the idea that the Maquis are not a plausibly deniable arm of Starfleet Intelligence.
But the Maquis are obviously are going to do what they need to do to defend their worlds, whether its their actual colonies or because they object to Starfleet sitting on its hands in the face of reports of atrocities.
In retrospect, for an era that was just testing the waters for multi-season arcs, this is such smart and tragic world building. Unlike say, the plot to destroy Qonos in Discovery or the anti-Changeling bioweapon being the Chekov's gun necessary to resolve the Dominion War, very little about the Maquis arc feels contrived and much more well supported by the world building around it.
