If you’ve watched Star Trek: The Next Generation, it has probably occurred to you that keeping families on a starship is a questionable practice. The Enterprise-D is constantly heading into dangerous situations, and while we can assume that there are protocols in place to keep the kiddies feeling safe and cared for, you have to wonder who thought this was such a brilliant idea to begin with.
Turns out the answer is: probably the Federation?
Over at the Daystrom Institute on Reddit, user thx712517 had a theory as to why the Family Aboard program existed at all in Starfleet. It started with pointing out one key factor in recruitment: if you have a society in which all your needs are tended to and life is pretty grand—free healthcare, endless opportunities to study and learn, holodecks to let you travel just about anywhere with a few words of input—why would you ever want to leave home? Once the Klingon cold war is over and the Romulans don’t seem to have any interest in jousting, there’s no threat to buoy Starfleet’s enlistment numbers. Who is going to sign up?
They went on to say:
There will always be those who seek adventure, who want to explore, who have a burning need to get out there whatever the cost. But would it be enough to crew hundreds of starships, especially on longer missions beyond the Federation’s farthest borders? In order to push the boundaries of exploration (which means traveling for long periods of time) while crewing each ship, being able to offer life aboard for the serving crew and their family would become very important. We see that Picard chose his career over family life, but I don’t see later generations being as willing to do so.
The Ambassador class, rather than a failure in design, could be seen as a proof of concept for the Family Aboard experiment later brought to full fruition in the Galaxy class starship design. The more relaxed attitude aboard ship, the large pleasant hallways and eating areas, the arboretum and numerous holodecks, all of it to compete with what is offered planetside and thus continue to attract recruits who would otherwise never consider Starfleet.
The author went on to point out that this practice is summarily dropped during wartime within the Federation, which only seems to prove the point—this does make sense on a functional level. The U.S. military has a similar outline for its handling of families: spouses and children often live on army bases, and they are permitted to follow their active-duty family members provided that they haven’t been deployed in combat situations. Ambassadors and diplomats are given similar treatment, which seems to be the case in the Federation even during tenser points in their history; Spock’s father Sarek traveled with his wife Amanda on his way to the Babel Conference, and they were given accommodation easily, despite the fact that Kirk’s Enterprise was not equipped to carry families.
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While easier space exploration may seem a glorious dream to us now, the idea that everyone would be clambering to get there in an idealized future makes less sense. Starfleet doesn’t guarantee a better quality of life for people in the Enterprise-D’s day, so more motivation may have been required to retain staff. And there might have been other benefits as well: user thatguysoto noted, “Aside from the children of course, most of the civilians aboard the Enterprise are scientists, teachers, or people who have other expertise and could potentially fill a role in the event of a staffing shortage.”
It should go without saying that starships are big, and they take a lot of people to run, and the Family Abroad policy would be a way to attract citizens with skills that could be useful to Starfleet’s exploratory, scientific, diplomatic, and defense functions—while still operating (somewhat) outside the rules and regulations of Starfleet. Even without specific roles for each civilian, it doesn’t hurt to have the expertise of so many spouses and family members just hanging around. Keiko O’Brien’s scientific work in the plant biology lab and Guinan’s role as the host of the ship’s social center, Ten Forward, (and as an informal counselor to many of the crew) are perfect examples of how having non-Starfleet members aboard a starship could work out to the Federation’s advantage.
While it’s still a hard sell to convince many fans that small children belonged on the Enterprise-D (poor Alexander), it seems Starfleet’s policy was largely beneficial during peacetime, and helped to fill out some of the more interesting corners of the Federation.
It probably made more sense for the Galaxy-class ships which didn’t have their own TV show.
That theory is close, but not quite there. The problem with TNG is that it had a revolving door on its writing staff in the first couple of seasons, as the ailing Roddenberry and his handlers systematically shut out and drove away the other co-creators (D.C. Fontana, David Gerrold, and Bob Justman) as well as numerous other staff writers and producers, until finally other showrunners came aboard and Roddenberry was eased back to a largely ceremonial role. So the people who created TNG were not the same people who made most of it, and thus a number of the creators’ original ideas and intentions got forgotten or abandoned.
The main intention here was that the Enterprise-D was meant to be designed for really long-term deep space exploration, spending as much as 15 years away from a friendly port. Remember that “Encounter at Farpoint,” the series pilot, had the Enterprise arriving at the most far-flung starbase ever built as its launching point for a mission into totally unknown space. Essentially, the ship was designed to do on purpose what Voyager would later do by accident, to be a totally self-sufficient entity with no Federation support for years at a time. That’s why families had to be aboard — because who would give up their whole lives and loved ones for 15 years? To function on its own for that length of time, the ship had to be more than a ship — it had to be a whole frontier town in space, a mobile university village.
However, this idea was quickly abandoned, even under the original staff — rather than sending the ship even deeper into the uncharted frontier, episode 2 had it answering a distress call from another Starfleet ship and episode 3 had it delivering a vaccine to a Federation planet. But as the show went on, the focus shifted even more strongly toward diplomatic and political missions within UFP space or along its borders, and the reason for the families was therefore forgotten. Not to mention that the ship’s civilian contingent was supposed to consist largely of civilian scientists and researchers, not just Starfleet crew’s families. This was also largely forgotten after season 1, with Keiko being pretty much the only shipboard civilian scientist who ever got any attention. So that further obscured the original thinking behind the crew composition.
I think it would’ve been interesting if they’d taken things a bit further — instead of having a single ship that could separate into a saucer section for the civilians and a battle section for combat, they should’ve had a civilian research ship commanded by Picard along with a Starfleet escort ship or ships commanded by Riker. That would’ve clarified the original intention behind the ship’s purpose, as well as creating interesting opportunities for conflict between the two captains, one a pure scientist and one more of a soldier. At the very least, they should’ve made Troi an actual civilian, a spokesperson for the crew’s civilian contingent, rather than a Starfleet officer who tended to wear civilian clothes. That would’ve put the civilian side of the crew more front-and-center and given Troi a more clearly focused role.
As for the “it’s too dangerous for families” argument, I find that a specious objection. If a Star Trek show were set at Starfleet Academy on Earth, then Earth and the Academy would suffer from weekly attacks, accidents, and other crises, and it would be just as dangerous as any starship. Because these are action-adventure TV shows and any setting they choose will be equally perilous. Look how dangerous ordinary high schools are in shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Batman Beyond or Class. The only safe setting in an adventure series is somewhere the main characters aren’t. Yet countless adventure series protagonists let their families live with them in spite of the weekly perils they face. That’s just the nature of the medium.
“The U.S. military has a similar outline for its handling of families: spouses and children often live on army bases, and they are permitted to follow their active-duty family members provided that they haven’t been deployed in combat situations.”
When I was in the Army Korea was an unaccompanied tour, but Europe was accompanied. Evacuating dependents from Europe if WW3 broke out was something that was planned and practiced for, but which no one really expected to work well. “Team Yankee”, a techno thriller that came out in the 80’s, got into that a bit. For that matter, “Alas, Babylon” delved into the downsides of having the families on base and having to get them to safety.
The State Department also has unaccompanied tours, a friend just got back from a tour at the Embassy in Kabul. If he’d been sent to Brasilia his family would’ve gone with him.
Personally I thought the Galaxy class ship should have been the flag and support of a squadron of smaller exploratory ships, a sort of mobile Starbase,
And here I thought all they wanted was a new generation of Starfleet brats, used to the life already.
@4/roxana: I had a similar idea too. I guess I’ve thought of a number of variant ways they could’ve done TNG over the years.
The reason for civilian families to be on starships was for Story. The writers wanted to explain child prodigy Wesley Crusher.
@7/Mike: Rather, the intended reason was because Roddenberry and his co-creators wanted to downplay the military side of Starfleet and emphasize research and exploration, with combat as an infrequent last resort. Making the crew part-civilian and including families was part of that downplaying. Wesley was meant to be the main character who represented that aspect of shipboard life as a whole. (And according to the season-1 series bible, Geordi was originally supposed to be some sort of liaison with the ship’s children, perhaps a nod to LeVar Burton’s Reading Rainbow role, but that was another idea that never went anywhere.)
They do five-year missions, so having the staff’s families aboard what is largely a mobile research ship would make a lot of sense. Most such ships probably wouldn’t have as many dangerous adventures as the Enterprise.
That would change in war-time, both because it would be much more dangerous to have civilians aboard, and because the warships probably aren’t spending years out on patrol – they’d be cycling back every few months to re-arm.
I thought it was when the evil space killer bee showed up, then at least on a ship you had a chance of flying your kids away from it, as opposed to a planet on which they would be wiped out and whose bones would be the subject of Picard’s Captain’s Log at the top of each episode. The problem with people saying space is too dangerous to take kids into is that space is where we keep all our planets. If anything your kids are safer on a ship than on a planet, in the Trek verse.
Of course, if you feel a bit squeamish, well you can always crawl back under your bed.
People have been trekking to far and dangerous frontiers, and hauling their kids along with them, throughout all of human history. Wasn’t the original premise of Star Trek, “Wagon Train in Space?”
I’m guessing the show’s writers got scared and figured there wasn’t enough variety in a long term space mission with the Roddenberrian scientific super friends of tomorrow, so they shifted the role of the Enterprise to more of the ye olde gunboat diplomacy from TOS. It makes sense for an episodic series from that time, but it did make the D an overloaded Swiss Army knife of a ship. The small fleet of specialized ships mentioned above would’ve made more sense.
@9/Brett: “They do five-year missions”
The only 5-year mission we actually have canonical evidence for (or did until last week’s Discovery) was the one the Enterprise went on in TOS, so I’ve never understood why people assume from that single instance that all Starfleet missions have to be 5 years long. A single example doesn’t prove a pattern. And there was never any indication of 5-year missions in the TNG era; after all, the show ran 7 seasons.
@11/Alan: While it’s true that ST was meant to be a frontier narrative partly influenced by Westerns (and partly by Horatio Hornblower), the elevator pitch wasn’t “wagon train to the stars,” it was “Wagon Train to the stars,” in reference to the popular Western TV series of the day. But there were countless Westerns on TV at the time, so when Roddenberry used that phrase to pitch the show to network execs, he wasn’t saying “Western in space.” He could’ve used any Western if that had been his intent. He chose Wagon Train because it was a respected, long-running adult drama that had a semi-anthology approach in which the episodes centered more on the guest stars of the week than on the continuing cast. He was trying to sell execs on something that was brand-new at the time, a science fiction series done as an adult drama rather than a kids’ show like Lost in Space, and having continuing characters rather than being a pure anthology like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. So he chose Wagon Train as an exemplar of the kind of sophisticated adult drama he wanted the show to be (and the kind of really long-running show he hoped it would be), and to illustrate his idea that the Star Trek format could be a launching point for an endless variety of possible stories driven by the guest characters encountered among the crew or on alien planets. (You see this to an extent in the early first season — the second pilot centered on Mitchell and Dehner, “The Corbomite Maneuver” focused largely on Lt. Bailey, “Mudd’s Women” focused on Harry and Eve, etc. Eventually this diminished as Spock became the breakout character and the stories came to be centered more on the triumvirate of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy.)
@11 True. We have become mindbogglingly risk averse in regards to children in the last couple of decades, and it is starting to show in the mental health of kids. And I’m told it is even worse in the United States too.
“Honey, Annika can’t hide under her bed until she turns eighteen. Being assimilated will give the child character!”
Did the Odyssey unload its civilian contingent at DS9? I seem to recall them saying it did. I wonder if anyone considered having Sisko, Jake, Quark, and Nog have to deal with that on screen, or if that was too much for TV back then.
” At the very least, they should’ve made Troi an actual civilian, a spokesperson for the crew’s civilian contingent, rather than a Starfleet officer who tended to wear civilian clothes.”
Makes sense, but now I can’t help thinking of her as Gina from Brooklyn 99.
Vis-a-vis exploration by way of fleets rather than lone ships:
In the Pocket novels-verse, the “Voyager relaunch” series (Homecoming (2003) et seq) concerns a small fleet that returns to the Delta Quadrant.
In the Robert J. Sawyer novel Starplex (1996) — which is, the author admits, “Star Trek the way I’d do it” — the titular exploratory starship can split into nine sections to pursue several missions at once.
In the Macross anime franchise, there are long-range colonization fleets that consist of civilian and military vessels, and also smaller exploration fleets — this is a plot point in Macross Frontier (2007). The Macross formula is “love triangle, cool transforming jet fighters, music as a means of communication with adversaries” so it’s generally optimistic, but not really exploration-centric. FWIW, Earth can’t avoid sending civilians into potential danger, because after one near-extinction event, it decided on an accelerated “get the eggs out of one basket” strategy, and encountering another Zentraedi fleet is unlikely but possible.
@16/Brian: Yeah, they did, and it always bugged me that the Odyssey didn’t just separate its saucer and leave it at the station while the stardrive section went into battle. That’s how the Galaxy class was supposed to work. But only the larger, 6-foot miniature was built to separate, and the FX team found it too cumbersome to work with, so the separation idea was abandoned.
@15 It made her the most interesting character on Voyager, that is for sure. But you are right, they ought to have left her at home on New Providence; she’d have been safe there, I’m sure. Or maybe some obscure outpost near the Neutral Zone that is so harmless it doesn’t even have a name. Or in South Florida, I mean nothing from outer space ever did nothing to South Florida.
Hey, anyone remember the time the Dominion almost blew up the entire Bajoran system?
#20
Come on, there’s a big difference in trouble coming to you and going out of your way to find it. I agree that helicopter parenting and coddling of youth is a problem, but then again it’s not the same as taking your kid to study a dangerous life form up close for an extended period of time. And we don’t have to look to fiction for examples. This has happened in the real world too, much to the regret of the parents.
@21/Falco: As I pointed out before, if you set an adventure series on a planet, then that planet will be under constant weekly threat just as much as a starship in a different series would be. Danger is a function of the genre, not the setting.
“it’s not the same as taking your kid to study a dangerous life form up close for an extended period of time.”
When would this ever happen? Unless it’s a spacegoing life form, then you’ll leave your kid on the ship while you beam down to study the dangerous life form. Or you’ll have it aboard ship in a science lab that’s heavily secured and well-removed from the civilian housing on another deck — in the same way that a real-life hospital or university lab might have deadly pathogen samples stored within a block or two of residential housing, because they trust in the containment and safety measures that exist, and because they don’t let children or untrained people run around where the pathogens are.
@21 DO you know why the Tippi case newsworthy? It is because the negative outcome so rarely happens. People do take their kids on adventures, at any one time there are huge number of parents sailing across the pacific with their kids, and I mean on actual sailing vessels too both monohulls and cats, in boats often under 40ft in length. Even more for the Atlantic. Especially at this time of year. That is just an example of dangerous things that people do with kids and have it mostly turn out okay.
If you want dangerous, lets talk socks. You don’t see people running to make sure their kids are always barefoot, but the damn things are killers (domestic accidents kill more kids each year than lions do). Just the domestic risks are almost instantly discounted by people because they are part of familiar daily life, but risks that come from further away are seen as far more important regardless of actual risk. Since you can’t get much further away than in space, you get people running flailing, hands in the air, voices raised in a high pitched hooting, about how it is so dangerous for the Enterprise to have kids on it, or kids being in space being irresponsible.
One quick look around that enormous cube should’ve told the Hansens all they needed to know about how dangerous the Borg were. But they were arrogant and fashionably eccentric, as scientists like to be, and it cost them. And yes, it’s a TV show and these things need to happen, because story. Got it.
As for the dangers of the household versus the dangers of vacation adventures, that really depends on the specific adventure, doesn’t it? A sailing cruise will probably turn out okay. Getting familiar with lions, not so much. Depends on how close you willingly put yourself to said danger, which should be obvious in the case of lions. This is where fashionably eccentric enters the picture again.
Just because your house may burn down still doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to take little Johnny and Susan to study large meat-eating animals in the wild (or trailing a Borg cube). That’s all I’m saying. Granted, the Enterprise is better equipped to handle these situations. But the Hansens were downright stupid.
@13 I was referring to the Wagon Train show in my comment (perhaps italics would have made that more explicit). As I remember (although I watched the show many years ago), a lot of the episodes of the show involved wagons carrying children and families. So even though the original Enterprise didn’t carry them, the idea of families in space was on the table from the very start.
@8/CLB I have read before somewhere that LaForge at one point was being developed as a teacher for the ship’s school, though Burton was not in mind to play the role until he came into audition, at which point Geordi was established as Helmsman…Not really a nod to his Reading Rainbow position, Burton was invited to read for the role as one of the show runners worked with him on an earlier TV movie, which was a pilot for an unsuccessful series, and remembered his being a Trek fan..
@24/Falco: “One quick look around that enormous cube should’ve told the Hansens all they needed to know about how dangerous the Borg were.”
Huh? There are plenty of enormous structures in space in a sci-fi universe. Starbases are enormous. Just being big doesn’t make something evil. And if anything, the Borg generally don’t look immediately threatening to the uninitiated, because they tend to behave relatively passively unless provoked and don’t even deign to acknowledge individuals that don’t actively draw their attention. Recall that in “Q Who,” Riker’s landing party was able to wander around the Borg ship unaccosted for quite a while.
@25/Alan: My point is that Roddenberry didn’t use Wagon Train as his elevator-pitch analogy because of its Western aspects, because there were countless other Westerns on at the time, so the fact that it was a Western would’ve been trivial to TV execs at the time. He chose Wagon Train because of the specific aspects that distinguished it among other TV Westerns and dramas in general — its smart, prestigious writing, its semi-anthology, guest star-centered format, and its very long run. He was telling network execs “I want my show to be like this other very successful and acclaimed show.” He was trying to fight against the prejudice of the day that science fiction was goofy kid stuff, so he compared his show to one of the most admired and successful adult dramas of the previous decade. It just happened to be a Western because half the shows on TV back then were Westerns.
By analogy, if someone today pitched a show as “Castle in space,” they wouldn’t be saying “It’s a police procedural,” because there are a gazillion other police procedurals. They’d be alluding to the specific things that made Castle distinct from other procedurals, like the romantic-comedy banter between the male and female leads, or the metatextual element of being about a writer whose in-universe books were published as real-world tie-ins.
I love this post and this thread and you are all my favorite nerds. Thank you.
@17 – Gareth Wilson: Now I’m picturing Gina as Picard’s assistant.
@9,
Before the invention of the explosive harpoon, and steam-powered whaling ships, it wasn’t that uncommon for whaling voyages to last four years. The idea that families are necessary for a multi-year voyage is certainly modern.
@30/swampyankee: As I mentioned, the original intention of TNG’s developers was that the Enterprise-D could spend as much as fifteen years away from Federation space. We know from TOS that officers can handle five years away from their families, but fifteen years is quite another matter.
Probably more like Colonization. IF the Ship got stranded in unknown space with no way back. IT could simple find the nearest Class “L” or “M” Planet, and start a Federation Colony there…
@32. They could split the saucer and stardrive sections off, and while the stardrive section looked for a way home they could also stick the ship’s therapist at the helm of the saucer and use that for a planetary habitat.
Add to that logic the following: children growing up on a starship and getting their education there would be better prepared to serve on board such a ship themselves, and might very well want to follow in the footsteps of, literally, all the people they see around them. Starfleet is in effect investing in hereditary starship crew. (Similarly, many circus performers today come from a long line of circus performers, and have grown up “in the circus”.)
There’s also the fact that Starfleet deep-space vessels are the face the Federation presents to newly contacted aliens. If they see a ship with families and children aboard, they’re less likely to see it as a potential attacker or threat than if they see a ship with only military personnel aboard. It makes “We come in peace” more credible.
@34 And if you are wanting to get people away from a nation-state mindset and into a more plural “United” community, then encouraging people to take up a spacefaring mode of life, where living and working in the stars (whether in Starfleet or not) on ships and space habitats is a normal thing, then including kids is a must. We have to remember that becoming a unified galactic community with less emphasis on being “from Earth”, or “A Vulcan” as a key part of your personal identity is a Federation goal (and no wonder, since the nationstate model led to world wars on pretty much all Federation members, we do always forget that The Federation and Starfleet is something founded and shaped by people who managed to survive those wars and don’t want to have them happen again). Getting people used to living in space and their identity not geographically fixed is a multi-generational model.
Gotta get populations off those dangerous planets and mobile if they want to survive too.
@random22 #36 great observation. I often compare in my mind the different Trek eras to different eras in US history. Prior to the US Civil War, the term “United States” was generally considered a plural term, as in “these United States” and people often thought of themselves as New Yorkers or Virginians (as examples) before they thought of themselves as Americans. That’s how I see the ENT/DSC/TOS eras. On the other hand, the TNG/DS9/VOY era more represents the more-modern US, at least before the last couple decades’ worth of political divisiveness crept in–the term “United States” is a singular noun, referring one nation as opposed to a union of states; likewise, in the 24th century, people define themselves as citizens of the Federation before they define themselves as human, Vulcan, Betazoid, etc.
I think in addition to all the info CLB provided, I seem to recall that Farpoint established that only these new, Galaxy-class ships had this concept of families living aboard. At least there was the scene with Picard being chafed by it. There were many other ships in Starfleet without so many crew families aboard, so it’s a little hard to swallow that it was some Starfleet-wide initiative or that crews simply wouldn’t go into space without families. We did see later incidences of Family members onboard ships (Timothy in “Hero Worship”), but not to the extent that the Enterprise had.
As for people having holodecks on Earth, I think “Encounter at Farpoint” also established that Riker had never seen the technology with that level of sophistication before, and that was before the Bynar upgrade to character interaction.
As for the constantly being in danger–aside from the fact that it’s a tv show–I seem to also recall that they had intended to separate the saucer much more frequently, but it proved to be too prohibitive, so they dumped it almost right away. Additionally, I got to wondering if we overestimate the times the whole ship is in danger in our minds. Sure, it was quite a lot. But not every week, certainly, given all the character driven stories. Of the action stories where there WAS a danger, it occurs to me that quite frequently the danger was limited to the main cast or an away team or something. It would be interesting to me to survey the episodes and classify which ones posed danger to the whole ship, potential danger to the whole ship, or no danger to the whole ship. Assuming the episodes showcase the most “exciting” moments of the Enterprise, we can guess that the time between episodes was peaceful.
@38/crzydroid: You’re right about those things being initially established — families and holodecks on starships both being treated as new — but both were later retconned. DS9 established that the Miranda-class Saratoga had families aboard, and VGR established that Janeway had played the Flotter and Trevis holoprogram as a child (plus of course “The Practical Joker” had established the existence of a holographic rec room during the 23rd century).
It just goes to show — every time a new Trek series or movie comes along, I see fans screaming about its continuity errors as if they’re unprecedented betrayals of the pure and perfect cannnnnnon and require condemning the new production to alternate-universe status. But that’s ridiculous, because Trek continuity has always been a mess, with different productions contradicting each other and themselves in many ways. We’ve just learned to rationalize or ignore the contradictions, and the only reason the newer contradictions stand out is because we haven’t had time to fool ourselves into overlooking them.
@38/crzydroid – that’s a study I’d like to see. You make a good point about infrequently ship-wide threats are used. I seem to remember the there were more in the earlier series than later, but with most the study you suggest, I don’t know how accurate that recollection is.
For my two-cents worth, I’ll second two concepts already mentioned: Star Fleet deliberately encouraging generational careers, and family protection.
First is due to people (of whatever species) being naturally conservative, anti-risk takers. It’s an evolutionary trait, if only a fraction of your population want to go exploring, if something happens to them, your species survives. That’s a problem for an organisation where risk-taking is a prerequisite, so you’ll want to create an environment which encourages this mindset to keep up recruitment. One of the downsides being culture conflict between Star Fleet-raised and planet-born. Referred to but not really dealt with in Enterprise. Another downside might be after several generations Star Fleet (and the Federation) might evolve almost into a caste-system…
Second is that if your one of the risk-takers that want to be on the frontier, do you want to raise your kids in one of the colonies that have got into trouble in one of the cold openings, or a fully-resourced ship with shields and weapons, one that has several people monitoring for problems and threats before they become insurmountable?
You know, if your Starfleet officers kids are on the planets or Starbases which come under fire (which, as we’ve established, happen far more regularly than ships coming under fire) then you are creating a situation where Starfleet officers -Starfleet Captains- may feel under extreme emotional pressures to shoot first and ask questions later. That seems like a situation more likely to escalate a conflict into a fullblown war (and because they are often facing unknowns, they would be rolling the dice on maybe starting a war with a much greater power). On the other hand, keeping their children onboard, there is incentive to be more cautious, to seek out alternative solutions and to de-escalate situations.
Having kids on board means far less of a chance of a hasty or panicked officer making a bad choice leading to millions of people dying, and does ensure the Federation keeps its moral (or kept, until someone came up with Section 31) authority which comes with having done everything in its power to avoid a war, and only going to war as a last resort. Because of that restraining factor on Starfleet, the Federation can (or could, S31, thanks a bunch for that dumb concept)be trusted. And an ounce of trust is worth a hundredweight of guns.