The Earth-Minbari War

[Khas 12,158]

Okay, I was reading up on the Earth-Minbari War on the B5 Wiki, due to never having actually seen B5 aside from short clips on YouTube, and I noticed the casualties.

 

250,000 for the Earth Alliance. Light for the Minbari.

 

Let's repeat that 250,000. And this was supposed to be a devastating war.

 

The American Civil War had more than 4 times the casualty rate.

 

Once again, sci-fi writers have no sense of scale.

[Afishymeadow 534]

Writers being nOObs! And only a quarter of a million casualties in an INTERSTELLAR WAR no less. :

[Khas 12,158]

Also, it appears that the vast majority of the 20,000 ships that defended Earth from the Minbari at the final day of the war were Starfuries.

 

Well, it's helpful to know that fighters count as vessels in the B5 universe.

[scvn2812 504]

When's the last time any Western nation fought a war in which casualties were higher than single digit thousands? We've been at war in Iraq and Afghanistan for in excess of ten years. They are the most costly in lives, treasure, morale, geopolitical stability, military hardware and virtually every other measure of war for the United States and its coalition partners in a generation. The wars are contentious, the public is exhausted, the cost is skyrocketing, it is being argued that the world's lone superpower has all but been broken by these conflicts and yet in a generation scholars will be looking back and looking only at the body count and arguing that the generations who lived through these conflicts are all a bunch of whiners with no sense of scale.

 

Compared to WW2 or even the civilian body count of the War on Terror (extreme and I mean EXTREME calculations put the toll on civilian life from the internal strife of Iraq and Afghanistan from all measures: deprivation, starvation, general break down of civilization, lack of law and order, damage to infrastructure and direct killing - at over a million lives) the Earth - Minbari war is not terribly impressive. However, lets put that into perspective. The Minbari waltzed into Earth space, lost only one battle on record - not counting the one at which they surrendered after they'd already technically won - and killed 250,000 people in just a couple years, presumably most of them Earth Force but also likely some civilians caught in the line of fire. An Omega class crew is pegged anywhere from 800 to over a thousand in some cases. A Nova (a direct predecessor to the Omega) docked with Babylon 5 with an entire brigade (iirc) aboard. Let's say the average Earth Alliance ship has a thousand crewmen aboard. (Hyperions undoubtedly carry much less but Novas are older than Omegas and could be significantly less automated) That's 250 ships of the line equivalents destroyed. If this was modern Earth, that would be more than 2/3rds of the United States navy. Wiped out with only four known enemy capital ship losses (the Black Star, the Black Star's escorts off screen and the Sharlin that was rammed by a Nova in the war montage.) That's 63:1 odds based on a very, very miserly look at canon.

 

Find me a people that wouldn't call a 63 to 1 loss ratio after 3 years of fighting with the war ending with enemy warships defacto in control of Earth orbital space "a devastating war."

 

I'm pretty sure the Taliban and the Iraqi warlords aren't really thrilled about the dozens to one loss ratios they've endured over the last decade and one could argue they're winning the strategic war even though they lose tactically more than they win.

 

Lives lost in absolute numbers is not the only measure of how traumatic or costly a war is.

[Khas 12,158]

I'm not saying it wasn't traumatic or demoralizing. But for an interstellar war, fought between two space-faring races, only 250,000 lives lost is TAME. Hell, it's tame compared to many real wars, like the Napoleonic Wars, Civil War, World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War.

 

Yeah, the last time we fought a war where there was more than single-digit thousands dead was Vietnam, with the U.S. casualties of 58,000 dead, and 300,000 wounded. Yes, there were more people simply wounded in Vietnam then there were people killed in what was supposedly a genocidal war waged by the Minbari. As genocides go, this was light.

 

It's also small by interstellar war standards period. I could point to many examples in ST, SW, SC, and WH40K that were bigger and nastier than this, and were considered smaller conflicts. In the Dominion War, before their homeworld was bombarded by the Dominion, the Cardassians lost 7 million troops.

 

And the 250,000 was the total Earth Alliance losses, military and civilian. But then again, JMS said that advanced species in B5 use birth control methods to keep their populations low.

 

Still doesn't explain how Earth's population is at a billion over carrying capacity, though, while Mars, the next most populous world, only has 2 million people. Wouldn't it make more sense to start spreading people out faster?

[Khas 12,158]

Also, you're leaving out a key factor for the sorry shape of the U.S., and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have little to do with this. It's the Great Recession, which came when the Housing Market collapsed.

[Khas 12,158]

Hell, the One-Year War from Mobile Suit Gundam, which was limited to Earth and all bodies orbiting it, made the Shadow War at the end of B5 look like a fight between two schoolyard bullies. Delenn said that billions would die if the war continued, at that point "mere" millions had. In the One-Year War, 5.5 billion people (half the human race) were killed in the first few weeks.

[scvn2812 504]

Why should it be bloody if the Minbari hadn't started their pogrom to wipe out humanity yet? As I said, 250,000 persons would account for 250 first rate capital ships or a greater number of mixed dreadnoughts, cruisers and corvettes. Babylon 5, despite attempts to inflate its numbers from some corners, is not a universe with terribly large fleet counts. The biggest on screen battles involved maybe hundreds of observable ships with thousands implied by JMS approved media of dubious canon status. An Omega class destroyer is as large as a Star Destroyer but even more so than the Star Destroyer is basically implied to be mostly machine with the human presence very small by comparison - around 1500 was the largest crew size ever mentioned for such a vessel iirc versus the ~40,000 of an ISD per reference material.

 

In setting, the Earth Alliance is technologically outclassed by many of its neighbors but enjoys an extremely robust economy and industrial sector so it takes the Yamato approach: super sized warships that use sheer immensity to tangle with smaller, more sophisticated foes on equal footing. This being one reason why their fleet, while made of big ships, is fairly small by scifi standards.

 

Given that each setting more or less sets an arbitrary, hidden "cost" of interstellar warships that determines how vast or diminutive fleets are going to be, I see no reason why B5's Earth / Minbari war should be considered unrealistic. If anything, the smaller the fleets and the destruction, the closer it is to the limits of energy production and engineering as we currently understand them the series is and thus the more realistic. Also take into consideration that most militaries that place a premium on having the best equipment on the planet are facing a death spiral where the cost of procuring new equipment to replace the old is skyrocketing, I see no reason why B5's militaries, even on a war footing, shouldn't still be very small by our standards.

 

The lack of civilian casualties from the colonial battles is something of a plot hole given the Minbari's stated war aim was to utterly wipe out humanity but apparently this was not something they were prepared to do until they had fully and completely neutralized humanity as a military threat. Some of the Minbari leaders such as Delenn were having second thoughts and may also have been working to delay any holocausts until a way of ending the war could be found. Its worth noting that in setting, beam weapons are not very effective orbital bombardment weapons. They're cumbersome to aim and when they are used for ground strike, they don't do tremendous damage. Towards the end of the series, the Centauri homeworld was bombarded by a joint Narn - Drazi fleet and the damage was comparable to Iraq war footage but not Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Most ships are not equipped with missiles, so they lack a means of delivering nuclear weapons to a planet. A technical readout declared that a Minbari warcruiser did carry nuclear weapons but political or religious reasons may have prevented their wide spread use in the Earth - Minbari war. The religious and building castes were stuck in a war they didn't want anymore but couldn't get out of without a severe upheaval in Minbari society but may have tied the hands of the warriors.

 

The how and why of the war being so bloodless (relatively speaking) might make a good mental gymnasium topic. I suggest moving it there since it is, kind of, sort of a plot hole.

 

The Iraq / Afghanistan wars and global war on terror were paid for in red ink before the recession kicked the legs out from under the economy. So war, even for a rich country fighting thousands of miles from home, still incurs collateral damage, if not precisely in ways we're used to thinking of. Also, in addition to the thousands dead, there have been tens of thousands wounded, many of whom permanently disabled, so again, a war doesn't need a large body count to lay a very large human and financial cost at the feet of those fighting it.

[Khas 12,158]

Look, all I was originally saying was that by sci-fi standards, the Earth-Minbari War was small, and that the writers underestimated just how huge an interstellar war would be, especially since the Earth Alliance lost many key colonies. That's it. I didn't expect any of this, nor was I even trying to stir anything up.

[scvn2812 504]

Back it up a sec dude, one of the biggest problems with having a conversation on the internet is judging tone. Can't two guys have a difference of opinion about what a major war is without assuming its "heated?"

 

Well, okay, war is a touchy subject so maybe that's a bad example.

 

Anyway, mostly what I wanted to do was give some context. Skimming a wiki is one thing and unfortunately that one thing is often missing context. So if any of that helped make the Earth - Minbari war make a bit more sense when compared to the slaughter you've described previously for Gundam, cool. If anyone else has anything they'd like to add or correct me on, jump on in. As I said, it might make a fun Gynasium topic.

 

Okay back to your original point: scale.

 

Yes, it is a "small" war by most standards. Heck, the Death Star by itself represents a greater loss of life than the Earth - Minbari war. Although context is exactly what's missing from the Earth - Minbari war. We know many humans considered it a very traumatic event and in the made for tv movie that covered it, everyone was convinced the twilight of the human race was at hand until the Minbari surrendered. We know little of how it was fought though. We do see a couple of soldiers brawling but no montages of cities burning, space colonies being opened like tin cans etc. On the other hand, maybe the writers did know what they were doing as they did present a faction of humans a decade later who swaggered about and seemed to actually think they'd progressed enough that if the war were fought all over again, they'd win. (Take my word for it, the odds were still bad, if slightly less so.)

 

Here's the rub, are the authors underestimating how bad an interstellar conflict would be or are we projected our favorite meme, World War 2, onto these science fiction universes?

 

There's this idea in fandom that if a war isn't a total war, fought with everything a civilization has and without restriction, its not realistic. I'm not sure I buy into that idea. If anything it seems the first decade of the 21st century has shown that regard for life isn't the same as lack of interest in war. If anything, it seems that the less bloodshed is directly involved in fighting, especially for civilians, the easier and easier it is to justify wars. I think we should rethink how we look at war in science fiction instead of automatically jumping to the World War 2 meme. I think its interesting to take the modern world and use it as the template for understanding scifi. In some cases I think it helps to explain inconsistencies like the absence of total wars or a lack of huge set piece battles in settings where grandiose brawls ought to be possible. Its not a perfect analogy, it may not even be a less bad analogy than World War 2 or the Age of Sail but its interesting.

 

Now that I think about it, we really seem to be on our way to a Dune model of war, minus the lasguns and personal shields. So far.

[Afishymeadow 534]

It'd be if some cable/satellite channel aired re-runs of B5 & DS9 back to back daily!