War is just another form of negotiation. Lots of people seem to view it as senseless murder and chaos but there are values in doing battle. The end goal of armed conflict is not to inflict harm on the other side, it is to get them to do what you want. Most commonly it is to get the other side to cede territorial control over to your side but there are many other goals it could be used for. For example, the purpose of the A-Bombs in Japan were not to eliminate military or infrastructure targets, or to simply inflict harm. They were used to force the Japanese to surrender because the US did not want to invade mainland Japan.
The first chapter of the book discusses this a bit. The objectives of the raid were to come in, cause confusion, and damage major infrastructure and utilities. In fact they were told to keep casualties to a minimum. The goal of the attack was to get the skinnies to withdraw their support from the bugs, that's it. The Federation simply used force to get the skinnies to do what they wanted and nothing more.
Does it say in these chapters, or a later one, that the skinnies were supporting the bugs? I didn't recall that from my first reading. In fact I had thought that the book made a point of the bugs being so different from humans in how they thought (perfect communists: a hivemind not afraid to sacrifice 'individuals' for the benefit of the whole) that it would be impossible for them to have peaceful diplomatic relations with a hominid race (though I will confess this might very well be a misconception based on the massive number of 'bug' races that exist in sci-fi.)
Yeah, it gets brought up somewhere later in the book. It's been a while since I first read it and I do remember the part about the bug race being "perfect communists" but I don't remember if they were a true hivemind. I think it was more like certain castes of bugs didn't have any value beyond the collective so they just sacrifice themselves.
The book does point out that the bugs are intelligent, enough to use organized maneuvers and to even build spaceships. So it stands to reason that they could form some kind of alliance with the skinnies.
War is just another form of negotiation. Lots of people seem to view it as senseless murder and chaos but there are values in doing battle. The end goal of armed conflict is not to inflict harm on the other side, it is to get them to do what you want. Most commonly it is to get the other side to cede territorial control over to your side but there are many other goals it could be used for. For example, the purpose of the A-Bombs in Japan were not to eliminate military or infrastructure targets, or to simply inflict harm. They were used to force the Japanese to surrender because the US did not want to invade mainland Japan.
The first chapter of the book discusses this a bit. The objectives of the raid were to come in, cause confusion, and damage major infrastructure and utilities. In fact they were told to keep casualties to a minimum. The goal of the attack was to get the skinnies to withdraw their support from the bugs, that's it. The Federation simply used force to get the skinnies to do what they wanted and nothing more.
Does it say in these chapters, or a later one, that the skinnies were supporting the bugs? I didn't recall that from my first reading. In fact I had thought that the book made a point of the bugs being so different from humans in how they thought (perfect communists: a hivemind not afraid to sacrifice 'individuals' for the benefit of the whole) that it would be impossible for them to have peaceful diplomatic relations with a hominid race (though I will confess this might very well be a misconception based on the massive number of 'bug' races that exist in sci-fi.)
Yeah, it gets brought up somewhere later in the book. It's been a while since I first read it and I do remember the part about the bug race being "perfect communists" but I don't remember if they were a true hivemind. I think it was more like certain castes of bugs didn't have any value beyond the collective so they just sacrifice themselves.
The book does point out that the bugs are intelligent, enough to use organized maneuvers and to even build spaceships. So it stands to reason that they could form some kind of alliance with the skinnies.