this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2026
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Your point is well made but for the record O’Brian wasn't an officer and never went to the academy. He even jokes about having to call Nog ‘sir’ when he becomes an ensign.
You're right. But assumedly it's just as hard to become an enlisted member of Starfleet than it is an officer. When you have hundreds of worlds and trillions of citizens, you're never going to have a shortage of potential applicants for your fleet. Unless you're fielding millions of ships, there will never be a shortage. Even if only rare societal oddballs found the idea of serving appealing? Well 1% of a trillion is still 10 billion. The point is, that for every one person we see on screen, there have to be thousands of potential replacements, each just as qualified and driven.
And that's also why they likely wouldn't mind asking compromised people to resign. After all, getting in in the first place is essentially just an act of extreme luck. Everyone there knows they beat a bunch of folks just as qualified as themselves to get their seat. If you view your position as largely due to chance, then if fate hands you a curve ball and also takes that away from you due to chance? Well that seems reasonable.
I get the point you are making and I mostly agree with it. My one main argument is to ask if the other people really are just as qualified though? Just taking O’Brien again, he is 45 when his son is born in DS9 having at that point been in Starfleet for over 20 years and served in over 200 combat engagements. That’s not an amount of, especially hands on, experience that the average anyone is going to have at enlistment time.
On the other hand at the end of the series he goes to teach at the academy so I suppose you could argue that what you are positing is exactly what is being done to him there. Being rotated off the front line and put in a place where he will have access to mental health resources. It’s also mentioned in Voyager where they have crew that they talk about wouldn’t have made it on a starship and would have been turfed to a star base or similar had they not been stranded in the delta quadrant so it may be that what you are describing happens to everybody who isn’t a main character anyway.