"GROPOS"

Season Two, Episode Ten

Surprise bonus episode for reasons you’ll understand on July 4! (Mostly I’m just trying to get this one out of the way.)

Babylon 5 has been invaded—by EarthForce infantry, under the command of Dr. Franklin’s father.

Previously on Babylon 5

• Dr. Franklin has repeatedly put his principles above the rules, such as in the case of Shon last year, and before that destroying his notes on the Minbari to prevent their use for making bioweapons.

• Susan was estranged from her father before his final illness.

• Pilot Keffer has lost someone in action recently—his squadron commander, Galus, killed in passing by the Shadows.

Summaries

B5 is quiet—until 25,000 infantry show up, needing billets for a few days. They are on their way to intervene in a civil war against the rebels at the request of the local government. The station (suddenly increased in population by 10%) is abruptly quite crowded and turbulent. The turbulence affects personal relationships, too: one GROPO, Dodger, makes a play for Michael, who overthinks it; Keffer suddenly has two roommates; Delenn is nearly targeted for a hate crime by a veteran GROPO; and the whole outfit is headed up by Stephen’s father, General “Firestorm” Franklin, with whom Stephen has never gotten along.

Some prodding by Susan gets Stephen to talk to his father, while John nudges “Firestorm” from the other side, and the father and son acknowledge their differences and express their love. Michael makes a second try for Dodger, who promises it’s a date. Keffer has bonded with his sudden bunkmates. So all’s well that ends well… except that all the GROPOS we meet, save General Franklin and his sergeant major, are killed in action.

Here’s the Lurker’s Guide link, although it’s much less informative than usual.

Tips for the Skippers

• This one is Safely Skipped, though it does have its moments. For those bypassing it:

  • Garibaldi nearly had a one-night stand with a GROPO, Dodger, but overthought it. She didn’t survive the subsequent battle.

  • EarthForce has responded to the Narn-Centauri War by getting a little more aggressive and increasing Babylon 5’s defense grid.

Quote of the Day:

“Looks like everyone’s goin’ to bed!”—Lou Welch

Paul’s Commentary

“Operation Sudden Death.”

During World War II, military operations usually received code names that were more-or-less meaningless for additional security. When operational names had been in use for too long, the names were sometimes changed; Operation Anvil was so slow to develop it was renamed Operation Dragoon. But other code names gave broad hints as to what was coming. Germany’s attack on Britain was initially labeled “Operation Lion,” which is not exactly subtle, and somehow got less subtle when it was renamed “Sea Lion.” The most famous of all, Operation Overlord, didn’t get its name entirely by chance: “Overlord” had a ring of dominance and power about it; also, alliteration’s always awesome. But it was not intended as a descriptor or a selling point.

But operation names always had a certain morale factor involved, even when kept fairly internal to the military. (Here’s an article for those interested.) And as the code names became used more widely, they became advertising. It was probably television’s fault. Operation Rolling Thunder, the bombing of North Vietnam, may have been the first in this vein; it may also have started the unfortunate trend of US military operations being labeled Operation Adjective Noun. Operation Frequent Wind probably caught some flack for being an evacuation and an admission of defeat: the helicopter in the infamous “Fall of Saigon” photo was flying as part of Frequent Wind. The invasion of Grenada a few years later was Operation Urgent Fury. Desert Shield and Desert Storm set the pattern in stone, and here we are: the attack on Iran was Operation Epic Fury. Doonesbury satirized the naming convention back at the start; shortly after Frequent Wind, Gary Trudeau’s comic strip had Operation Frequent Manhood. One can imagine President Trump hearing that name and taking it at face value.

Which brings us to Operation Sudden Death. Clearly in 2259, this tradition of military-operations-names-as-advertising has not been forgotten. But something’s wrong. Operation Sudden Death is supposed to be a secret operation, not a carefully choreographed and telegraphed media event.

Or is it? The cover story of heading to Io is tissue-thin: Io is in our own solar system, so staging them at B5 makes no sense unless they are coming from even further away, and as B5 is “located in neutral territory” it’s highly unlikely to be much closer to Earth than any other point in Earth Alliance space. Also Io is an extremely hostile environment, being essentially one giant volcano; I’d guess 25,000 troops wouldn’t fit well there either, and even if they did, who would there be to fight? Besides, if Dodger can figure out that “Firestorm” Franklin wouldn’t be in command of a garrison run, so can everyone else. And why, after all, is this operation happening at all? To secure a new EarthForce base close to the Narn and Centauri fighting—in other words, to be nearby and visible.

So I think Operation Sudden Death is actually no secret at all. The specific target is a secret, but I think General Franklin and his division were intended to be seen. Saber rattling, as Sheridan points out. The point is to remind everyone watching that EarthForce is, ahem, a force to be reckoned with.

Again, why is this happening? “Firestorm” Franklin puts it this way: the Narn-Centauri war will make the other races more aggressive. So the Earth Alliance tries to get out ahead of that and deal with it by… being more aggressive. It’s the oldest pattern in the Book of Statecraft: if you fear your adversaries are going to do something they have no right to do to you, then you have every right to do that something to them first. “Do unto others before they do unto you,” as the saying goes.

Remember that politics is just a scaled-up schoolyard—or perhaps a prison yard. The way to deal with bullies (they say) is to beat them to the punch. Sleep a little easier (they say) by making them lose sleep.

But this is Babylon 5, and the show understands the world a little better than that. This is the importance of the bar scene in “The Coming of Shadows.” G’Kar and Mollari both followed the politics-as-prisonyard approach all through Season 1—but the emperor, in risking his health to “choose something better,” showed G’Kar that it doesn’t have to be that way. And G’Kar, by showing his joy at this and giving good wishes to the emperor and to Mollari, showed Mollari that there could have been a better way.

So while the attack on Matok succeeds and the rebellion on Akdor is ended, the show takes a moment to illustrate the price, and because this is the show that killed the kid at the end of the moral-dilemma episode, the way B5 will illustrate it is by killing all the lower-ranking GROPOS. Every single one.

Operation Sudden Death, indeed.

The United States, in its recent military adventures, has been astonishingly lucky. In Iraq the US lost around 4500 lives; in Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom), across 20 years, the US lost 2400. That’s an order of magnitude smaller than the Vietnam War (58,000), which was in turn an order of magnitude smaller than US losses in World War II. In Operation Epic Fury (so far, at least) the US lost 16 members of the armed services. The fact that the US lost all those wars except World War II tells us something about the US. I have said of Afghanistan that, while that country is indeed the graveyard of empires, the US was the first of those empires to lose because it got bored. Operation Epic Fury might be the first military operation in history to broadly succeed tactically, but fail because of the price of gas.

But in a larger sense, what all these low-death but low-success operations tell us is that the US was operating far from home, far from the minds and hearts of the American people. To fight a war as a democracy requires a democratic, population-wide commitment, a measure of sacrifice and a measure of dedication to a cause. Such a commitment requires either considerable trust in leadership—trust that Vietnam squandered and has never been regained—or a shocking loss at home, such as Pearl Harbor or September 11. The kidnapping of Maduro was code-named Operation Absolute Resolve. Never has a codename been so staggeringly inapt; the US has shown little resolve, both as a government and as a people, in either winning conflicts or in avoiding them. Some say that President Trump has shown resolve in his two attacks on Iran across the last year—but considering the outcome, it seems more likely that he was not resolved at all, but just posturing on the playground. If anyone showed resolve in recent years, it was Joe Biden in withdrawing from Afghanistan—ending a war that the American people at large had no interest in fighting or winning, but recoiled in horror at the prospect of losing. Biden was willing to leave and lose, and paid the price. (Had he shown such courage in leaving his own office, he might have served the country even better.)

Spoiler alert: we will never hear again of Operation Sudden Death in Babylon 5. We will never hear again of Matok and Akdor. We will never hear of any strategic benefit to EarthForce or the Earth Alliance won by the sacrifice of the people we briefly met.

“So much pain, so much loss—and for what, I wonder?”

Stray Observations

• I am no military operations expert, but several things about the attack on Matok make little sense to me. General Franklin asks for Sheridan’s input on the attack plans, but it seems like Franklin has zero intelligence. This, at least, is partially explained by the new allies lying, but the general also doesn’t seem to have much of a plan. He and Sheridan must have come up with something, though.

• Also, if I’m correct and the whole operation was intended as a show of force from first to last, then not alerting Babylon 5 about their impending arrival was a colossal blunder. As they say, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, and “Firestorm” Franklin is clearly a professional. A competent general would never have sent his soldiers through a jumpgate with such a thin logistics plan.

• But let’s talk logistics: if each EarthForce GROPO division is 25,000 people, and there are at least 356 of them, that gives us nine million in infantry divisions alone—not counting all the ships’ crews and pilots like Sheridan and Keffer. This seems a bit high. What’s more likely is that EarthForce expanded during the Earth-Minbari War and shrank back down again after, but certain particularly vaunted outfits like the 356th were kept intact. (Also, for what it’s worth, US divisions are usually only 15,000.)

• Frankly, I’m not sure 25,000 people would fit on the ship (the Schwarzkopf) that brought them there—though that does add credence to General Franklin wanting his people off that ship.

• That said, some things about the operation do ring true. Though the EarthForce gunships are moving far too slowly and are sitting ducks, they do seem to have air superiority at that point (it’s base vs. gunships, not aircraft vs. gunships)—but air superiority is not enough, and you really do need ground pounders, and a frontal assault against prepared positions really is going to be costly.

• Apparently Akdor is a featureless globe—but apparently it’s a strategically important featureless globe. Not the CGI department’s finest hour…

• Telling us that B5 now could go toe-to-toe with a warship and then saying “Let’s hope we never have to test it” might get Foreshadowing of the Year Award on a lesser show, but this is Babylon 5—we’re rolling in foreshadowing here.

• We’re still smoking cigars in 2259? Well, we are if we’re in “Drink, smoke, and be merry, for tomorrow we die” mode. I suspect that the war-storyteller character has also figured out what Dodger figured out: this ain’t no coffee ‘n cake run. (Whatever happened to milk runs, though?)

• It’s worth remembering that this episode was made just a few years after the US first sent women soldiers and pilots into a combat zone, in Operation Desert Storm—and the show doesn’t even blink about representation. There are women soldiers all over this episode, and they absolutely hold their own in the brawling shown on camera. We’re still arguing about whether or not women have the strength and skill to serve in battle, though that may be more of a way of weeding out people from the US military who might be more loyal to the uniform and the Constitution than to the president. I am again no expert, but I will say that women are on average shorter, smaller, and weaker than the average man, but often those differences can be mitigated (albeit not eliminated) by good training. I’m not certain that we see a lot of evidence of such training in the brawl scenes, but hey, we can pretend. There is also some evidence that we have not been doing athletic training for girls and women correctly—oftentimes their training is just a scaled-down version of the training for boys and men rather than specifically tailored for female bodies—so it’s conceivable that by 2259 we’ve finally cracked the code and women, especially professional soldiers, are just straight-up stronger.

• I also note that the brawl scenes might seem like “let’s have a big exciting fight scene” but they serve a real purpose: showing that Dodger and her fellow women in the division are entirely physically capable of combat.

• One of the episode’s funnier moments: the civilian woman in the big brawl scene bopping a GROPO on the head. I also think I saw one of the regular bartenders avoiding a soldier at one point; if so, points for continuity.

• I like Lou Welch covering for Garibaldi.

What’s Next?

In many ways, the reason we came to this show in these times—an episode titled “All Alone in the Night” which I really, really wanted to have us discuss on the Fourth of July.