...personally speaking, I don't mind the Federation having a dark underbelly. No empire is perfect, even the "good guys" in the Federation.
The Fed is not as good as it seems.
This is not the issue at hand. There are plenty of indicators that the Fed has it's dark shades as well. While on one hand they surely try to be as morally upstanding and civilized as they can (by their standards) they have their issues, less spoken of vices, and so on. That's not a problem - in fact, that is great and helps add to immersion.
The issue at hand is not that the Fed get's a "dark" stain to their reputation with this. It's that once again, you get a "The Fed tries, but is utterly incompetent" bit. There have been several of these over the years, and it seems to me to be the favorite stick to beat the Fed with, much like "Evil Corrupt Religious Slavers" is the Empire's stick and "Uncaring Fascist Corporate Servants" is the State's stick and so on. It's like a never-ending, insulting meme that never quits and insists that things never get better or improves, for anyone.
Ofc, it remains to be seen exactly how this Arc develops, but IMHO we are not off for a great start, and I'm not expecting it to get any better.
Federation is a culture entrenched in hedonism, chemical abuse isn't that much of a surprise. Combined with the points raised earlier in this thread this is a credible news piece.
The Federation is a union of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of different Cultures, resulting in a huge "melting pot" on the Federal level, stating they only have one is a great disservice. Also, despite very clear hedonistic tendencies for the vast majority of the Federal level of society, overt substance abuse are still generally banned across the Fed, why do you think the Serpentis (who face criminal charges and arrests if captured) have to smuggle their products over the border?
Utilizing combat-boosting narcotics is not in any way far-fetched - might even be very smart in many ways - but clearly not bothering to test these before distributing them to the high-quality demanding military? Yeah, that one won't fly with me, reads like more incompetence stick application.
I think there's a few things to consider in regards to the Federal Military:
- The defence budget cuts of President Foiritain in order to shift those funds to other areas of spending (citizenry might have agreed with this, since hey, no real clear and present threats at the time why not focus on the economy etc.) This would have caused a bleed out of experienced Officers and NCO's that might have hung up their uniforms to go into the private sector and which would have degraded the capacity and capability of the military overall.
- The Federation has always had issues with recruitment and retention with its military. Budget cuts would have just made its manpower issues even more painful, forcing widespread use of drones and other automated systems as stopgaps.
- Potential for war weariness on the homefront and the fact that CONCORD seems to have contained it in the CEWPA zone means there might not be much interest to sign up with the armed forces in lieu of drafting or conscription of its citizens (I'm not even sure if the Fed has a draft).
So in a situation where you've got critical manpower shortages in a military that's all voluntary and in which it seems the current CEWPA conflict might appear as an almost "phony war" to the general populace, then it seems the Federation has been forced to cut corners because no one wants to enlist and they can't do a general draft. This leads to lowered standards and issues around troop integrity, professionalism, morale, and cohesion as the article points to in trying to fight a war set by CONCORD where it's designed that no one can win in its meat grinder of attrition.
The Empyrian war started in 110, 5 years ago. Do you honestly think there are STILL serious budget costs and effects half a decade into the new conflict? PF and news entries have told us over the years that the Fed has been gearing up for the war, getting old ships out of storage, re-applying the budget for the military, upgrading old equipment, making more and getting higher percentages of volunteers for their forces across the board. I would imagine that any budget cut effects to have been cleared out in a couple years, or at least to not be a major issue anymore 5 years in.
