The Imperial Fleet

1. Overview

The Imperial Fleet is the navy of the Romulan Star Empire. It guards the Empire’s borders, carries its power to its neighbours, and, in the years after 2379, held the Empire together when nothing else could. It is the part of the Imperial government that Starfleet officers meet most often, and the part they understand best. That is not saying much. The Fleet does not publish its strength, its order of battle or its doctrine, and a great deal of what Starfleet knows about it was learned the hard way.

The Fleet is not the Empire’s only armed force. The Tal Shiar, the Empire’s intelligence service, commands ships of its own and places its officers aboard the Fleet’s ships. The two serve the same Empire and do not trust each other. This article covers the Fleet itself: its organisation, its ranks, its crews and their careers, its doctrine, and how it behaves on the Neutral Zone in 2393. For the service that watches it, see The Tal Shiar. For its ships, see Ships of the Empire.

2. The Fleet in Brief History

The Fleet’s history with the Federation begins before the Federation. The Earth-Romulan War ended in 2160 with the Neutral Zone, and in all that war no human saw a Romulan face. The next open contact came in 2266, when a Romulan Bird-of-Prey crossed the Zone and destroyed several Earth outposts with a plasma weapon before the USS Enterprise turned it back. Its commander chose to destroy his own ship rather than be taken. Two years later Starfleet found the Romulans flying ships of Klingon design. After the Tomed Incident of 2311, the Romulans withdrew behind the Zone and were not seen again for more than fifty years.

The one exception was violent. In 2344 Romulan warbirds attacked the Klingon outpost at Narendra III, and the USS Enterprise-C was destroyed defending it. The Klingons have never forgiven it. See The Klingon Empire.

In 2364 the Romulans came back, and the ship that came back with them was the D’deridex warbird, larger than anything Starfleet had expected. Through the late 2360s, Fleet commanders such as Tomalak met Starfleet ships along the Zone in a long run of incidents, each of them tense, few of them fatal. In 2374 the Empire entered the Dominion War on the Federation’s side, and its warbirds fought in the Allied line until the war ended in 2375. In 2379 Shinzon’s coup killed the Senate. At the Bassen Rift that year, Commander Donatra brought two warbirds, one of them her own Valdore, to stand with the USS Enterprise-E against Shinzon’s ship, the Scimitar. Both were badly outmatched. Donatra’s ship survived.

The years from 2379 to 2382 are called the Silence. There was no Senate, and rival houses and provincial governors ran their own provinces. The Fleet held the Empire together by refusing to take sides. It did not seize power and it did not split, and Federation analysts count that restraint as the most important thing the Fleet has done in living memory. When the Restored Senate first sat in 2382, the Fleet was still whole. In 2387, under Praetor Ardhal tr’Vesuin, the patrols came back to the Neutral Zone. See History of the Romulan Star Empire and Timeline.

3. Organisation

3.1 Fleet command

The Fleet answers to the Praetor and, through him, to the Senate. Its highest command sits on Romulus. How that command is arranged, who sits in it and how its orders pass to the frontier are not public. Starfleet’s picture of the Fleet’s structure is drawn from the outside in: from the ships it meets, the commands those ships report to, and the logistics behind them.

3.2 Sector commands

The working unit of the Fleet on any frontier is the sector command. A sector command holds the ships assigned to its sector, keeps their order of battle, sets their patrol assignments, gathers their readiness reports and runs their logistics. It is assessed to hold the repair yards, depots and stations in its sector as well. Three sector commands face the Federation across the Neutral Zone:

Chaltok Sector Command sits on the far side of the stretch of the Zone that Starbase 234 watches. It keeps the order of battle, patrol assignments, readiness reports and logistics for the Chaltok Sector. Its staff includes the post of fleet disposition officer, the officer who tracks where every ship of the sector is and what it has been sent to do. Tal Shiar and other compartmented forces in the sector sit outside the Fleet’s view there, and do not appear on its board.

Nevrha Sector lies spinward of Chaltok, toward the Klingon border. Its command faces two powers at once, and it is assessed to be the most watchful of the three.

Aethren Sector lies coreward. It is quiet, and it is heavily fortified. Starfleet sees less of the Fleet in Aethren than anywhere else on the line, and reads that as a sign of strength rather than weakness.

For the worlds and stations on the Romulan side of the line, see The Romulan Side of the Zone.

3.3 Fleets and squadrons

Below the sector command, ships are grouped into fleets and smaller squadrons. A border fleet is assessed to hold a mix of warbirds and smaller ships, with a senior commander or admiral at its head. In peacetime most of its ships do not sail together. They are spread across the sector on patrols and station duty, and the fleet exists mainly on the sector command’s board. In wartime, as in 2374 and 2375, the fleets gather.

3.4 The ship

The single warbird is the Fleet’s basic unit and, on the Zone, the one Starfleet sees. Its commander holds wide authority over the ship and its crew, and Romulan commanders have shown a good deal of independence in how they carry out their orders. Each warbird commander is answerable to the sector command and, in practice, to any Tal Shiar officer embarked aboard.

4. Ranks

The Fleet’s ranks, as they are used in Starfleet’s records of this border, run as follows from lowest to highest. Several of them, among them centurion, sub-commander, commander and admiral, have been seen in Starfleet’s dealings with the Romulans since the 2260s. The equivalents given here are rough, and the posts are typical rather than fixed.

The Tal Shiar does not use the Fleet’s ranks. Its officers have been seen with ranks such as major and colonel, which stand outside the Fleet’s chain of command. Names follow the Romulan pattern: a personal name, then tr’ for a man or t’ for a woman before the house or family name. See Language, Names and Address.

5. Crews and Careers

5.1 Who serves

A warbird’s crew is Romulan. Men and women serve alike at every rank, and Starfleet’s record of Romulan commanders includes many women, from the commander met in 2268 to Toreth of the Khazara in 2369 and Donatra of the Valdore in 2379. Remans are another matter. The record shows that the Empire used Reman troops as shock forces in the Dominion War, and Remans are assessed to serve in the Fleet, when they serve at all, as labour and as expendable soldiers rather than as officers. See The Remans.

5.2 Careers

Very little is known of how a Romulan officer is trained. What is known of careers comes from watching officers rise. Federation analysts see two paths. On the first, an officer rises through ship service, from a station on the bridge to a department, to second in command, to a ship of her own. On the second, an officer with the right family rises faster, because a great house can open doors in the Fleet as it does everywhere else in Romulan life. Most careers are assessed to be a mix of the two. A commander with merit and no house can command a warbird. An admiral with no house is rare.

The Silence changed this in one way. With no Senate to look to, the Fleet’s officers held to the Fleet itself, and the officers who rose in those years did so by keeping their ships and crews out of the houses’ quarrels. Many of them now hold sector and fleet commands. Starfleet assesses the senior Fleet of 2393 to be more loyal to the Fleet as an institution, and more wary of politics, than the Fleet of the 2360s. See Society, Houses and Customs.

5.3 The Tal Shiar aboard

The Fleet’s officers do not command their ships alone. In 2369, aboard the warbird Khazara, a Tal Shiar officer embarked on the ship held authority over its commander on any matter the service chose to make its own. The commander obeyed and made her dislike of the arrangement plain. Starfleet regards this as normal practice. It is assessed that in 2393 a Tal Shiar officer, or an informant reporting to the service, sails aboard most Fleet warbirds on the Zone, and that the commander may or may not know who it is. Federation officers often call such an officer a commissar, a borrowed word; the Romulans’ own title for the post is not known.

6. Doctrine

The Fleet does not publish its doctrine. What Starfleet knows of it comes from more than a century of watching Romulan ships behave, and the picture is consistent. Three rules seem to run through everything.

6.1 Patience

The Fleet is in no hurry. A Romulan commander will wait for days to learn one fact. The Empire as a whole once waited behind the Zone for more than fifty years. Starfleet officers who meet the Fleet should assume that a Romulan ship which seems to be doing nothing is waiting, and that it has more time than they do.

6.2 Cloak first

The cloak is the centre of Romulan naval thinking. A ship that cannot be seen cannot be counted, followed or answered, and it chooses the moment of every meeting. Romulan ships move cloaked, wait cloaked and decloak for a reason: to be seen, to speak, or to fight. When a warbird shows itself, Starfleet’s first question is not what it will do but why it has chosen to be seen. See Romulan Technology.

6.3 Never commit to what can be held against you

The Fleet commits to as little as it can. A Romulan commander probes, tests, gathers and waits, and forces the other side to react, while doing nothing that can later be named and answered. A ship on its own side of the line has done nothing wrong. A buoy that drifts has malfunctioned. A distress call may be genuine. The aim is almost never to win an engagement. It is to learn how the other side thinks, and to be the side that understands the border better when the day finally comes.

When the Fleet does fight, it fights hard. Warbirds that engaged the Dominion in 2374 and 2375 did so in the Allied line and took their share of the losses. The restraint on the Zone is a choice, not a weakness.

7. How a Border Patrol Is Run

What follows is Starfleet’s assessment of a Fleet patrol on the Zone, put together from long observation. The Fleet has confirmed none of it.

Assignment. The sector command gives each warbird a patrol area and a period, and the fleet disposition officer records it. The area is assessed to be large, and the period long, often weeks.

Transit. The ship leaves its station or depot cloaked and stays cloaked on the way out. Starfleet usually learns of a patrol only when it is already in progress.

Station. Once on its area, the warbird holds position for long stretches rather than moving all the time. It listens. It watches Federation traffic, Federation patrols and Federation buoys. It may decloak on its own side of the line and sit there in plain sight for days. Starfleet reads this as a message, a test or both.

Tending the line. Romulan sensor buoys and listening posts are assessed to be visited, checked and serviced by patrolling ships. A buoy that fails and drifts, by accident or not, is part of the same work.

Contact. If a Federation ship comes close, the warbird’s commander chooses whether to be seen. If seen, the usual pattern is a hail, a statement that the warbird is in Romulan space, and a request to know the Federation ship’s intentions. Since 2387, Romulan commanders on this stretch of the Zone have rarely been the first to raise shields or arm weapons, and have not been the first to fire.

Report. Everything the patrol learns goes back to the sector command. Some of it, Starfleet assumes, goes elsewhere as well, through the Tal Shiar’s own channels.

8. The Fleet at the Line in 2393

Since 2387 the Neutral Zone has hardened into a border in all but name. On the Romulan side, the listening posts are manned again and sensor buoys line the Zone. Cloaked warbirds patrol ground the Empire insists they never enter. The Fleet’s ships are the visible part of this, and they behave as the doctrine above would predict. They are present, watchful and patient. They commit to nothing.

The Fleet’s posture differs along the line. Facing Starbase 234, Chaltok Sector Command keeps a steady run of patrols, and its warbirds are the ones Starfleet sees most. Nevrha Sector watches the Klingons as closely as the Federation, with Narendra III still remembered on both sides. Aethren stays quiet and heavily fortified. Taken together, the three commands are assessed to be stronger on the line than at any time since the Dominion War.

Two other pressures shape the Fleet’s behaviour in 2393. The first is T’Met, the Reman-settled system just outside the Romulan border that broke away from the Empire and has since joined the Federation. To the Empire the breakaway is an affront, and the region around it has grown less stable each year. The second is the Tal Shiar, which has returned to the line with the patrols and works beside the Fleet without telling it what it is doing. A Fleet commander on the Zone in 2393 has to watch the Federation, the Klingons and the Remans, and has to assume that his own service is watching him. See T'Met and The Neutral Zone (2393).

9. What Is Not Known

The Fleet’s total size is not known. Nor is the size of any one sector command, the number of ships in a border fleet, or the share of the Empire’s building that goes to the Fleet rather than to the Tal Shiar. The identity of the Fleet’s highest commanders is not public. How Romulan officers are trained, how they are chosen for command and how the houses influence those choices are matters of assessment, not record. Whether every Fleet warbird carries a Tal Shiar officer, and what such an officer may and may not do, is not known in detail. Starfleet officers serving opposite the Fleet should treat every confident claim about it, including the ones in this article, with care. For the Empire as a whole, see The Romulan Star Empire and Government of the Empire.