Alysha Forrest’s Fleet is not, most of you will have noted, much like a military. This is a reflection of its origins. After the Pelted fled Earth and established their new homeworlds, they thought it would be a good idea to have a military, but while the technology was easily within their reach, the cultural challenges were significant. Most Pelted are non-violent both by inclination and biology, and prior to the Exodus their few interactions with military personnel on Earth had been either as distant authority figures or in security functions. They knew nothing of military history; they weren’t aware of the division of labor or forces; they didn’t understand the military culture and, importantly, its purpose in keeping people under high stress functional and capable of executing their missions.
In short, they were pacifists who could build big guns, decided they should, and then weren’t sure what to do next.
It didn’t help that once they settled into their colonization period, the Pelted failed to find anyone to deploy their fledgling military against. The universe was mostly empty until the Pelted filled it with their own experiments in genetic engineering, and the few aliens the Pelted met were benevolent. The warships the Pelted built found themselves assigned to exploration, disaster relief, and ambassadorial duties. As the merchant fleet expanded, Fleet found extra work in anti-piracy duties… but pirates were few and poorly organized, and these few encounters never necessitated the development of even the most rudimentary of tactics.
Hundreds of years after the Exodus, the most modern and potent military in known space is manned mostly by scientists, engineers, and a small handful of people trained in executive decision-making. It completely lacks the distinction between officer and enlisted personnel, has all of six ranks, and offers little mobility between them save in the command track. Most of Fleet’s members are in the soft and hard sciences and remain ensigns all their careers. They are assigned to the departments of particular ships and never leave. This structure—more like a corporation or government—reflects the duties that have become typical for Fleet, which are primarily scientific, exploratory, and diplomatic.
Command track officers are among the few Fleet personnel who do advance, usually based on their abilities with personnel and resource management. While some of them have the decisive personalities and leadership qualities that a Terran military officer would recognize, most of them are simply superb managers who drive their ships from world to world, mapping nebulae, ferrying diplomats around, and occasionally frightening away pirates.
When the Rapprochement reintroduced the Pelted to their makers, humanity was eager to join its defensive efforts with its far more powerful ally… which was when they discovered just how ill-equipped the Pelted Fleet was for anything more complex than escort duties. Earth wanted badly to overhaul the Pelted’s military, but the Pelted resisted. Their Fleet had grown to one of the most sizable employers in Alliance space, and one of its most productive governmental arms; they had no desire to change it to suit their more warlike progenitors’ demands.
...and then the Chatcaava, who had previously been a non-issue (and whom the Pelted had insisted to humanity was no threat), became abruptly expansionist. The unexpected change of policy made the Pelted uncomfortably aware of their own vulnerability, and the subsequent increase in piracy made it clear that at least some traditional military training would be necessary in the future. With this in mind, the Pelted began to accept the offer of personnel loans from the human militaries into theirs, and the culture clash began in earnest. As the Chatcaavan Empire has become more aggressive, humanity's demands that the Fleet find the wherewithal to transform into an actual fighting force have become more urgent.
This is the Alliance Fleet into which Alysha Forrest and her contemporaries have been inducted, and the tension between humanity and the Pelted, and the looming threat implied by the Empire’s saber-rattling, have cast a long shadow. No doubt Fleet will make the transition. The only question is whether they will do so in time to serve the purpose their makers never thought they would need to fulfill.