In other words, protecting Earth by making sure Earth didn't get involved in another devastating war while it was so weak. It's what generally happens these days; diplomacy prevails before the missiles start flying.
Diplomacy only works as long as it works. (See WWI, WWII, Korea, Bosnia, etc., etc., etc.) Then you need an actual defense. And B5 was at least as much for the purpose of keeping
other worlds from becoming embroiled in war as it was to protect Earth.
Nor is it clear that most of Earth's forces were destroyed at the Line. Nearly every ship that fought there was, but we're never told what percentage of Earth's total fleet that represented, nor how far in advance Earth knew about the Minbari advance. Substantial forces must have been guarding the primarily civilian colonies (which hadn't been hit yet.) And the only ones the could have joined the final defense were those close enough to answer Earth's last desparate call for help.
Lexington certainly wasn't among them, and we're never told that she was unusual in this respect. Certainly all of the Earth ships without rotating grav sections that we see in the series are Minbari-war vintage, which suggests that most of them survived the conflict. (Some would have been under construction during the war.) A fair number of ships were also in Earth orbit to act as a final defense. "The Line" proper was further out, probably between Mars and Jupiter.
Under these circumstances it doesn't seem that Earth would be in such desparate shape that it would build the Babylon Station as a
primarily defensive outpost, nor that Earth would divert huge amount of resources to build it
instead of new warships. I suspect Earth diverted resources from other things entirely in order to build
both the spacestation
and as many new ships as the yards could turn out. Carrot
and stick, rather than trying to use a carrot as if it
were a stick until actual sticks could be found. /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif (I suspect that one of the areas that was cut back to pay for all of this was support for the Mars colony, which may have helped increase tensions there.)
Regards,
Joe
