Because of severe ship losses during the recent civil war, the best guess was that the Klingons would be unable to mount a serious challenge to the Federation for at least two decades, unless they were able to secure a more reliable source of raw materials. These measures included lower ship speeds to give more time to detect and avoid mines and the construction of mine sweepers and mine hunters, which were small, autonomous robots that emitted the sensor and subspace signatures of a target ships to attract and detonate mines.
This shadowing led to several incidents in which Federation and Klingon ships were damaged in collisions with one another. Klingon operatives that had infiltrated the Federation bureaucracy learned of these invasion scenarios, which were unofficial and, therefore, were discussed openly outside the usual Starfleet security protocols.
