#salem is hardly a mastermind but she clearly has a working grasp of military theory whereas her opponents do not

[bestworstcase]

last few eps of V7 and all of V8 make it really. really obvious that not only has the atlas military never won a war, its entire command structure is oriented around individual power and technology to the extreme detriment of strategy and tactics; the salem wins primarily because she delivers a siege to a general who has not the slightest idea how to mount a proper defense and a city that would have been shockingly ill-equipped to withstand siege even if ironwood did know what he was doing. (dialogue early in V8 suggests that atlesian warships are sallying against the grimm flock and being shot down repeatedly—this strongly suggests that atlas does not have any kind of ground-based or even long-distance ranged weaponry with which to fire on the grimm from within the hard-light fortifications, which is in line with the arrogant presumption of untouchability that pervades the culture but utterly gobsmacking from a tactical standpoint, particularly in light of the fact that defenses of this general nature have been adopted to good effect by other states ie the turrets on the argus express which are in fact a great idea.) (further the nearly absolute reliance on the hard-light shields as a singular line of defense is breathtaking; the ace-ops mention proximity alarms that have been taken offline in V7 but there is noticeably no reference to defensive outposts or anything of that nature, suggesting that once watts disabled the sensors salem was able to fly her army east from the coast to atlas itself completely uncontested—granted it is unclear how much defensive depth would have mattered given that the nature of salem’s army made logistics virtually a non-issue and she is effectively able to respawn any forces lost to engagements while she advanced, but they could have at least slowed her down.)