... weren't Asari as a race biotic? Or is that fanon?
Asari are biotic, but it sounds like the Lystheni have minimal experience in ground combat, minimal experience with biotics, and probably NO experience in ground combat WITH biotics. It's entirely possible they just grossly underestimated how much biotic abilities would
matter in a gunfight, in the same way that Han Solo could say "hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid" when the Jedi knights were running around trying to save the galaxy
literally when he was a kid.
I admit some confusion about how the Lystheni thought killing Mira "and her puppet master matriarch" would completely cripple Virmire. Oh sure, it would cause some major damage to lose their most beloved prime minister and exceptional military commander, but it wouldn't completely cripple Virmire (except for punching the questers in the gut, the face, then between the legs).
Again, the underlying assumption is simple:
all societies are fundamentally autocratic. This is more or less true of the salarians. And note that the Lystheni split off from the salarian species at a time when their contact with the bulk of the galaxy's aliens was still pretty new, and that they took some pains to go to a remote reach of the galaxy where no one would bother them. They clearly didn't want much contact with non-salarians. If so, the Lystheni may have been deliberately ignorant of alien cultures even
before their self-imposed isolation, so them salarian-o-morphizing alien societies would be totally unsurprising.
IF you accept as a premise that all societies are fundamentally autocratic, then no society can really have a peaceful transfer of power unless great pains are specifically taken to set it up in advance. After an autocrat dies or is removed, there will be a period of paralysis. Anyone who makes a serious attempt to exercise state power during this time will be seen as making a bid to claim the
supreme power, and even unambitious people loyal to the state itself will hesitate to do anything drastic until the question "so who's in charge, anyway" has been answered.
Thus,
IF you accept this core premise that the Lystheni might well take for granted without even thinking about it, it logically follows that if you can launch a successful decapitation attack against an enemy, they will
almost inevitably experience a period of disorientation, chaos, and paralysis. Even in the best possible case where they recover swiftly and a new autocrat takes control, there will still be such a gap in which they are vulnerable.
[Come to think of it, the salarians reflexively thinking this way might have a LOT to do with how their particular style of espionage-heavy, infiltration-heavy, first-strike warfare developed. To salarians, war is a bit like a chess game in that if you can take out the enemy's
king Dalatrass, it's likely to be all over regardless of how many other pieces they have in the field. But
unlike chess, whether or not you are a success in the postwar environment depends on how many of your own pieces are left. This combination of incentives rewards both sides for leading with aggressive gambits that are likely to result in a swift 'checkmate.' ]
Ok maybe I'm being unfair in my judgement since it might not be public knowledge what happens if the PM is unable to continue their duties, but you'd think spies could figure out the most basic of contingency plans the enemy has in place; like the chain of command! I mean c'mon, do they think our people can't make independent decisions or something
They think our people either
won't make independent decisions, or
will make independent decisions but will make decisions calculated to maximize their chances of securing the 'throne' in the new power vacuum... Or
won't dare to make independent decisions, for fear of being mistaken for ambitious underlings planning to seize the 'throne,' and killed off by other underlings.
It's not about brainlessness, it's about the period of paralysis that ensues in almost any dictatorship whenever the dictator dies.
Unless we find proof of diplomatic communications between the Lystheni and other nutjobs, or even the Rachni, then I don't understand how they expected to survive any sort of Virminian breakdown. I mean surely they didn't expect to absorb our population into their crazy cult, right? Let alone believe they have the capacity to fight off the Rachni themselves.
Maybe they just assumed that if Virmire itself fell, the rachni, who are busy elsewhere, would just
stop pushing and not spread out into Sentry Omega far enough to catch the Lystheni. Maybe they have a plan to evacuate deeper into the cluster and just wait until all this blows over.
E: I'm also curious; they understand the stereotypical dynamic between asari maiden and matriarch, but they did not understand that Mira is an asari (aka a biotic) commando that is very skilled and talented? Her background (at least part of it) should be public record, and spies should've found at least one thing that wasn't public record. Lystheni, did you fellows remove your brains? Or did you just use your nuclear power generators to radiate your brains?
Older 'mother figure' leaders telling younger 'daughter figure' leaders what to do is something salarians instinctively understand, because the mother-daughter relationship is very much a ruler-subordinate relationship in salarian society. So that was easy for them to infer; they may NOT have known how maiden-matriarch interactions commonly work among asari and STILL 'deduced' that Kirai was pulling Mira's strings.
At the same time, their
only strong sources for just how dangerous a biotic commando is, and their literally magical ability to deflect bullets by wiggling their fingers, would be popular entertainment (which they do not consume) from Virmire (which they seldom visit), plus multi-century-old reference books that they may or may not be interpreting as fully factual.
I'm quite prepared to believe they knew Mira had a background as a commando, but that is why:
1) They had like eight guys pointing guns at Mira,
2) They also threatened Kirai, which they figured would be an effective threat to make Mira
AND her bodyguards stand down, since Kirai is supposedly the real brains of the outfit and Mira supposedly knows this.
They were not expecting the part where Mira could lolnope and no-sell their eight guys with guns, because
that is not normal even for elite commandos, except for elite commandos who can raise deflector shields by wiggling their fingers, which is something of an outside context problem for the Lystheni.
Severe cultural disconnects can sometimes result in pretty great
gaps in the understanding of what is and is not possible.