Did you miss the- Oh wait that's right you haven't actually seen the movie.
Ummm do you mind spoilers?
Not really. Probably have already gotten them.
What do you expect humanity to do? Just sit around and wait for the Kaijumasters to just give up? While said Kaijumasters were very much in the process of winning?
Nope. But it was still risky. More it the point, had the entire Wall of Life debacle not happened, I suspect they wouldn't have been pushed to that point. We're not in the same position they were, and we don't need to take the same risks.
This is not a war we win on defense. The only way we win the Kaiju War is through finding opportunities to take offensive action.
...No, that's actually a pretty good strategy, here. At least, for the moment. Every Kaiju we kill cost the some amount of resources, and gives us more resources. We're literally hurting them just by playing defensively. We're slowly bleeding them dry. It's a fairly decent tactic, in assymtrical warfare. Not the usual method of doing it, but this war isn't exactly super conventional anyway. This let's us build up our forces, so we can actually accomplish something.
Given that this is quite literally a turf-war, our goal should be reclaiming as much land as possible, and eliminating all the crap they have growing in that territory. If we slowly take over more and more territory, keep it clear, etc, while also boosting others and helping them to do the same, we should reverse quite a lot of the damage that's been done, and the progress the enemy has made towards their goals.
To be more precise, this is a war we win by striking at strategic targets while defending our own. The Mount Saint Helens Breach, for examplem is one such target, and closing it, followed by hunting down the Kaiju in our region, will most definitely make the area safer in the long term.
Agreed. But that shouldn't be our next move. We still kinda need time to build up our forces.
Humanity in Pacific Rim was forced to fight a defensive war because the one strategic target they knew about and could strike, the Breach in the Pacific, could not be destroyed thanks to a then-unknown defense mechanism. It's telling that when we discovered how to bypass that defense the Kaiju Masters rushed the first Cat V Kaiju to defend it, because we could suddenly win the war with a decisive strike.
Now, on our case, the defensive battles we fight are for the sake of gaining time to build up our forces so we can actually succeed at striking those strategic targets with minimal losses. Actually striking those targets requires us to take risks and make dangerous choices, and even make a gamble or two sometimes, same with every battle.
Sure. I completely agree. But taking the Breach shouldn't be a requirement for expanding. It's too big a leap, from out current position, barring massive aid from our allies. War might involve risk-taking, but it's the measured risk-taking of a (good) professional gambler. You don't take bad bets if you can possibly help it. And I've yet to hear a decent reason why we absolutely
must take Mount Saint Helens in the near-futuret, or to get a second city. Which seems to mostly be Jawa's thing, admittedly.
That said, I'm not sure we consider the same things 'strategic targets'. I personally consider every piece of Anteformed land a strategic target. Their goal is to change our planet. Stopping that from happening, on as wide as scale as we can manage, should be our top priority. The fact that it's possible that some Kaiju are born in such places makes that even more of a priority, IMO.
Considering those as strategic targets, there are a number of locations we could take/raze, before going after the Breach. They'd be softer targets, and they'd provide us with some amount of resources, to boot. And we're going to have to cleanse them anyway, at some point. Let's handle what we can handle easily, before we push on the hard stuff.
It kind of is, and I think you're running a lot further into that "genre" than everything else around you.
You say that like a different perspective is a bad thing. I am sorry if it's getting annoying, but it's a way of thinking often useful for situations like this one. Admittedly, I may be going a tad heavy on jargon. But I thought I was being fairly clear. If I'm not, just ask me what I mean.
Edit: Most important bits of terminology:
Tactics: planning/methods for winning individual battles
Strategy: Long-term planning, what fights you must win, lose, larger actions, focused on winning the war, not individual battles.
Assymetrical warfare: when one of two sides is smaller, significantly more poorly equiped, and/or generally with fewer resources. Rebellions, revolutions, and uprisings generally fall into this category.
