No, I understand just fine. The Atlas military was never strong. They just thought they were. Strength isn't just a big gun and the ability to use it. If it was, Ironwood would have actually been strong, as opposed to another Raven, that blames everyone else for his own fuckups and tries to run when the going gets tough.
If you understood then you wouldn't keep harping on the point we agree on while acting like that completely subsumes the point we don't.
Ok, let's talk some more about Raven. When Yang faces off against her she doesn't try to fight Raven because she knows there's no way in hell she's ever winning that fight. She talks to her, argues with her, uses the personal connection she has with her, hits Raven's psychological weak spots and offers her a deal that's too "good" to refuse.
Meanwhile Cinder tries to defeat Raven by using force. Power against power. And boy did that not work out so hot for her. Raven might have been a garbage person but that didn't mean that she was a pushover in a fight. She might not have strength, but if you think that means that she doesn't have power then you're in for a rude awakening. Sure there's no victory in strength, but there's no victory in wishful thinking either.
The Atlesian Military is like that. It has flaws that can be exploited and focuses too much on the wrong things. But being flawed doesn't mean sucking at literally everything. It's nice to talk about how having a gun doesn't make you strong, but as real world events are currently reminding us having a gun and knowing how to use it sure does help when murderous beasts come knocking at your door.
Like, the biggest tragedy with Raven and Ironwood is the fact that they and the forces they command (magic/military) are unambigiously powerful and could do a great deal of good if they weren't so broken. Penny getting Maiden powers was such a triumphant moment because finally we got to see the kind of power Raven has go to someone who deserves it. Ironwood's speech in volume 7 and the Atlesian military showing up in force to evacuate the people of Mantle was such a triumphant moment because finally the might of Atlas was being used for the purpose it should have been used for all along.
Power is power. Whether the person wielding it is good or evil or something else power is still power. The SDC was once a force of good under Nicholas Schee, it became a horrid toxic pit under Jacques but would have saved Mantle if not for Ironwood's interference during the brief moment it was controlled by Weiss and Whitley. The SDC might have had strength (of character) under Nicholas and lacked it under Jacques, but it was powerful under both. It was more powerful under Jacques even, it just wasn't using that power for anything good.
Like, I agree about what makes someone "strong" in a more character driven sense. But some perspective here. If lacking true strength made people/corporations/military forces into pushovers then the real world and the world of Remnant both would be much happier places.
I wouldn't even say that the Atlas army was doing well inside its comfort zone, unless that zone is solely eating lives to defend Atlas City. A defense in depth would have at the least had pickets and defenses out beyond Mantle, but it looks like their attitude was "We will retreat to our flying city, and ignore ground attacks. We can afford to let the enemy invade Mantle- it's not like they can harm us from there..."
Even the defenses on Atlas weren't impressive, with soldiers bunched up like something out of the 18th century-a lot of those troops would be shooting through each other.
Oh hey, while doing a bit of research, I found an old Reddit post that explains
the flaws in Ironwood's strategy better than I can.
So the incredibly defensive "turtle" strategy I think not only points to flaws in Atlasian military doctrine, but points to Ironwood's personality as well. This isn't a professional military strategy, but the tactics of a panicked ruler desperately trying to protect the core of his power base.
My headcanon is that whenever someone would bring up the idea of an attack on Atlas, Ironwood world have a silent panic attack, then trigger Mettle. And then he would ignore the question and focus on whatever else he wanted to focus on.
Honestly this annoys the hell out of me because these kind of things acts like RWBY is something it fundementally isn't. I remember it being called out several times during the volume 8 commentary that the CRWBY debated how to do the battle scenes and concluded that they could more easily do one or two big battle scenes than they could do a lot of little battle scenes.
Volume 8 was packed as hell and did not have the time or resources to give the battle scenes anywhere near the amount of focus required to demonstrate tactics being used in a way that's legible for the viewers. The reason all those troops are bunched up in big squares like that is because it's the easiest way to get as many troops into a single long take as possible.
When the Grimm first start clashing with the army and the army opens fire you can see that they couldn't even animate soldiers firing their guns and just had to make a big wall of spontaneously generated bullets in front of the army, many of which clearly spawn in locations no soldier or mech could have fired them from.
It's just a quick, easy and cheap shorthand way to show lots of bullets being fired because that's all they could afford. Similar reason why we only see the same basic units repeating over and over instead of showing more variety like people with rocket launchers, turrets and other weapon systems that we know the army has or should have.
Similarly in the battles of Atlas and Argus both the majority of the air battles are just Mantas and Grimm vaguely looping around in the background without actually doing anything with some interspaced generic explosions effects popping up completely at random with no source and no connection to the actual battle. It's kept in the background so that you won't focus on it beyong thinking that there's an air battle, but if you focus on it it's blatantly clear that CRWBY did not have the resources to show the nitty gritty details of the vying for air superiority beyond the barest of bones.
Big budget Hollywood movies with a hundred times the budget of RWBY have made armies that behave way less competently with far less justification for it and often while being supposed to be competent. At least Atlas actually uses air it's aircraft for close-air-support, bombing runs and combat against enemy airborne elements and makes use of actual tanks (well, mecha) instead of arming all their dudes with sticks and having them charge head first into melee combat against enemies that lack ranged weapons and armor.
Also the point about recon and going on the offensive completely ignores that Salem's Tempest Grimm were shooting down any aircraft that approached with lightning bolts, denying Atlas the ability to perform meaningful recon against Monstra or launch any offensives. Meanwhile most of the points about Mantle are just invalid. Atlas did still use the cameras in the city, that's why we see Ren destroying the cameras when Yang's group is traveling around in the city. The surveilance drones were still there too, we see Joanna shooting one down and Ruby hiding from one later.
And Salem did not commit any of her own forces towards Mantle at all, so dividing the army and fortifying Mantle would not have helped much at all, and might even have been counterproductive if we're looking at things purely from a military standpoint. Ironwood's failure in Mantle was primarily a moral one. His strategic mistake in regards to Mantle was not that he failed to station soldiers forward, it's that he failed to pull the civilians back. By doing so he would not only have saved his most precious resource (the citizens) but would have rendered moot the rift that formed between himself and his allies by removing the point of contention.
And while they held the majority of the grimm armada back for a while, by spending lives like they were going out of sale, they didn't stop a large number from flying right over them and into the city proper. And after Oscar nuked the whale and blew up said armada? We don't see the army dealing with the grimm in the city. We're treated to several shots of the grimm flying around uncontested, and hanging around subway station entrances, trying to get at the juicy treats inside. That's both a demonstration of how Atlas was not strong, but also showing said weakness without spending twenty minutes going into detail. CRWBY is good at using limited screentime, after all.
I think you're conflating Ironwood's steadily deteoriating mental state and increasing hyperfocus with the military's ability to do it's job.
In the incredibly limited scenes the CRWBY were able to make we see Mantas engaging flying Grimm that managed to make it inside the city, we see numerous scenes of Mantas engaging Grimm in aerial battles, we hear about bombing runs inside the city to deal with Grimm that got past the front lines, hell even after the nuke we see Mantas engaging Teryxes and Manticores (and being destroyed in the process).
The military clearly did put a lot of effort into containing the Grimm. But Salem started with
thousands of airborne Grimm, mostly powerful types like winged Beringels, Manticores, Sphinxes and Teryxes, and Monstra spat out hundreds more every few minutes.
Not to mention the Tempest Grimm moved against Atlas alongside Monstra and those monstrosities were big and strong enough to rip Atlesian battleships in half and could control the weather and shoot lightning bolts.
It frankly says incredible things about Atlesian strength (at arms) that the military didn't get overun in the first few minutes, let alone that there was still even an airforce left by the time Oscar used the cane.
Yeah Ironwood's obsession with his plan to lift Atlas as some silver bullet that would solve all his problems continoually led to problems with him neglecting his other duties like properly evacuating the civilains and ordering the army to clear out the city while he waited for Ruby's response.
But for the army themselves we should cut them some fucking slack for facing an impossible situation that caused tremendous casualties and would have done so regardless of the tactics used. That scene with the Manticore and Teryx wrecking a pair of Mantas as "Penny" makes her way to meet Ironwood pretty clearly shows that the military is no longer in much shape to keep fighting.
But seriously. Take someplace like Menagerie for example. They're much "stronger" than the Atlesians in terms of spirit and morals and whatnot. Arguably they're better led and might have tried to use their limited resources more effectively. But stuff like "
letting some airborne Grimm past their outer defenses" would have been the least of their troubles if Salem decided to pay them a visit with Monstra, 5-10 Tempest and thousands of mid tier flying Grimm. I'm not sure they even have an air force.
It doesn't matter how much moral superiority they might have had over Atlas, their military forces are no match for the Atlas Military, so Salem could crush them if she wanted to. Although ironically they might help bring about her downfall because she's too focused on strength (of arms) to care about what they're doing.
edit: Heck Sienna even says it directly.
Sienna: I do
not want to start a war with the humans that we cannot win!
In terms of strength I think most of us can agree that Sienna had plenty of it while the people she was fighting against had none of it. But she would still lose in a war and she knew it. As Yang said being powerful doesn't make you strong. But as a corollary being strong doesn't neccesarily make you powerful.
For me, the Atlas army is POWERFUL. The SDC is POWERFUL. But that power isn't true strength, just the illusion of such, and it falls apart under pressure. Which is why the Atlas army abandoned first its allies, then its own nation, and turtled up behind a shield. It merely THOUGHT it was strong.
