Equal, not eclipsed.
There is a Clan's worth of ASF, SC and PWS there, they will outnumber the defenders.
Swarming naval missiles is always a good idea. But the issue is delivery. The orbital stations were taken out very quickly and the stations only had a limited time to attack. If your gonna go with swarm attacks then a mobile force with those missiles would be the way to go. A unit of six Arondight PW's could put out a large amount of missiles all directed at a single target. Enough to do significant damage and defend themselves against incoming Aerospace fighters. Even better, they do not need to sitting on the jumping. They could be based on defense platforms, on the RoTS warships, or even sitting on the moon to deploy when it comes around in its orbit!
and that Clan's worth is why you take the risk to hit their carriers, but to do that, you have to have mobile forces, and Stone focused on fixed defenses, and fixed defenses alone are a testimony to false assumptions and a 'strategy' based on hope and unicorn farts.
But as Gio pointed out, the Republic's 'strategy' wasn't a strategy, it was one old man's narcissistic fantasy, as carried out by his brainwashed minions. The focus on nukes in the discussion is interesting because really, they're the
smallest factor.
Stoney's 'Strategy' would have failed even with
all the nukes, because his defensive plan, including relying on Sats and Stations, is a fail from the outset. what I'm saying here, is you're right, mostly, because he lost the war the moment he handed the initiative to the enemy.
which he did, from the outset.
No walled city has every survived a seige without external support. The moment the walls get pierced, regardless of how long the seige has been, those cities either fall, or get rescued. Vienna, Constantinople, Berlin, doesn't matter-fixed defenses only work if help is on the way, and it wasn't.
stone orchestrated Gray Monday, and his followers executed Fortress, and with that, Devlin Stone lost the war. He lost it because he didn't know his enemy, and he did not understand his own assets, instead basing his entire defense on false assumptions.
I'll point out again, the only 'successes' to be found among the Republic's military occurred under subordinates willing to go against his 'grand strategy'-and there were too few of those to make any difference whatsoever.
The actual
layout of his defense, on the naval scale, was built on the kind of assumptions only someone uninterested in outer space could treat as credible, and was rooted in techniques already proven to fail
in universe in previous conflicts (See: Reunification War, Star League Civil War, and Succession Wars 1 and 2, the Jihad where Stone made his fame, and so on.)
Stone made nearly every mistake you could make, from giving his opponents the initiative and cutting off reliable information, to relying on stationary, fixed defenses that aren't capable on their own, to placing his naval force at the mercy of his enemies by building it to that stationary, fixed defense model, to witholding his mobile reserve with the idea that it would be 'better used on offense'.
and that's before we get to his doing the same things on the ground after the landings started.
which should look familiar, because the WoB/Master/etc. made exactly teh same mistakes, which were made by New Dallas after Exodus, and made by Amaris before him.
A Naval force, in a fixed position, is not a naval force-it's an expensive bunker, and expensive bunkers collapse. The Maginot Line, the Siegfried Line, these demonstrate the folly of fixed defense against an enemy granted the initiative and strategic mobility.
as the saying goes, "Defense may seem stronger, but it rarely wins decisions."
