Reploid Productions wrote:Charellia wrote:Zuko, however, may have accepted restrictions as a show of good faith to the other nations.
INCOMING OVERTHINKING RAMBLE!
Not to mention that war is resource-intensive, and this had been going on for a century, even if you assume there were plenty of lulls in the intensity of the conflict. When Aang and the others are hiding in the Fire Nation in Book 3, you can see the hints of the toll the prolonged conflict has taken on the average population in contrast to the opulence of the elite class Zuko and Azula see. I honestly don't think the Fire Nation's position and strength at the end was nearly as great as some might think. Their navy had taken a massive pounding when the force sent to the North Pole got flattened, losing several hundred (if not somewhere over a thousand) warships and untold numbers of crew. A loss that size is going to put pretty massive dent in any war effort, and is probably what thinned the Fire Nation's naval presence enough that the gang was able to find and capture a solitary warship in between books 2 and 3.
Sure, the Fire Nation had the technological advantage thanks to their navy and the steam tanks and airships, but they also wasted a TON of resources on one-shot grandiose projects that were either horribly impractical or of extremely restricted use, with the most glaring example being the drill. (Though the "Gates of Azulon" protecting the most obvious naval approach corridor into the Fire Nation is also a pretty glaring waste of resources for similarly minimal benefit.) Building and fielding that massive single-purpose machine had to have diverted sizable resources in both material and personnel from more useful and more importantly, multi-purpose tools of warfare. The steel alone was probably enough to build several new warships, or maybe an entire extra fleet of massive war balloons- the wall of Ba Sing Se could have been rendered irrelevant with an airship fleet of similar scale and power as the Fire Nation's navy, and far more effectively than using a massive one-shot device to punch a single point of entry through the outer wall. So not only did they waste all these resources on a project that failed, they also delivered an enormous bounty of quality materials that the Earth Kingdom could cannibalize at their leisure.
While I don't believe the series ever says who's brilliant idea that one was, it certainly shows the same sort of short-sighted grandiosity that Ozai's "BURN ALL THE THINGS!" plan does. Which makes sense; Ozai is an absolute monarch, and he also has no real grasp of How To War, what with being the second son and never so much as seeing a battlefield. I could easily see him in his misguided ego ordering all these impractical things thinking they are grand ideas, and in the process running an already war-ragged population to the very brink of no longer being able to sustain the war effort, or worse, no longer even being able to effectively hold all of the gained territory. A more capable tactician on the throne (for instance, Iroh, who actually KNOWS a few things about military strategy) probably could have done a much better job of managing the war effort, and I suspect prior to Ozai's successful bid for power, that Sozin and Azulon had actually done so.
I would imagine that the drill was commissioned before the Fire Nation had access to designs for war balloons, so it's not as foolish as it may have seemed.
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