[-Norbert-]

7-"I hate doing this, but if even half of what we were told is true we need to free our Sol brothers and sisters from those self-destructive space hippies that govern the system."

[Phantom Hoover]

8 - holy **** i want to fly an atalanta

[BritishShivans]

9 - hello fellow terrans i am too, a member of the Gee Tee Vee Ayy and wish to engage in morally ambiguous fisticuffs with the U Ee Eff with my interceptor, made from Gee Tee Vee Ayy parts. wait what the petrarch do you mean i'm a shivan

[CT27]

I would also imagine there's a similar range of thought among flag officers/ship captains.

[NGTM-1R]

I really suspect that you could produce a strong correlation between having fought the Shivans and being willing to fight the UEF. It takes only a look around, to see the UEF is not winning the war against the GTVA, to determine that these people are not ready to fight the Shivans, and a general examination of their philosophies is likely to leave veterans of the NTF and Second Incursion feeling like the UEF just isn't going to be able to switch gears and confront the threat.

The reason the GTVA went to war in the first place is a result of their belief that the UEF would never be able to fight the Shivans, based on their own experience of doing so. The more that experience of combat against the Shivans isn't institutional but personal, the more likely someone is to agree with them.

So I think most captains and flag officers probably believe in the war, because they're old enough to remember Capella.

[X3N0-Life-Form]

Indeed, and the GTVA first wave did include a number of Capella veterans, such as the Beis.

[-Norbert-]

While the 14th BG indeed had veterans on board, the ordeal they went through in the other universe gave them a different perspective, one that the people in the GTVA simply don't have. Thus I think they are a bad example from which to judge all the other GTVA personnel.

[QuakeIV]

But the 14th BG was Vishnan compromised right?

[crizza]

Veterans died by the dozens at Neptune, so the other BGs had their share of aces too.

[Lowane]

Not to mention that Samuel Bei seems a special kind of, I don't know, naive if you will.

Just listen to his speech when he flies guard of honor for the Admiral. He's so far up the GTVAs rear end, so convinced that the GTVA is this perfect ideal that can do no wrong, that he doesn't see how much it has changed over the past 18 years. And when he finally does see it, he cracks and runs to the nearest and next best thing he can worship, namely the UEF, which he, once again, sees as some sort of perfect and infallible ideal.

[CT27]

Not to mention that Samuel Bei seems a special kind of, I don't know, naive if you will.

Just listen to his speech when he flies guard of honor for the Admiral. He's so far up the GTVAs rear end, so convinced that the GTVA is this perfect ideal that can do no wrong, that he doesn't see how much it has changed over the past 18 years. And when he finally does see it, he cracks and runs to the nearest and next best thing he can worship, namely the UEF, which he, once again, sees as some sort of perfect and infallible ideal.

Interesting point.  Was the GTVA ever really what Bei thought it was?  Or was he ignorant and the GTVA never really 'betrayed' its principles?

[Aesaar]

Yeah, Samuel Bei has a very naive view of what the GTVA is.  He thinks it's some sort of Star Trek UFP founded on the ideas of peace and cooperation, when in reality it was born out of an alliance of convenience for which the ultimate goal was survival.  He projects his values onto the GTVA and feels betrayed when reality doesn't match his vision.

He's someone who prefers to see the world the way he'd like it to be, rather than the way it actually is.  It also explains his immediate adoration of the Vishnans.  He desperately needs this to be a black-and-white situation.  Shivans bad, so Vishnans must be good.  Wars are bad, so it's impossible to start one and be good, so the GTVA must be bad, which makes the UEF good.

I do not like Samuel Bei.

[QuakeIV]

That was my impression too.

In fact I was a little sad I wasn't able to frag the traitor admirals shuttle, though that would be a pretty pivotal change in the campaign path, which is kinda difficult to have lots of that early on.

[SmashMonkey]

He's someone who prefers to see the world the way he'd like it to be, rather than the way it actually is.

Is Bei's lack of brains why he was never promoted for years beyond squadron leader?

[General Battuta]

Bei's an excellent tactical commander and a charismatic leader. His difficulties go beyond 'he dumb'.

[Mars]

"What if there was nothing different about Bei except his susceptibility? The man was not exactly cool and collected. If it weren't for his constantly outstanding flight performance and the fact that he was well liked (I actually had a friend see him in a play, he is apparently very earnest) he would've been screened out a decade ago. Capella managed to put him, his wife, his daughter, and his father in the same place at the same time (rumor had it this was Arifiel Actual pulling strings to get a pilot he trusted on the escort, which only complicates the guilt/alienation picture for both of them) and he ****ed it up. 

[iDerfel]

O hai! I've been lurking here for the past couple of... years? Jeesh, time flies when you're waiting on your next fix (read: get a ****ing move on already with chapter 4 ).

To me the Sol war resembles the Finnish-Soviet winter war of 1939-40:

It lasted only for 105 days (GTVA needs to keep this short because of Shivans).
The Soviets expected an easy victory and actually believed they would be greeted as the liberators by majority of Finns.
The Soviets had a massive numerical and material advantage (kinda like the GTVA).
The Finns were way more motivated, more skilled and more mobile where the strategic situation allowed for mobility (UEF are certainly the first two but the mobility is debateable).
For the first 2 months or so the Finnish defences held anything and everything the Soviets could throw at them, but at the end of January 1940 two things started to happen: The Soviets adapted their tactics and the combat fatique of holding the line for 2 months straight, with minimal to no downtime, began to dramaticly decrease the effectiveness of Finnish troops, along with casualties of course (kinda like the GTVA has been doing under Steele and kinda like the UEF aces getting killed one by one because of not enough downtime etc).
And the conflict was (one of) the precursors for a much larger conflict, the WW2 (Kinda like the Sol war will likely spark the win all, end all conflict for humanity)

I see a lot of similarities also in the mindset of the GTVA pilots and the Soviet soldiers. Both are the product of a totalitarian government, brought up to believe that they are surrounded by an existential threat, self sacrifice and dying for the glory/survival of the state are high ideals. Both also are lead to believe they are liberating an oppressed population.

[Aesaar]

The UEF might be more motivated, but not more skilled.  One thing made pretty clear in Act 1 is that the UEF is bleeding personnel like crazy because there just aren't enough skilled pilots to go around.  The UEF keeps their aces flying and fighting, whereas the GTVA pull theirs back to train up new pilots.  The effect is that UEF aces fight, kill a whole lot, and then die, whereas GTVA aces improve the next batch of pilots and make more aces.  This is pretty much exactly what happened during the Pacific campaign in WW2.  The UEF is Japan, and the GTVA is the USA. 

As for mobility, the GTVA has the UEF outclassed pretty significantly, purely because of sprint drives.  Sprint drive equipped ships can engage in situations where other ships can't, which gives the GTVA a lot of strategic freedom.

Also, the GTVA is not a totalitarian government.  The military has a lot more influence than what we're used to from modern states, but it's still a democracy.  It makes me think of the German Empire, actually (which was a constitutional monarchy, but still).  Or Israel.

[Phantom Hoover]

Whether the UEF is truly more motivated is also up for debate, when a big theme of WiH1 was that they're just not psychologically equipped to deal with fighting a war.

[CT27]

Something else I just thought of:  maybe one of the reasons some pilots are willing to fight against the UEF is that Earth doesn't matter all that much for them after being separated for so long.  That happened in the Inferno campaign "It's just a gravitational anomaly to me".