Indeed. Though the GTVA has to balance their desire to take Sol's infrastructure with their strategic need to degrade that infrastructure - a balance that tipped sharply towards 'wreck' when Steele arrived with his plan to end the war rapidly.
It's not as if the UEF has only persisted this long at the GTVA's sufferance. The GTVA could have piled ten or twenty destroyers into the system at the start of the war, and the result would've been a mutual bloodbath, with the UEF having the subspace tracking advantage required to drop their bomber wings right down destroyers' throats, the GTVA shock-jumping everything it could find, and the two faction's air wings shredding each other. It would have been over soon, and the GTVA probably would have been victorious, but the cost would have been staggering, including, most likely, the best of the GTVA's equipment and personnel.
Both sides misunderstood the strategic intent and tactical capabilities of the other - something that comes up again and again in the history of war. (In fact, one of the marked statistical trends in the history of warfare is the overconfidence of aggressors, something I had the distinct pleasure to write a lengthy paper on at one point.)