A lot went wrong. Top to bottom, though, it absolutely comes down to ‘stupid’. The Caldari Navy took the worst of it, but all four empires were absolute idiots in their anti-invasion forces. And EDENCOM (the official arm of CONCORD, not EDI) was even stupider for letting them be that stupid.
The Amarr made a big deal (after totality, I’ll note) about having to put one of their capital groups in for repairs, but really, other than that press release, there’s no sign of significant capital usage. But let’s set that aside for now.
Did anyone see any advanced hulls among the EDENCOM forces? Did the Imperial Navy’s detachment field any Damnations? Zealots? Guardians? Did the Republic put even a single Muninn or Huginn into the fight? Were there Rooks and Eagles and Cerbs, or just Blackbirds, Moas, and Caracals?
I know what I saw in those systems, and it wasn’t the kind of top-of-the-line ship deployment I’d expect from literally the four wealthiest powers in the cluster. Facing invasion from an enemy with advanced technology, hell-bent on taking control of entire star systems full of citizens, not one of the navies saw fit to unleash their naval capsuleers in T2 hulls. A single Caldari Navy group of 30 Eagles with Basilisk support could have shredded anything the Trigs, the Kybers, or Nullsec was using in those systems. But we didn’t see one. We didn’t see anything other than bog-standard, lowest-common-denominator, ‘this crap wouldn’t even pass muster patrolling the Jita/Perimeter gate’ deployments. From anyone.
Yeah. Stupidity. S’a good word for it. Or ‘incompetence’. Maybe ‘gross negligence’, but that’s 2 words.