Klendathu Invasion

Before the Klendathu invasion, Military Intelligence says the Arachnids' plasma fire is “random and light.” In orbit, accurate heavy bursts tear through the fleet and turn the confident mass deployment into a catastrophe.

A weak capability assessment is treated as a safety guarantee, and uncertainty disappears as the result moves up the chain of command. The first realistic deployment supplies the adversarial test—at irreversible scale.

The film does not establish whether the bad estimate comes from flawed evidence, political pressure, or deception, and no AI performs the assessment.