What she said may have been that Odo was more important than the AQ-- but I don't take that at face value because of who she was addressing.
Weyoun made a comment saying basically that the "female" founder had neutralized Odo as a threat to their war. Her comment to him seemed more to the point that the Founders are super important- more important than the Vorta, than space, than any war with pathetic solids. It, to me, was more of a rebuke than an actual point of fact.
Exactly. She was reacting to the comments he made about "neutralizing a potential security risk" when referring to Odo. As discussed above, if they had to
choose, they would rather get Odo back and leave the AQ forever than win the war and lose Odo forever, but if Odo had suddenly joined the lihk at any time during season 5-7, I don't think the war would have ceased.
Most of the evidence point to the fact that without the worm hole and constant resupply from the GQ, the Dominion couldn't do very much in the AQ.
Umm, what? The Dominion
never got a single resupply shipment through the wormhole during the entire war. Never. First there was the minefield, then the Prophets blockaded the thing and ultimately the Alphans held the terminus.
Despite this, they appeared to be winning hands down - always bouncing back from defeat, always outnumbering our heroes through outproducing them. That is, their isolated beachhead force was outproducing the combined native Alpha Quadrant shipyards, allowing them to outnumber the Klingons twenty to one at the final stages of the war. The Feds or the Romulans could hardly be argued to have been twenty times more powerful than the Klingons...
Timo Saloniemi
infinix pointed out that the Dominion sent a
ton of ships, troops, and supplies into Cardassian territory before the wormhole was mined, so I think calling the Dominion's AQ holdings an "isolated beachhead force" is a huge stretch. And beyond that, I think you are overstating things rather severely.
That the Jem'Hadar (and their ships) can be produced faster than their AQ counterparts is granted, as is the fact that the Dominion (and its military) were bigger than any single AQ power to begin with. But, let's keep in mind a few things: one, until sometime in late season 5, Starfleet ships couldn't mount an adequate defense against Jem'Hadar ships, due to their shields being completely ineffective in such encounters. Prior to the proper war, it's reasonable to assume that every such encounter went badly for Starfleet (though the
Defiant lowering and then raising her shields around beaming Odo and Garak onboard at the end of "The Die is Cast" sort of throws a monkey wrench in it... it
did seem like the shields were doing something then, despite Weyoun's pretty clear-cut statement in "Call to Arms" that a Starfleet shield holding up against Dominion weapons was a shock, because it hadn't been happening before). Additionally, the Klingons and Federation had both sapped each other's military resources with their brief "almost war" during s4-5, while the Dominion hadn't been fighting anyone. Then, the beginning of s6 shows us that the initial stages of the war have gone very badly for the AQ... and then, within an ep or two, we are given a specific reason
why: the ridiculously powerful sensor array that Ross tasks Sisko with destroying. Once its gone, things shift... but by that point, all the factors mentioned above had already combined to put the AQ in a disadvantageous position. Even once the array was gone, they were fighting an uphill battle due to all the losses they had suffered (and, they were fighting the Dominion's AQ resources AND the Cardassians.
The "outnumbered twenty to one" referred to the Klingons alone, after all they'd gone through during s4-7, vs. the combined forces of the AQ Jem'Hadar, the Cardassians, and the Breen. And the Klingons had just lost an impossibly large number of ships to a single engagement, just as the UFP and Romulans had, further weakening them. "Outnumbered twenty to one" may also take into account the strategic situation: the Klingon forces
in the Bajor sector will be outnumbered twenty to one. This does not absolutely mean that all AQ Dominion forces, everywhere, outnumber all Klingon forces, everywhere, by 20-1.
Besides, once the Breen weapon had been rendered more or less moot, the AQ Alliance were able to push the Dominion and bottle them up in Cardassian territory. Granted, that was once Damar's rebellion was underway, but even so, if the Jem'Hadar by themselves were able to SO completely outproduce the AQ Alliance as you suggest, then Damar's rebellion wouldn't mean squat in terms of the ability of the Alliance to effectively fight the Jem'Hadar,
and the Cardassian fleet that remeained mostly loyal to the Dominion,
and the Breen, let alone go on the offensive and drive them back.
