User blog comment:Arbington/ME3 Theories/@comment-1903421-20100629153252

''That is a very well though out strategy and one that is certainly plausible. However, think about how many reapers we saw at the end of ME2.''

Believe it or not, someone actually counted ... the number was somewhere around 300.

There's another strategy the Citadel races (or at least the Systems Alliance) may take as well, and Bioware has foreshadowed this, too: EDI is based on Reaper technology, both hardware-wise (her blue box) and software-wise (Reaper viruses, etc.). She has experience infiltrating Collector computer systems and working with Reaper technology (the IFF).

And resources shouldn't be a problem: just look at American hardware production during World War II. In 1942, the U.S. rolled 200 tanks per week off the assembly line. In 1944, the U.S. was producing 2,000 aircraft per week. Naval production over the course of the war included eight battleships, 200 submarines and more than 300 destroyers. That's a lot of hardware, and that's just from one nation on one planet. Scale that up to something the size of the turian or human civilizations in the ME2 setting and try to imagine what they'd be able to produce with the same amount of effort.

Given outside-the-box strategies, the EW capability Cerberus and/or the Systems Alliance can bring to bear and the resources that the Citadel races can mobilize, humanity certainly has a fighting chance.