Let’s just hope it’s better than our economy’s.

The Neuroi in the novels are definitely inimical; they send sixty bombers at a time to raid cities, and wherever their ground troops go, they produce a noxious cloud that is poisonous to humans (yet somehow, remains only within areas they have effective control of). One novel refers to a similar war in 1917, and random sightings prior to that, the other just starts the invasion out of the blue in 1939.

I could buy a theory that there’s two interstellar factions at war with each other, and the stronger decided to invade Earth for use as an advanced base, only to be surprised by the Strike Witches. The weaker infiltrated that effort in order to make contact with the humans and eventually managed to sabotage it entirely. Something like that was the rationale behind the British high command getting enough technology to create their pseudo-Neuroi units. Some of the rest of what happened in the last couple of episodes of the first series could be explained as the equivalent of a cyberspace war going on within the Neuroi hive, between the Militants and the Saboteurs, to give them names. Behind the scenes, elements among the Saboteurs had already made contact with the BAF, leading to a technology transfer and construction of the pseudo-Neuroi units. The 501st was broken up, not because of some insane plot, but because they were multi-national; the BAF wanted to keep sole contact with the aliens. In the meantime, the Saboteurs got the upper hand, and shut the hive down or destroyed it, but weren’t able to get a full report back to their home planets.

So when the Saboteur diplomatic mission shows up to try and make contact with the Earth and these Strike Witches, who would make fine allies against the Militants, they didn’t know how to talk to humans directly (or just didnt’ get the chance). Nor did they go straight to Brittania — or perhaps, the report that they received was complete enough that they decided they didn’t want to talk to Brittania, which was obviously playing its own game. Unfortunately, the Militants had decided to double down, as they couldn’t let the Saboteurs succeed in enlisting Earth as an ally. The Saboteurs’ diplomatic craft arrived mere moments before the next invasion wave hit Earth, and was destroyed in the opening shots of the Second Neuroi War.

That doesn’t contradict anything in the novels I’ve seen thus far, but I’m not sure how it fits with the end of first season, as I quit watching around episode 10; with the first hints that the earth militaries were cooperating with the Neuroi, I bailed. Of course, this theory would put a different spin on it; the BAF were cooperating with the Saboteurs, who were handing over Neuroi technology. They weren’t saints, but they weren’t traitors in the name of building bigger toys either.

But on the other hand, who’s to say that the Neuroi haven’t been scouting us in OUR history also… Churchill ordered UFO Coverup (Note that the picture has nothing to do with the incident that was suppressed.)

There are two Neuroi factions and they’re fighting a war against each other. Their war is interstellar but it’s fought on the surface of planets.

There’s more to the theory, but that’s the essence of it. Does it fit with what you know of the novels?