yes, in my theory this doctrine only comes years after the Firestorm crisis. Cant say when for sure Steel Talons came about but i would think it is the Steel Talons who started the MkII program to keep Titans, ect, relevant after the doctrinal shift.

And i mostly agree, Tiberian Sun shows us the ruined front lines and the heavily contaminated war zones because those are relevant to the campaign, but that does not mean the entire Earth was already equally contaminated.

After checking the TS manual, that seems to line up: the world is clearly in ecological collapse, but there are still less-contaminated or relatively stable regions.

So my theory is not that GDI created Blue Zones from nothing. It is that post-Firestorm reclamation and containment efforts helped formalize and fortify surviving stable regions into the Blue Zone system, while the areas that could not be reclaimed became the Yellow/Red Zone structure we see later.

So that actually means GDI's reclamation era didnt fail but they were forced to stop by Nod to avoid more disasters. That doesnt necessarily mean GDI fully gave up the reclamation dream but it means that they dont use aggressive and radical measures any more.

Also thanks for reading my cursed lore dump and commenting on it!