You have fallen for pitfall 1 in writing, throwing all the best ideas in immediately. When the stakes are always high you can never get the feeling of progress, and important areas like character development are abandoned in the long run. The other pitfall you stumbled into was sudden introduction. As Wyvern said, without introduction things just seem too disjointed and seem as if you threw them in for entertainment. Maybe that is ok for a movie, which only runs for an hour, but for anything that runs longer subtle hints need to be dropped, starting off minor, to something like spreading rumors before blowing into a proper plot device. Perhaps making this argument against Blitzkreig invasion would have better than logic.