of course AS is going to do battle.
no one expects they will sit by and not fight for their market.
that page has been linked on here before but to reiterate, investors' number one question for AS is what DL is doing to AS. They aren't asking the same question to DL. DL is disproportionately impacting AS compared to what AS is doing to DL and everyone understands it. The failure of AS mgmt. to provide any meaningful assurance of what AS can do to fight back is most striking.
They are largely rendered powerless as long as DL can continue to expand at SEA, and DL has affirmed once again that it has the ability to continue to grow in SEA, despite the assertions that many made that DL would run out of gates.
AS may have lower costs but that only matters if DL intends to compete directly across AS' network for the same number of passengers. DL will connect a large number of passengers to its own int'l flights which AS does not operate. DL doesn't need to have the same costs because it won't compete for the same discount passenger that AS now serves.
Further, SEA is not an ideal hub for domestic connecting traffic. Every other mainline carrier hub can serve most markets more efficiently than AS does over SEA and that inefficiency requires having lower costs in order to be able to compete.
DL is currently AS' largest interline partner and AS has long acknowledged that both sides have contractual requirements to continue to feed each other, exactly what DL needs to fill out the smaller markets that it will not serve from SEA.
AS also cannot compete in the int'l markets to the same degree that DL does because AS has antitrust immunity with no foreign carriers and thus has to allocate seats on the same basis to each of them - blind to their revenue specific needs while DL can operate an integrated domestic and int'l hub.
Since there are a number of large corporate accounts in SEA, DL has the ability to offer the volume discounts that neither AS or any of its other partners can offer.
AS has made a huge strategic miscalculation in rebuffing DL's invitation to work with DL to feed DL's int'l flights. History will show that DL will achieve its strategic objectives in the Pacific NW while AS will have permanently lost many of the advantages it once had.