Drawn as a changing line, the top position is one of the plainest warnings in the whole book. A querent here is being told that a course has been carried past the point where correcting it would have been simple, and that continuing to act from it, particularly on any large scale, will produce consequences far beyond the original mistake. The reference to armies put in motion is the classical form of that scale: a private error becomes a public disaster once it is committed to at size.
The ten years named in the text set the timescale for repair. Nothing in the line says the situation is beyond recovery, but it insists that recovery will now be long, costly, and largely out of the querent's hands, which is exactly the difference between this position and the first one. The counsel is to stop committing further rather than to expect any quick correction.
Standing at the top of the upper trigram Kun, at the maximum distance from the returning light at the base, this line is the hexagram's own account of what happens when its counsel is ignored to the end. A reading landing here is not fatalistic. It is a description of the price of delay, offered by a hexagram whose opening line already showed how cheaply the same turn could have been made.