I’m usually not big on “What if” scenerios but I was wondering what ya’ll thought, what if the battle on Reach never happened, do you believe Operation Red Flag would’ve worked if the UNSC attempted it? I honestly thought it would’ve been a disaster.
No, because in order to have caused a strong enough reaction make the Covenant pause, they would have had to capture a Hierarch, instead of just a Prophet in general. At best they probably would have captured maybe a handful of Ministers, MAYBE a Councillor if they had gotten extremely lucky. But a Hierarch? There’s absolutely no way, not even with every available Spartan-II do I believe that it would have been possible.
The only reason ANY of the Hierarchs were vulnerable to begin with was the overall chaos caused by the Invasion of Earth. Regret jumped the gun, and then ran to Delta Halo instead of doing the smart thing and going back to High Charity and the safety of it’s enormous fleet. We only get the chance to kill him because he screwed up.
Even then, you see that with Regret it only caused a MAJOR reaction and upscaling of the force used.
“Incoming Phantoms, too many for me to track” When Chief was approaching Regret’s hiding spot on Delta Halo, and then after punching him to death, the Covenant switched over to GLASSING what they otherwise would have thought and treated as a sacred and divine location.
Mercy dies to the Flood due to Truth creating mass chaos within High Charity, leaving them vulnerable, and we get to Truth only because he went mad with power and instead of waiting for reinforcements, ran to the Ark with his small fleet instead of waiting for backup. Or not glassing Earth when he had the chance before Halo 3 begins.
Operation RED FLAG was a Hail Mary play by a exceedingly desperate military that only partially understood it’s enemy and it’s motivations. Over twenty-five years of warfare and it is only in the last few months of the war that the UNSC truly began to get a grasp on how the Covenant functioned. RED FLAG would have ended with a bloodbath and further escalation of the war as the mere act of trying to take a Prophet hostage would have enraged the High Council at the sheer audacity of it.
This is why it is so hard to believe 343i’s story direction post-Halo 3 and how Humanity is supposed to be the dominant military and political faction in the galaxy now when it clearly should NOT be. The UNSC and Humanity SURVIVED the war, largely on account of a technicality. We did NOT win it, and before the crappy retcon, it was heavy implied not just in-game with Halo 3 but with supplement materials such as The Beastiarium that Humanity was /this/ close to extinction. All the other colonies were gone, Earth was an OCCUPIED planet with billions already dead and the population at 200 million [sudden change]. We were BEATEN.
And yet a mere four years later 343i somehow has the UNSC the dominant power in the galaxy? Just goes to show that they have no idea what they’re doing with the franchise.
So no, OOPERATION RED FLAG wouldn’t have worked and would have likely backfired entirely. All it would have done is likely get ALL of the Spartan-IIs killed, including the Chief, Cortana killed or captured, the Autumn and Keyes captured and the location to Earth revealed. And then humanity would have been glassed to extinction. And then eventually, the Covenant would have found the Halo Array and unleashed the Flood, which would have consumed an unprepared galaxy. Highly doubtful that without the Chief that the location and access to the Ark would have ever been revealed to the Covenant, and even then you’re looking at the galaxy being wiped clean of life with NO re-seeding plan to revive it.
Absolutely not. I understand the narrative reasoning behind Operation Red Flag. It provided a plausible reason for Chief to be aboard the PoA prior to the events of CE.
But even if Red Flag worked perfectly, the Covenant would have shrugged it off like any other lost battle, and kept marching along their path to victory. It’s pretty obvious that the Prophets were an ambitious bunch. Should any one of the Prophets be captured, another one would have eagerly taken their place and continued the war effort.