Ok, so quick question, we know that the Covenant was hell-bent on committing Human genocide on every world and colony it came across. We also know that while the UNSC Navy wasn’t up to par unless there was a 3:1 superiority ratio, and that ONI was searching for “the” Covenant homeworld. However, over the course of the war, the UNSC was CONSTANTLY on the defensive and losing BADLY. If you know you’re facing an enemy like the Covenant, while you may not discover their primary homeworld, especially in light of the revelation that High Charity was their homeworld and it’s mobile, wouldn’t it make more sense for the UNSC to first send Prowler’s and probes to discover the home worlds of the Covenant species? I mean, imagine if the UNSC sent a Fleet Reconnaissance in Force (FRF) and discovered the Grunt’s or the Hunter’s home world’s? Once that was discovered, the UNSC could mass a fleet from other FRF’s and decimate the enemy planet. This would draw Covenant ships and troops to protect these locations. Imagine if the UNSC discovered the Sanghelli’s or the Brute’s home world? It would turn the tables. Even if the initial sortie was a defeat, the Cole Protocol could still be enacted onboard human ships, and more importantly, you can’t hide the home world of the species. That would mean that every time the Covenant wants to launch a sortie against the UNSC, the UNSC can always launch another fleet. It would not only buy the UNSC time, but it would be a space equivalent of the Tet Offensive.
I think you missed the point that the UNSC was on their back foot the whole time, their resources being tied up defending their own worlds. They didn’t have the resources to send more than they did looking for Covenant home worlds, and if they had found one, their best option would be hit-and-run with nukes, not sending fleets to attack after being pulled away from the defense of their own worlds.
Your not wrong.
I’ve said the same thing for a while now. If your fighting a losing war against an enemy with superior technology, superior resources and are not concerned over taking high losses then a purely defensive strategy with the hope their offensive will simply run out of steam is exactly the wrong tact to take.
I said a while ago that the UNSC should have begun the war by evacuating everyone they logistically could from the majority of the Outer Colonies then consolidated their defences in the Inner Colonies. The Covenant never seemed to have many ships available at any one time to throw at the UNSC up to the Fall of Reach, so spreading their own fleet out across 800 systems and colonies negated that advantage. At the same time ONI should have sent its entire Prowler fleet into the Outer Colonies to observe the Covenant and track their slip space point of entries back to the Covenant own outer colonies. From here they can start tracing Covenant shipping back to their Inner Colonies and homeworlds, until they eventually locate what would be High Charity, the enemies Command & Control.
With all due respect the only point of your post I disagree with is going after any of the Covenant homeworlds, on the grounds that they would be to numerous and too well protected for the UNSC to ever to be able to knock out every planet capable of building warships or raising armies. It took the UNSC about 250 years to establish 800 habitable colonies capable of supporting a war effort. How many populated and industrialised worlds to think the Covenant have established in over 3500 years?
What the UNSC could do is use the fact the Covenant never seemed that serious about commiting more resources to their crusade to wipe out humanity to build up their intelligence on the location and defences of High Charity. Once they realise the Covenant C&C was a mobile and moving space based target, they launch an all out attack against with everything they have when time is precisely right, with the goal being to wipe out the entire Covenant leadership. Hopefully depriving the Covenant of the core of its leadership would plunge what remains of it into factionalism and civil war, but the key would be ensuring only the Covenant leadership were wiped out and not masses of civilians, as cathartic as it may seem to avenge the billions of humans glassed to ashes in the Outer and Inner Colonies. That kind off -Yoink!- for tat and eye and eye mentality would just unite the Covenant against humanity and give them incentive to return the blow tenfold, and realistically a divided and warring Covenant that the UNSC could then play off against each other via alliances is the only way the UNSC could have survived the war with minimal losses. (David will not win a punch up with Goliath in this instance)
To be fair to the UNSC, Operation Red Flag seems to have existed in some variation from the beginning of the war, but they didn’t throw nearly the kind of resources they should have into locating and mapping out the Covenant’s own territory. (Which at 28 years they certainly had the time to take a crack at)
One thing they certainly should not have done is invested so much money, resources and personnel into the construction of that useless flying paperweight known as the Infinity, which may have cost as much as half the UNSC’s defence budget over 20 years accordingly to Admiral Hood. Realistically all this ship could have done was saved a few thousand and taken them to a habitable world far from Sol in event Earth and all its remaining colonies were glassed, which the Covenant would have located sooner or later. I know the Infinity’s sales pitch was to give humanity’s best and brightest another chance to rebuild the human race somewhere outside the Covenant’s reach, but in all honestly when push came to shove based on human nature it would be used by the UEG’s privileged elite to evacuated themselves at the expense of everyone else, and there is no place in the galaxy they could reach the Covenant could not follow. When you think of the dozens if not hundreds of additional warships the UNSC could have fielded with the money and resources they lavished on a ship that never saw action during the war, its mind boggling how many millions of not billions of lives they could have saved or years they could have bought themselves in the long run.
I do find it a tad bit irritating when people think the humans in Halo are superior tacticians to their Covenant counterparts because they spent 28 years allowing the Covenant to take them apart world by world all the way from Harvest to Earth, whilst always falling back to the same brute force tactic of victory through superior numbers and superior losses. From a realistic perspective the UNSC certainly fielded some brilliant battlefield tacticians like Keyes and Cole, but whoever was in charge of the war from an overall strategic perspective really did the bare minimum necessary to be considered an active combatant.
28 years, and what exactly did the UNSC do other then survive a war because the Covenant had the good grave to suffer an internal schism all the result of a blind ship space jump? (How very considerate of them. The Prophet of Regret technically saved the human race by getting killed by Chief via his own idiocy)
> 2533274853837831;3:
> I do find it a tad bit irritating when people think the humans in Halo are superior tacticians to their Covenant counterparts because they spent 28 years allowing the Covenant to take them apart world by world all the way from Harvest to Earth, whilst always falling back to the same brute force tactic of victory through superior numbers and superior losses. From a realistic perspective the UNSC certainly fielded some brilliant battlefield tacticians like Keyes and Cole, but whoever was in charge of the war from an overall strategic perspective really did the bare minimum necessary to be considered an active combatant.
>
> 28 years, and what exactly did the UNSC do other then survive a war because the Covenant had the good grave to suffer an internal schism all the result of a blind ship space jump? (How very considerate of them. The Prophet of Regret technically saved the human race by getting killed by Chief via his own idiocy)
I’d agree that humans arent better tacticans than the covenant over all, and the human handling of the war is pathetic. That said, we don’t see any particularly amazing tactics by the covenant. Thel is lauded as a great tactical mind, but the battle of reach was effectively an orc zerg rush save for a single ship (which got taken out by a cruiser).
Since stories are usually about the supposedly underdog humans beating the superior covenant, a lot of stories involve humans outsmarting their enemies. Similarly, due the needs of the universe at the time, not a lot of care was put into the conflict between first contact and the fall of reach. The games mandated humanity be in a bad spot in CE, so that was what needed to be written.
I would say Truth saved the human race, not Regret. Truth was already having brutes murder elites on Earth in ODST, weeks before Regret died. Regret was just a convient public excuse, but the brute take over was already in motion.
> 2533274883501878;2:
> I think you missed the point that the UNSC was on their back foot the whole time, their resources being tied up defending their own worlds. They didn’t have the resources to send more than they did looking for Covenant home worlds, and if they had found one, their best option would be hit-and-run with nukes, not sending fleets to attack after being pulled away from the defense of their own worlds.
That would be an amazing strategy, especially since the UNSC could fire ODST drop pods from Slipspace, all you’d have to do is modify an ODST drop pod to turn it into a missile and load the nuke inside. Imagine a UNSC destroyer squadron like loaded predominantly with a nuclear arsenal and the effect they’d have on the Grunt home world which has a methane rich atmosphere.
> With all due respect the only point of your post I disagree with is going after any of the Covenant homeworlds, on the grounds that they would be to numerous and too well protected for the UNSC to ever to be able to knock out every planet capable of building warships or raising armies. It took the UNSC about 250 years to establish 800 habitable colonies capable of supporting a war effort. How many populated and industrialised worlds to think the Covenant have established in over 3500 years?
Regarding your quote timh1990, while that is a good point, even if they discover a few hundred worlds an use guerilla style hit and run attacks as described above, the Covenant have to divert warships to enact area denial to key systems. I’m thinking about the Star Wars novel Tarkin, where basically the same thing happens albeit for different reasons. You don’t know which targets the enemy will strike next and may have to work on protecting everything at once. You can use Prowlers and probes to branch out from the discovered worlds because you know you’re getting close, any new worlds you can launch preemptive strikes against. A dozen UNSC destroyer squadrons launching say 10 strikes a day with an average payload of 20-25 nukes per strike can be used to take out Covenant shipyards or logistics bases. I also think that the UNSC Infinity was a HUGE waste of money. It’s no better than the Empire building the Death Star, how many destroyers armed with nukes could the UNSC have built for the same cost as the Infinity? Idk, but even if it’s 2:1 that’s still a better outlook and resource management.
Even more devious, imagine first finding a way to contain and transport, and then releasing the Flood on Covenant worlds?
> 2533274871238887;1:
> Ok, so quick question, we know that the Covenant was hell-bent on committing Human genocide on every world and colony it came across. We also know that while the UNSC Navy wasn’t up to par unless there was a 3:1 superiority ratio, and that ONI was searching for “the” Covenant homeworld. However, over the course of the war, the UNSC was CONSTANTLY on the defensive and losing BADLY. If you know you’re facing an enemy like the Covenant, while you may not discover their primary homeworld, especially in light of the revelation that High Charity was their homeworld and it’s mobile, wouldn’t it make more sense for the UNSC to first send Prowler’s and probes to discover the home worlds of the Covenant species? I mean, imagine if the UNSC sent a Fleet Reconnaissance in Force (FRF) and discovered the Grunt’s or the Hunter’s home world’s? Once that was discovered, the UNSC could mass a fleet from other FRF’s and decimate the enemy planet. This would draw Covenant ships and troops to protect these locations. Imagine if the UNSC discovered the Sanghelli’s or the Brute’s home world? It would turn the tables. Even if the initial sortie was a defeat, the Cole Protocol could still be enacted onboard human ships, and more importantly, you can’t hide the home world of the species. That would mean that every time the Covenant wants to launch a sortie against the UNSC, the UNSC can always launch another fleet. It would not only buy the UNSC time, but it would be a space equivalent of the Tet Offensive.
If I was cole I would have said yes instantly but 2 problems.
- Space is super vast and so it is super unlikely you are going to just make a jump and find balaho
- In HW Regret and Ripa talk about using the entire armada but Regret says no because they need local defense, so the covenant always had a large defensive fleet which in case of invasion could be called upon.
> 2533274964189700;4:
> I’d agree that humans arent better tacticans than the covenant over all, and the human handling of the war is pathetic. That said, we don’t see any particularly amazing tactics by the covenant. Thel is lauded as a great tactical mind, but the battle of reach was effectively an orc zerg rush save for a single ship (which got taken out by a cruiser).
>
> Since stories are usually about the supposedly underdog humans beating the superior covenant, a lot of stories involve humans outsmarting their enemies. Similarly, due the needs of the universe at the time, not a lot of care was put into the conflict between first contact and the fall of reach. The games mandated humanity be in a bad spot in CE, so that was what needed to be written.
>
> I would say Truth saved the human race, not Regret. Truth was already having brutes murder elites on Earth in ODST, weeks before Regret died. Regret was just a convient public excuse, but the brute take over was already in motion.
I think it really comes down to what version of Reach’s fall you consider canon. I’d agree with you in the novel both sides are essentially like 2 blunt instruments striking against one another as far as tactics go, but at least the Covenant understand from a strategic perspective if you want to win a war you need to wage in in your enemies territory. (They do also make use of mass drop ship assault on Reach ODP generatogn by rs which did appear to take the UNSC unaware, but I don’t know why it would have)
The Fall of Reach as its depicted in the game on the other hand presents the Covenant as darn tactical geniuses in my mind if the actions we see the game are coordinated. They know Reach is humanity’s most heavily defended and economically vital planet outside Earth, and they knew the most costly way to take it would be a full on Zerg rush like you stated above. So they use special forces to slip their most powerful asset under Reach’s orbital defence grid where all of the UNSC anti-ship weapons will be logically pointed in the wrong direction. Not only does the UNSC loose it’s entire fleet defending Reach without a single Covenant loss in return, but they also draw in over half the UNSC’s battle groups into what should be a safe fallback zone, only to find the Covenant most powerful weapons platform in front of them and hundreds more Covenant ships behind them, where the UNSC ships will be at their vulnerable.
As far as as Sci-Fi tactics go I still think it’s the best use logical tactical and strategic planning that also work in an established setting with established rules. In both phases of the Fall Reach the UNSC’s only effective anti-ship weapons are always facings towards the target they will be off least use against, and that’s a situation the Covenant have tactically and strategically forced the UNSC into. (They didn’t just pull as Holdo maneuver out of their collective *****)
Truthfully I think this discrepancy in general human competency as it’s portrayed in Halo owes a lot to the transition from Bungie to 343. Bungie’s go-to author of the day, Eric Nyland very much envisaged the UNSC and humans in general to inexperienced, under equipped and and genuinely naive to the challengers of the greater galaxy at large, which I think is only logical when you consider first contact with alien civilisations for us occurred within the protagonists lifetime of this setting. Then when 343 took over, for some reason they took in a lot of creators who really seemed to be on something of a self induced ego trip in my opinion, and the UNSC was their new pet and boy was everyone going to know how big and strong their new pet was, regardless of just how very much that outlook was not compatible with the established lore and setting. The really sad thing is you can see these people were seemingly blind to the true treasure trove they’d inherited from Bungie. (The Covenant, the Great Schism, the Forerunners and the 99.99% of the yet to explored galaxy at large. Humanity should only ever have been the anchor in this story, to give the player sympathise stakes to fight for and the UNSC it’s loveably outgunned redshirts. The UNSC and ONI in particular should never have received the amount of focus it has since 343 took over)
Rant over! 
Sorry, you can probably tell how much I wish 343 had gone down the other route when they took over the reigns from Bungie over 8 years ago!
> 2533274871238887;5:
> That would be an amazing strategy, especially since the UNSC could fire ODST drop pods from Slipspace, all you’d have to do is modify an ODST drop pod to turn it into a missile and load the nuke inside. Imagine a UNSC destroyer squadron like loaded predominantly with a nuclear arsenal and the effect they’d have on the Grunt home world which has a methane rich atmosphere.
Don’t think it would be nearly as simple as that. Firstly I don’t think the UNSC had the ability to equip ODST drop-pods with slip space capability till after the war, but I may be wrong. The bigger problem is that realistically everything that protects Covenant warships from damage including nuclear missiles could also be used to protect a city of sufficient size, which means Covenant city’s would likely be protected by both energy shielding and point defence pulse lasers capable of shooting down human missiles.
Which means your macross nuclear missile barrage will probably get shot down by point defence lasers before they ever breach a planets orbit. I think if the UNSC wanted to reduce a Covenant city to rubble, they’d probably need to land an army first then overwhelm a city’s energy shielding via massed artillery fire, like a conventional siege. The whole exercise would probably be more trouble then it was worth in terms of the resources the UNSC would expend to get an army planet side and protect it from an orbital counter offensive from the Covenant, which is always going to be able to overwhelm the UNSC expeditionary force given time.
> 2533274871238887;5:
> Regarding your quote timh1990, while that is a good point, even if they discover a few hundred worlds an use guerilla style hit and run attacks as described above, the Covenant have to divert warships to enact area denial to key systems. I’m thinking about the Star Wars novel Tarkin, where basically the same thing happens albeit for different reasons. You don’t know which targets the enemy will strike next and may have to work on protecting everything at once. You can use Prowlers and probes to branch out from the discovered worlds because you know you’re getting close, any new worlds you can launch preemptive strikes against. A dozen UNSC destroyer squadrons launching say 10 strikes a day with an average payload of 20-25 nukes per strike can be used to take out Covenant shipyards or logistics bases. I also think that the UNSC Infinity was a HUGE waste of money. It’s no better than the Empire building the Death Star, how many destroyers armed with nukes could the UNSC have built for the same cost as the Infinity? Idk, but even if it’s 2:1 that’s still a better outlook and resource management.
>
> Even more devious, imagine first finding a way to contain and transport, and then releasing the Flood on Covenant worlds?
In regards to your Star Wars reference I’m guessing your referring to Akbar’s ‘stateless strategy’. As far as fictional tactics go it’s one of the more realistic and well thought out ones, but the key point is it only worked because the Rebel Alliance didn’t have its own fixed territory it needed to defend, and it replaced its losses through raiding and encouraging defections from Imperial military and civilian personnel. The UNSC doesn’t have this option. It’s only source of new ships and personnel comes from its own colonies and infrastructure which requires ships and troops always be present to defend, so they cannot employee a stateless strategy. (This tactic would be more akin to those employed by the Banished)
The problem your over looking here is proportional retaliation and response. The Covenant is much larger then the UNSC and so has access to much greater volumes of resources, ships, troops etc. Both Hasley and Admiral Cole theorised that up until the final year of the war the Covenant had only assigned a tiny fraction of their total military assets to the war against humanity while the bulk of their forces were potentially tied up with another threat. That was why the war had dragged on for 27 years, because they considered humanity little more then a nuisance in the grand scheme of things. I specifically remember Hasley stating in Ghosts of Onyx that if the Covenant had diverted their full military potential to the war effort against humanity the war would have been over in a matter of weeks, not years.
With all due respect that’s what I think your proposed wolf-pack tactics off using nukes against densely populated Covenant worlds will result in. In the short term succeed in forcing the Covenant to scramble its fleet to protect its planets, but in the medium to long term in will just force the Covenant to re-evaluate just how quickly they want humanity exterminated, and they’ll then respond with 10 times the number of ships. (And make no mistake, based on how long the Covenant have been space faring compared to humanity and how many races their alliance is comprised off, they would easily have the resources to both defend their worlds and overwhelm the UNSC in a matter of months)
This is why in a nutshell the UNSC should have focused on not escalating the conflict until they located High Charity, and were in a position to launch a quick surgical strike to wipe out the Covenant leadership. To put it simply the UNSC in my opinion only ever had the strength for one knock out blow blow the Covenant, and that needed to be directed against the brain of their metaphorical body. Hit a high population target like Sangheilios with lots of civilians and infrastructure but little in the way of political leadership, and all you do is give the Covenant a black eye. All this would succeed in doing is uniting the Covenant wholeheartedly against against humanity where they were at best divided before, and humanity gets wiped out in retaliation.
That’s the scenario the UNSC should have been trying to avoid at all costs in my opinion, as they simply couldn’t take the kind of material or territorial losses the Covenant could afford to take in a protracted full scale total war.
> 2533274853837831;8:
> > 2533274871238887;5:
> > That would be an amazing strategy, especially since the UNSC could fire ODST drop pods from Slipspace, all you’d have to do is modify an ODST drop pod to turn it into a missile and load the nuke inside. Imagine a UNSC destroyer squadron like loaded predominantly with a nuclear arsenal and the effect they’d have on the Grunt home world which has a methane rich atmosphere.
>
> Don’t think it would be nearly as simple as that. Firstly I don’t think the UNSC had the ability to equip ODST drop-pods with slip space capability till after the war, but I may be wrong. The bigger problem is that realistically everything that protects Covenant warships from damage including nuclear missiles could also be used to protect a city of sufficient size, which means Covenant city’s would likely be protected by both energy shielding and point defence pulse lasers capable of shooting down human missiles.
>
> Which means your macross nuclear missile barrage will probably get shot down by point defence lasers before they ever breach a planets orbit. I think if the UNSC wanted to reduce a Covenant city to rubble, they’d probably need to land an army first then overwhelm a city’s energy shielding via massed artillery fire, like a conventional siege. The whole exercise would probably be more trouble then it was worth in terms of the resources the UNSC would expend to get an army planet side and protect it from an orbital counter offensive from the Covenant, which is always going to be able to overwhelm the UNSC expeditionary force given time.
>
>
>
>
> > 2533274871238887;5:
> > Regarding your quote timh1990, while that is a good point, even if they discover a few hundred worlds an use guerilla style hit and run attacks as described above, the Covenant have to divert warships to enact area denial to key systems. I’m thinking about the Star Wars novel Tarkin, where basically the same thing happens albeit for different reasons. You don’t know which targets the enemy will strike next and may have to work on protecting everything at once. You can use Prowlers and probes to branch out from the discovered worlds because you know you’re getting close, any new worlds you can launch preemptive strikes against. A dozen UNSC destroyer squadrons launching say 10 strikes a day with an average payload of 20-25 nukes per strike can be used to take out Covenant shipyards or logistics bases. I also think that the UNSC Infinity was a HUGE waste of money. It’s no better than the Empire building the Death Star, how many destroyers armed with nukes could the UNSC have built for the same cost as the Infinity? Idk, but even if it’s 2:1 that’s still a better outlook and resource management.
> >
> > Even more devious, imagine first finding a way to contain and transport, and then releasing the Flood on Covenant worlds?
>
> In regards to your Star Wars reference I’m guessing your referring to Akbar’s ‘stateless strategy’. As far as fictional tactics go it’s one of the more realistic and well thought out ones, but the key point is it only worked because the Rebel Alliance didn’t have its own fixed territory it needed to defend, and it replaced its losses through raiding and encouraging defections from Imperial military and civilian personnel. The UNSC doesn’t have this option. It’s only source of new ships and personnel comes from its own colonies and infrastructure which requires ships and troops always be present to defend, so they cannot employee a stateless strategy. (This tactic would be more akin to those employed by the Banished)
>
> The problem your over looking here is proportional retaliation and response. The Covenant is much larger then the UNSC and so has access to much greater volumes of resources, ships, troops etc. Both Hasley and Admiral Cole theorised that up until the final year of the war the Covenant had only assigned a tiny fraction of their total military assets to the war against humanity while the bulk of their forces were potentially tied up with another threat. That was why the war had dragged on for 27 years, because they considered humanity little more then a nuisance in the grand scheme of things. I specifically remember Hasley stating in Ghosts of Onyx that if the Covenant had diverted their full military potential to the war effort against humanity the war would have been over in a matter of weeks, not years.
>
> With all due respect that’s what I think your proposed wolf-pack tactics off using nukes against densely populated Covenant worlds will result in. In the short term succeed in forcing the Covenant to scramble its fleet to protect its planets, but in the medium to long term in will just force the Covenant to re-evaluate just how quickly they want humanity exterminated, and they’ll then respond with 10 times the number of ships. (And make no mistake, based on how long the Covenant have been space faring compared to humanity and how many races their alliance is comprised off, they would easily have the resources to both defend their worlds and overwhelm the UNSC in a matter of months)
>
> This is why in a nutshell the UNSC should have focused on not escalating the conflict until they located High Charity, and were in a position to launch a quick surgical strike to wipe out the Covenant leadership. To put it simply the UNSC in my opinion only ever had the strength for one knock out blow blow the Covenant, and that needed to be directed against the brain of their metaphorical body. Hit a high population target like Sangheilios with lots of civilians and infrastructure but little in the way of political leadership, and all you do is give the Covenant a black eye. All this would succeed in doing is uniting the Covenant wholeheartedly against against humanity where they were at best divided before, and humanity gets wiped out in retaliation.
>
> That’s the scenario the UNSC should have been trying to avoid at all costs in my opinion, as they simply couldn’t take the kind of material or territorial losses the Covenant could afford to take in a protracted full scale total war.
The first logical, thoughtout strategy i have read into this whole thread.
Abandoning colonies and thus resources to form bastions? Humanity had multiple bastions, they all fell. I wouldnt reiterate the points raised but what is put forward is why the UNSC could ill afford such strategies. If you read the book halo envoy we see the rage that was caused by the NOVA bomb detonation. If that were to happen prior to the events of halo ce and the schism. Humanity would be all but a memory under glass and fire.
> 2533274853837831;8:
> > 2533274871238887;5:
> > That would be an amazing strategy, especially since the UNSC could fire ODST drop pods from Slipspace, all you’d have to do is modify an ODST drop pod to turn it into a missile and load the nuke inside. Imagine a UNSC destroyer squadron like loaded predominantly with a nuclear arsenal and the effect they’d have on the Grunt home world which has a methane rich atmosphere.
>
> Don’t think it would be nearly as simple as that. Firstly I don’t think the UNSC had the ability to equip ODST drop-pods with slip space capability till after the war, but I may be wrong. The bigger problem is that realistically everything that protects Covenant warships from damage including nuclear missiles could also be used to protect a city of sufficient size, which means Covenant city’s would likely be protected by both energy shielding and point defence pulse lasers capable of shooting down human missiles.
>
> Which means your macross nuclear missile barrage will probably get shot down by point defence lasers before they ever breach a planets orbit. I think if the UNSC wanted to reduce a Covenant city to rubble, they’d probably need to land an army first then overwhelm a city’s energy shielding via massed artillery fire, like a conventional siege. The whole exercise would probably be more trouble then it was worth in terms of the resources the UNSC would expend to get an army planet side and protect it from an orbital counter offensive from the Covenant, which is always going to be able to overwhelm the UNSC expeditionary force given time.
>
>
>
>
> > 2533274871238887;5:
> > Regarding your quote timh1990, while that is a good point, even if they discover a few hundred worlds an use guerilla style hit and run attacks as described above, the Covenant have to divert warships to enact area denial to key systems. I’m thinking about the Star Wars novel Tarkin, where basically the same thing happens albeit for different reasons. You don’t know which targets the enemy will strike next and may have to work on protecting everything at once. You can use Prowlers and probes to branch out from the discovered worlds because you know you’re getting close, any new worlds you can launch preemptive strikes against. A dozen UNSC destroyer squadrons launching say 10 strikes a day with an average payload of 20-25 nukes per strike can be used to take out Covenant shipyards or logistics bases. I also think that the UNSC Infinity was a HUGE waste of money. It’s no better than the Empire building the Death Star, how many destroyers armed with nukes could the UNSC have built for the same cost as the Infinity? Idk, but even if it’s 2:1 that’s still a better outlook and resource management.
> >
> > Even more devious, imagine first finding a way to contain and transport, and then releasing the Flood on Covenant worlds?
>
> In regards to your Star Wars reference I’m guessing your referring to Akbar’s ‘stateless strategy’. As far as fictional tactics go it’s one of the more realistic and well thought out ones, but the key point is it only worked because the Rebel Alliance didn’t have its own fixed territory it needed to defend, and it replaced its losses through raiding and encouraging defections from Imperial military and civilian personnel. The UNSC doesn’t have this option. It’s only source of new ships and personnel comes from its own colonies and infrastructure which requires ships and troops always be present to defend, so they cannot employee a stateless strategy. (This tactic would be more akin to those employed by the Banished)
>
> The problem your over looking here is proportional retaliation and response. The Covenant is much larger then the UNSC and so has access to much greater volumes of resources, ships, troops etc. Both Hasley and Admiral Cole theorised that up until the final year of the war the Covenant had only assigned a tiny fraction of their total military assets to the war against humanity while the bulk of their forces were potentially tied up with another threat. That was why the war had dragged on for 27 years, because they considered humanity little more then a nuisance in the grand scheme of things. I specifically remember Hasley stating in Ghosts of Onyx that if the Covenant had diverted their full military potential to the war effort against humanity the war would have been over in a matter of weeks, not years.
>
> With all due respect that’s what I think your proposed wolf-pack tactics off using nukes against densely populated Covenant worlds will result in. In the short term succeed in forcing the Covenant to scramble its fleet to protect its planets, but in the medium to long term in will just force the Covenant to re-evaluate just how quickly they want humanity exterminated, and they’ll then respond with 10 times the number of ships. (And make no mistake, based on how long the Covenant have been space faring compared to humanity and how many races their alliance is comprised off, they would easily have the resources to both defend their worlds and overwhelm the UNSC in a matter of months)
>
> This is why in a nutshell the UNSC should have focused on not escalating the conflict until they located High Charity, and were in a position to launch a quick surgical strike to wipe out the Covenant leadership. To put it simply the UNSC in my opinion only ever had the strength for one knock out blow blow the Covenant, and that needed to be directed against the brain of their metaphorical body. Hit a high population target like Sangheilios with lots of civilians and infrastructure but little in the way of political leadership, and all you do is give the Covenant a black eye. All this would succeed in doing is uniting the Covenant wholeheartedly against against humanity where they were at best divided before, and humanity gets wiped out in retaliation.
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> That’s the scenario the UNSC should have been trying to avoid at all costs in my opinion, as they simply couldn’t take the kind of material or territorial losses the Covenant could afford to take in a protracted full scale total war.
I think that’s also very well thought out. A surgical strike directly at Covenant leadership would have been highly effective, a modern equivalent is to analyze and compare the Covenant to Iran albeit with slight differences, but with similarities in government organization and structure. Since it’s too centralized, the knockout blow would be devastating, especially if an all out attack on High Charity was planned. I think the tactic of using the original SPARTAN-II’s was sound, but the UNSC needed more intelligence. What could have also happened is once the Chief and Cortana discovered High Charity, the SPARTAN-III’s led by Chief, Blue Team and other SPARTAN-II’s could have led a decisive blow regardless of casualties. A large UNSC fleet could be assembled to provide a distraction while the Spartans could regroup around the Forerunner Dreadnought and make their escape with it being flown by Cortana.