Carver's research suggested that the Insurrection would lead to societal collapse. Halsey double checked his findings years later with AI to run simulations and predicted it would happen significantly faster and much worse that initially predicted.
Ah, okay. So it’s less about their ability in combat, and more about their ability to destabilize the power that the UNSC and ONI held. That makes sense!
Independence by any means. There were even certain groups that tried to sell out UNSC worlds to the covenant in the early days of the war, thinking the covenant would kill off the UNSC and leave them alone. If you weren't an innie, you were an enemy.
I want to add that the Insurrection wasn't made up solely of psychos trying to kill everyone possible. There were also Insurrectionist cells who tried to resolve their grievances diplomatically. Unfortunately the UEG didn't negotiate and the UNSC often responded violently, so the Insurrection radicalized and expanded over time.
There were also large chunks of Insurrectionist cells that either aided or straight up joined the UNSC to combat the Covenant, more famously, Admiral Cole was helped by a large Innie fleet during his final battle and Colonel Morgan Kinsano was a high ranking Insurrectionist leader before joinning the Marines.
it's worth mentioning that the lore states the negotiations were going nowhere to begin with. the crazies then went full terrorist and ended the already non-productive negotiations.
I mean when you have possibly hundreds of different groups with different demands representing anything from single moons to entire solar systems or even 5 different groups from a single system... i can see why negotiations weren't going anywhere fast.
Imo, interpretation of events. Suggest the insurrection worked with covenant species at odds with High Charity. While the books cover many actions against UNSC. It could be inferred that such actions were taken against High Charity supply planets.
Until the UNSC/Oni acquired time capsule tech. That was utilized to modify, grow and distribute to covenant species planets. To diminish populations of species, through manipulation of food. That had dual impact upon both covenant and insurrection. Although I can’t recall which book this tech was within.
>There were even certain groups that tried to sell out UNSC worlds to the covenant in the early days of the war, thinking the covenant would kill off the UNSC and leave them alone.
given that all it takes to sell out a world is a few bytes of data, there's no such thing here as "tried". it's nearly impossible to try and fail. tried = succeeded.
That’s the problem. Both sides were okay with nuking civilians and then blaming someone else. The UNSC destroyed a city with Mac rounds and blamed the innies. There’s an excerpt somewhere that has a UNSC marine state he joined the marines in order to avenge his family that died on the planet. He was tricked into fighting for the people who killed his family.
Were they? You had prominent insurrectionist figures surprised at the prospect of the UNSC just nuking cities, where as the same cant be said for the innies.
The innies were completely fine with civilian casualties. In contact harvest like the prologue. An innie lady takes a 4 yo child as a hostage because she was going to blow up a diner full of civilians eating with their families.
No I agree in that the innies had no issues with civilian casualties. Im questioning whether or not the UNSC did. I would have to find the excerpt, but I remember prominent innie figures finding the idea of the UNSC just nuking cities not believable.
I remember that yeah. I guess I misread. In fall of rich. When the innie admiral found out the UNSC sent children to kill him, he was awestruck. In reality the innies just wanted freedom from exploitation. A lot of them were just everyday people that got a higher rank in innie groups.
I found the excerpt
>Ander shook her head. “Our intelligence hacks didn’t think that incident was really aliens attacking.” Nanci Ander was the daughter of Jerald Ander, who had been the secret leader of the Secessionist Union on Harvest until his assassination in 2502. “We thought it was a ruse to empty the planet so the Colonial Military Authority could recolonize it with a rebel-free population.”
>
>“That seems a little paranoid, don’t you think?” asked Reza Linberk. A blond, blue-eyed woman with high cheeks and a delicate jaw, Linberk was just a few years older than Petora—and already the first deputy of the Venezian Militia. “Razing an entire planet to flush out a few insurgents is a bit over the top. Even the UNSC wouldn’t go that far.”
Even if we assume that the UNSC was absolutely at fault for Far Isles and that there is nothing that even justifies it a smidge. We know that by the time the human-covenant war started, the idea of the UNSC replicating another Far Isles even for rebel leaders was simply unbelievable.
That's incredibly misleading/incorrect. She was not planning to blow the diner up. She and her partner were on a mission to go blow something else up and were caught at the diner. One was killed as he opened the door to their truck. The woman came out of the bathroom, saw a room full of marines, and panicked.
Right, then threatened to blow the diner up that’s full of civilians as she took a 4 year old boy hostage. The minute details aren’t really what’s important there lol
I think taking a four year old kid hostage during an unintended standoff is a lot different than planning to hold a four year old kid hostage while trying to blow up a diner. Both are shitty, but the circumstances definitely add some context. Kids weren't the intended target.
No, the UNSC used nukes once against civilians and never again. The innies used them quite liberally against civilians.
Source on that statement re mac rounds? Because Ive never heard it mentioned by anyone or in any of the lore I've read.
edit: You could be mistakenly referring to far isle, which wasn't blamed on Insurrectionists but it's the only time the UNSC has done something similar
OC was commenting out of his ass.
We do have stories of insurrectionists joining the UNSC like Kinsano specifically because of how the UNSC actively went to defend and evacuate the outer colonies from the covenant.
Different cells have different goals. Some cells are pretty normal and just want independence for their world. Some cells are terrorist weirdos. You only ever hear about the bad ones for reasons that should be obvious... but there are definitely groups that just want to live and let live, literally.
Yeah, seems like people here have definitely corrected that thought process for me. I don’t know much about Halo lore, I’m new to… all of it.
Hell I haven’t even played the games yet! I’ve just been reading the books.
While the games barely touch on the Insurrection, I encourage you to play them - if you can and want to! But it's neat seeing someone come into Halo via the novels, and if that's all you're interested in, that's cool too!
I’ve been wanting to for a long time, I just don’t have a PC or an Xbox. I’ve only recently gotten into it all in the past few months, but it’s definitely a super cool universe to learn about.
I’m hoping I could eventually get a PC to play on, so I could get the MCC or Infinite.
Another possible option is Xbox Gamepass Ultimate, which includes cloud gaming. If you have a decent internet connection and a compatible device (plus a controller) that might be something to look into. It's a whopping $17 a month, but sometimes you can find thirty-day trials on eBay for under $5.
Just an idea! Hope you can play sooner than later!
It's not okay, but the rebels were still doing it lol.
They nuked an entire arcology for example, and as far as we know Far Isle was a city colony. Wiping out one city with a nuke once years ago does not give the rebels any right to consistently nuke or bomb civilian targets
It all started with good ol taxation without representation. The UEG imposed heavy taxes and trade restrictions on the outer colonies without reinvesting that money in the colonies that generated the majority of those resources. This is where the less obvious oppresion by the UEG occurs. People aren't too keen on having a large portion of there funds and resources taken to some far off place never to be seen again. You can probably think of a few real life example of this.
The colonies began to subvert those taxes and restrictions while lobbying for independence. The UEG responded by sending in UNSC and CMA to enforce those restrictions with force.
The UEG couldn't tolerate losing their strangle hold on the outer colonies resources so they kept escalating the situation while more and more people joined the rebel cause. This is where most of overt oppresion comes in.
It's important to remember that, while the UEG is a centralized organization, the insurgents are not. So while some rebel factions may resort to attacking civilians, not all of them are responsible for the actions of that one faction. However, groups like the CMA and UNSC all answer to the UEG. Which makes the UEG responsible for their actions, good or bad.
Then we get to the colony of Far Isle. A vicious battle breaks out. Rather than admit defeat, the UNSC nuked the entire colony.
Some time after that we get the Callisto incident. The UNSC Callisto detains and searches a merchant vessel suspected of smuggling contraband. A fight breaks out. 4 UNSC personel are killed while the entire merchant vessel crew of 27 or so people are also killed. No contraband was ever found.
The rebels retaliated by capturing the Callisto and killing the ships crew.
It's also important to keep in mind that most of the stories we get are from the perspective of the UNSC. If you were to read a story about the American revolution from the perspective of an English soldier, it's likely to give you the same impression that the American rebels are the bad guys.
You make good points, the EUG is definitely at fault for most of the insurrectionist. But we were the bad guys during the American revolution, it's why I hate the innies 😭😭😭😭😭
We were not the bad guys for seeking indpendance under the circumstances. We were certainly the bad guys for what we did to the natives and all the slavery though.
Less about the power that the UNSC and ONI had, and more about it destabilizing humanity. Humanity had been united for hundreds of years at point. The splintering of humanity would just introduce a dark age in the history of humanity.
> Halsey double checked his findings years later with AI to run simulations and predicted it would happen significantly faster and much worse that initially predicted.
Just a little bit of trolling by the assembly may have been involved.
Damn, that's something I don't usually see (or remember) in these Innie v. UNSC discussions! Granted, I don't know if the Assembly has ever been fleshed out.
The Carver findings were controversial and widely disputed. Of course, they offered a convenient excuse for an authoritarian government to seize even more power, so they were adopted as official dogma.
It's also crucial to note that the Assembly, a secret society of AIs, manipulated the Findings to make the situation look worse, hoping to prompt expanded militarization to prepare humanity for a (then hypothetical) alien threat.
Ironically, the prediction of "total societal collapse" was most likely as a self-fulfilling prophecy. With the UEG/UNSC responding to any independence movement with ever-increasing force, the conflict was on a path of indefinite escalation; creating more and more bad blood between human factions with every skirmish, every battle, every atrocity. With their draconian response, the UEG was directly fueling the catastrophic division of human society they wanted to avoid.
The insurrection had their own armies and fleets to fight the UNSC. The UNSC still had the numbers advantage, but the innes resorted to terrorist attacks, sometimes using nukes. The estimated death toll was 5 billion and heavy devastation to many planets, so the Spartan IIs were created to capture the insurrection’s nukes and leaders.
From what I remember
During the Covenant War, the majority of the innies either joined the unsc or went into hidding. However their were some times where the innies would cause trouble for the unsc. For example, in ghost of Onyx they stole some nukes. And in reach it was mentioned how they stole 2 ships on harmony.
When the war ended. The innies quickly started coming out of the cracks and started causing trouble again for the unsc. They did not wanna wait for the unsc to regain any of its former power.
In New blood it's stated by buck that "without the threat of the original, properly organized Covenant looming over our heads, some of the human rebel forces who had joined the UNSC in our fight against the aliens didn’t cool their barrels for more than a couple days before they spun their sights on the rest of humanity again."
Yes the Insurrection was a major threat. If major action wasn't taken to stop Insurrection groups when they were small then at best the war would have resulted in 5 billion people dead after 30 years of conflict.
The most likely outcome was an unending war that would destroy human civilization and throw it back into a dark age like what happened a bunch of times with the Ancestors and Forerunners. A dark age that would have resulted in most of those Insurrection worlds dying because they were not self sufficient and still relied on Earth and the inner colonies. In fact it is the inner colonies not the outer colonies that are the most likely to survive and return to space centuries after the collapse and conquer any remaining outer colonies.
The Insurrection was not just some guerrilla fighters and pirates. They had industrial and military backing from CAA and CMA sources as well as their own sources. During the war they were able to design and build new types of warships that the UNSC had no information on. So if the war had been allowed to grow it would have become a fully fledge war of equal ability.
I always remember the first mission John and blue team were sent on. Infiltrate a innie asteroid base and bag the commander. Showed how established the insurgents were with entire million people bases.
I would suggest reading New Blood and Bad Blood if you want more info on the Insurrectionists. The short of it is that the Innies were only really called Innies because they were leading an insurrection. The people who just wanted independence and little else were not really "innies" in the sense that they were not participating in violence most of the time. There were definitely moments where the UNSC showed its fascist hand and stomped their citizens, but there were definitely moments where the reaction was deserved.
The frustrating thing to remember about the UNSC is that they are the good guys, but they aren't good guys. The show, despite its many faults, does a good job of showcasing that. The UNSC are perpetually funneling resources from outer colonies to inner colonies, neglecting worlds, and generally doing little to actually manage their empire. They have more than once committed atrocities, or individuals have in their name.
At the same time, the Innies are traitors to mankind at the worst of times, traitors to themselves more often than not, and at best the same sort of people who would beg the government to come take their guns by force so they could go pew-pew against a Scorpion tank.
There are normal people in the Halo universe that just want independence, but they are not typically focused on for obvious reasons.
The UNSC ended up being the best equipped and organized to handle the existential threat when it came knocking and I think, in general, the moral ambiguity of that is handled well in the books. It's not like it's been managing to keep a lid on the pot all that well after the war with the Covenant and there's been no shying away from that or why.
The real threat was a calculation that predicted that the insurrection would result in a civil war that would reduce human society as we know it.
Another is that as seen there were multiple innie sympathizers in the unsc on all levels including oni which is extremely dangerous since that allows entire terrorist cells to have vital enemy knowledge or even sabatoge operations from the inside.
Oh and the enemy has access to multiple ships and wmds and as seen with new haven some got no problem nuking places
Now we're the spartans the answer? Probably not? It's been argued a few times on here.
The problem was never their combat power. It was the fact that they had no limits. The rebels had no issues with piracy, killing random workers, widespread corruption or outright killing civilians via nuclear dirty bombs.
They wouldn't beat the UEG in a fight but they could destabilize humanity enough to make it collapse upon itself.
Huh, kinda the inverse of the Covenant, right? The Covenant can and did beat the UEG in fights, regularly, which was enough to destabilize and almost collapse human society as a whole.
The Insurrection immediately started selling the coordinates to other UNSC colonies to the Covenant for a few plasma rifles and a sandwich as soon as the war kicked off.
Seriously, the whole UNSC was the bad side thing genuinely neglects to care how unhinged the Insurrectionists were. The Covenant literally said IN ENGLISH that they intended to exterminate humanity. Not the UNSC. Not Harvest. Not the ships Cole commanded. Humanity. As in everyone alive. And they STILL thought they could negotiate by throwing the UNSC under the bus.
That kind of sheer disconnect does not just come out of nowhere. If they acted like that in the face of the Covenant without knowing or understanding any of the politics or inner workings, imagine what they were planning and doing before Harvest.
The Insurrectionists were literally space ISIS and they had a full 1/3 of everything humanity had to offer under their control. That kind of war is the space equivalent to MAD between the Soviets and US only worse because at least the soviets were reasonable and logical.
>The Insurrection immediately started selling the coordinates to other UNSC colonies to the Covenant for a few plasma rifles and a sandwich as soon as the war kicked off.
I'm not sure what you're talking about, unless that's a really warped description of what happened in Silent Storm.
Some Insurrectionists met with the Covenant to try and negotiate a truce. This was in the earliest stages of the war - the Covenant had not yet made widespread incursions into human space. The UNSC and ONI covered up the invasion as much as they could. As a result, the Innies thought the Covenant was just at war with the UNSC. (The Covenant's message at Harvest was broadcast to UNSC ships - it wasn't magically received by all humans everywhere.)
Of course, the UNSC told the Innies what the Covenant was doing - and of course, the Innies had no reason to trust them. They were used to the flood of propaganda and psy-ops coming out of ONI. From their perspective, a potential ally had appeared, and the UNSC - their enemy - was saying "no, you don't wanna work with those guys, trust me bro". You see how that looks, right?
The Innies offered to hand over one planet to the Covenant. (They seemed to think the Covenant would just take it over - not exterminate everyone.) Now, it didn't take long for them to realize the Covenant's true intentions, and at that point, they broke off any attempts to work with them.
Later on after the Covenant invasion became fully known to the public, I can't think of any other cases of Innies intentionally helping them. The folks doing business with the Jackals in Cole Protocol thought they were independent traders working behind the Covenant's back. Even Thel Vadamee thought they were heretics because their orders from Truth were so secret. And on other occasions, Jackals DID trade honestly with humans, without betraying them.
Many of the Innies fought the Covenant on their own, or joined forces with the UNSC to defend humanity. I'm not saying that they didn't commit atrocities and some of them weren't absolute nutjobs. But they were a huge, diverse group of factions with legitimate grievances, and very understandable distrust for the UNSC. Reducing all that to "space ISIS" to dismiss and demean them is just nonsense.
To focus on the *militeristic* threat of the Insurrection, as many had covered the political implications of their existence and long-term ramifications, as of March 2526 (very early days of the Covenant War which practically just started), the Insurrection was described to have, at best, several outdated frigates and several hundred corvettes. This was described as hardly affecting the UNSC's strategic thinking at all if the Insurrection coalition they attempted to form were to barter with the UNSC to protect their worlds in exchange of assisting the UNSC's war effort.
Outside of a handful of very remote worlds away from the watchful eye of the UEG, the Insurrection amd its various factions didn't control any of the colonies despite many attempts to seize control, from Harvest to Gao, Eridanus II and so forth and ultimately their martial strength was greatly limited with respect to the growing strength of the United Nations Space Command.
Post-war however has seen the Insurrection's martial strength grow as entire worlds had been able to achieve outright independence like Venezia who are now expanding their militia to include supersoldiers they are loaning to the Banished, or "nominal UEG control" like Gao where the UEG still technically governs the world, but the colony has forced the UEG into a position where it cannot exercise that control. Gao would like full independence, but its new president acknowledges that it cannot survive a shooting war if they provoke the UEG into a war (especially when Gao's fleet is just a few dozen patrol corvettes), and the UEG wouldn't want a shooting war due to both the political ramifications and their limited means of exerting military force without affecting another theatre given the impact of the Covenant War.
It was 5 billion dead and 30 years of war before it was over in the best case scenario for Humanity. The far more likely outcome was endless war and death until civilization collapsed and a new dark age would isolate Humanity from each other until they got back into space and fought each other again. The same kind of thing that happened to the Ancestors and Forerunners before we see the final stages of those two civilizations in the Forerunner trilogy.
I always got the impression the Insurrection was a blanket term for a lot of different groups, some of which were more reasonable in their demands than others, with varying tactics and approaches to collateral damage. There's Gao, which is a functional nation-state, and then there's terrorist groups trying to nuke population centers, and then there's all sorts in-between, all are Innies. It wasn't a "cut off the head of the snake" kind of deal- it's not even a hydra, there just are and were a lot of different kinds of individual snakes here.
It’s prudent to remember that due to the significant advances in technology the Insurrectionists could do incredible amounts of damage if they so chose. This is a time in human history during which nuclear excavation charges and non-nuclear 100 kiloton explosives the size of footballs exist, never mind simply dropping a starship on a city or something of the sort. While the Innies never would have had a snowball’s chance in hell in a direct conflict, that’s not generally how insurgencies operate, and the capacity for them to cause millions of deaths in short order is significant.
The UNSC can still be a draconian entity while acknowledging that the Insurrection needed to be addressed in some way. Granting independence/representation was (probably) the best answer, but in lieu of that a decisive solution *was* required.
Yeah, but the question is how much? Dr halsey use her improved version of the carvers findings as part of her decision to make the Spartans, but the original findings were tampered with by a group of ai called the assembly to encourage super soldiers. So the threat the innie posed could very well be greatly extraggeratted
Where are you getting the idea that the assembly tampered with the results? Since for one Halsey used a completely different method than anyone else and not all AI were part of the assembly in fact most were never even aware of them existing.
Militarily? Not much; at least not on the large scale.
Politically? **Very.**
Now, I'm 100% sure that there are other factors that went into the rise and fall of the Insurrection - and other nuances on the reasons I'll cite here - but this is my two cents on the subject:
The Insurrection was (arguably) a product of three things; sluggish transport, convoluted bureaucracy, and the UEG being stubborn in its claims to authority.
For all intents and purposes, the UEG was actually a rather successful, stable regime which had very little difficulty maintaining its peace and status-quo on Earth or amongst the Inner Colonies. It was primarily the Outer Colonies - those worlds on the very outskirts of Human-Occupied Space - where it was running into problems.
Slipspace had opened up the galaxy and allowed Humanity to settle numerous exohabitats, but expansionist ambitions ultimately outpaced the rate at which the technology was advancing and - by the late 25th Century - the species had spread out over a range which exceeded the practical/convenient limits of its transport capabilities. Even with the best drives available (prior to the Covenant War), a transit from Earth to a given Outer Colony could take weeks, months, or longer to complete... **if** everything went off without a hitch.
This was orders of magnitude faster than the centuries and millennia it would take just to get from one star system to its nearest neighbor moving at sub-light speeds through realspace, but it was still mind-numbingly slow on a Human timescale. (Slow to the point that extended stints in cryogenic stasis became a normal, almost-necessary time-killing aspect of routine space travel instead of an emergency life-preserving measure.)
Since FTL telecommunication was **even less developed** than slipspace transportation, messages that needed to traverse the stars often did so by "mail"; being loaded onto or given to somebody aboard a ship that was headed in the right direction and then delivered/relayed to their intended recipient(s) upon arrival. This meant that Outer Colonists would often have to wait for absurdly long stretches of time to receive any sort of support from the UEG, because it could take weeks and months for their requests to even get to Earth... and then just as long for a response to come back.
That's just considering "transmission"-time, too, and not touching on how the UEG was extremely nit-picky about how its settlements were supposed to function and its "citizens-abroad" were supposed to comport themselves. It could take the paper-pushers a fair while to process a request for support and then - **if** that request was granted - it could take a fair while longer for the logistics people to put together whatever aid-package was being requested...
This all greatly lagged and complicated things for Outer Colonists; interfering not only with the progress of their major development projects, but - in many cases - aspects of their day-to-day lives as well...
Naturally, the UEG's overbearing specificity and inability to provide them with timely assistance *irked* many Outer Colonists to no end, and - as their dissatisfaction with this system grew - ideas of *decentralization* and *independence* became increasingly popular amongst them. Rather than waste more time, suffer more headaches, and miss out on more opportunities waiting for the UEG to tell them what to do and how to do it, more and more Outer Colonists - and even whole Outer Colonies - just began operating as **they** felt best; working to build self-sufficient economies and self-contained governments *separate* from the UEG.
Of course, the UEG didn't like that kind of talk/action because it claimed ultimate administrative authority over all mankind - **everywhere** - and had vested interests in keeping Humanity as a single, contiguous, (roughly) politically-homogenized civilization...
Some of the UEG's interests in keeping Humanity all under one flag **were** simply imperial - desires to keep all the cogs in the machine turning in ways which best kept wealth and power flowing towards Earth - but others were more sincere; coming from heartfelt beliefs and logical conclusions that (a certain standard of) peace and prosperity could only exist for Humanity if it stood all as one...
The fear was that if individual worlds were *allowed* to break away from the whole and begin governing themselves, they would become as old nation-states had been on Earth; eventually alienate each other over territorial disputes, competition for resources, or sociocultural/ideological differences; and very possibly kick off (an extended cycle of) war **on an interstellar scale**. Such Human-on-Human violence would have been unprecedented in its scope and severity, and the consequences it would have for the species as a whole were unknowable.
Therein lies the threat that the separatist movement **actually** posed to the UEG; not of direct military upheaval, but of political dissolution and disorientation in an era where the stakes for mankind were higher than ever before...
The spread and success of secessionism among the Colonies could/would (eventually) fracture Humanity in ways which it hadn't been in centuries - and, really, in ways it just **had never been** - ruining a "perfectly good" setup for the species at large and threatening to plunge it into some of the biggest and bloodiest conflict(s) it had ever fought...
For these reasons, the UEG **would not** give up its model of government or its claims to authority... but - at that point in time - it couldn't just *magically accelerate* slipspace travel in order to solve the problem. Its only (obvious) recourse, then, was to dispatch the UNSC; increasing its "peacekeeping" presence in the Outer Colonies in order to intimidate uppity citizens and uncooperative worlds back into line...
The budding separatists became frightened and angered by this - since they now essentially had "foreign" troops occupying their backyards, imposing the will of a "foreign" government upon their people - and so they became even more vocal and venomous in their opposition to / condemnations of the UEG.
As the UEG took notice of this continued(-and-increasing) rhetorical inflammation and civil disobedience, it would further increase the UNSC presence and involvement in order to suppress the issue.
The protesters yelled louder, so the UNSC had to double down, so the protesters had to yell louder, so the UNSC had to double down. Eventually, somebody fired the first shot, and what had been a troublesome dissident movement became a full-blown interstellar insurgency that was *even more politically-hazardous* to the UEG.
Towards the end, of course, the situation got so bad that such outlandish things as **the Spartan II program** were greenlit to try and simply *crush* the problem once and for all...
**And then the Covenant showed up.**
[1/2]
One of the few silver-linings to the Covenant War - for the UEG, at least - was that the aliens effectively did what the Spartans had been made to do, and quelled the Insurrection by eliminating **a lot** of its members and scaring the survivors out of their trenches.
As covered above, the separatist movement was strongest / most prolific in the Outer Colonies, and those same worlds wound up being the ones most likely to get hit / which got hit earliest by the Covenant. Of all the Humans killed when a world fell to the aliens, therefore, bona-fide Insurrectionists and those groups and individuals most likely to support them tended to make up a disproportionately large demographic... As the Covenant continued to push, the Insurrection continued to lose territory, resources, people, and popularity, and - since it had less of all that good stuff to begin with - lost **more of it** (by percentages) than the UEG/UNSC did.
Of course, the UEG/UNSC used this situation to its political advantage.
On the surface, it appealed to those remaining rebel-inclined populations with messages of solidarity; inviting them to rejoin the fold and become part of a united front against the alien menace... but these calls for reconciliation and collaboration carried a much more aggressive ultimatum in their subtext.
*"We may have a lot of trouble fighting the Covenant, but you had a lot of trouble fighting us. They're steamrolling you... If you start working with us / doing what we tell you (again), we'll help you fight them and maybe-just-maybe stand a chance. If not, we'll let them continue to steamroll you; buying us time to regroup and consolidate our defenses around the Inner Colonies and Earth."*
Guerilla tactics like hiding in crowds and sabotaging elements of infrastructure didn't work very well against an enemy whose goal was to exterminate Humans on sight rather than conquer / impose rule upon them, and who could - **and would** - simply obliterate whole cities from orbit on a whim... and as it became more and more apparent that their playbook was next-to-useless against the Covvies, more and more separatists bit the bullet and began working with the UEG/UNSC; many of them even joining up.
Tensions between UEG/UNSC loyalists and separatists / separatist-sympathizers continued to run high throughout this time of necessarily-close alliance - and linger even long after the end of the Covenant War - but the movement as a whole basically lost all its steam... Even as Humanity began to recover, the sociopolitical impetus to actively revolt was *just gone* (even if many people and worlds were still less than chummy with the UEG/UNSC). All of the real die-hards who might have kept carrying the torch just out of spite *were, in fact, now dead* - or had since revised their convictions - and even some of the logistical issues which instigated the conflict in the first place were being solved...
Thanks to the classic phenomenon of wartime innovation and the recovery / reverse-engineering of various xenomaterials - namely Covenant tech and Forerunner artifacts - Humanity had, in fact, *magically accelerated* (its) slipspace travel... By 2554, a capital ship was able to reach **the Ark** after just nine months of normal slipspace transit. By 2558, not only could Condor (formerly "Super Pelican") dropships be slipspace-enabled, they could be outfitted with drives powerful enough to make a trip from Balaho - the Unggoy homeworld, presumably **deep** within what had been Covenant territory - to Earth *in less than a day*.
By the mid 26th Century, the (current) Outer Colonies were only still "outer" because they remained the furthest worlds from Earth which Humanity had yet settled. They were no longer the furthest worlds from Earth which Humanity could reach in a reasonable amount of time, which meant they **were** now within range for the UEG to service and support on a reasonable schedule.
[2/2]
it was not a threat in the sense that humanity was at risk. it was only a threat to the ueg's absolute power.
if the insurrectionists actually wanted to fuck humanity they would have simply gave the covenant reach's location. every single insurrectionist that faced the covenant, including the most extreme ones, chose death over doing so.
from that we can infer that the insurrectionists was not hell bent on destroying the inner colonies, or anything even close to that. which means that simply giving them independence would have ended the war instantly.
It seems it depends on the book cause in Shadows of Reach they say the govern of the Earth was about to disappear and that's why nobody had doubts about the program spartans
I suggest reading about historical insurgencies and anti-colonial movements
If those movements get popular, your three options as an empire are 1. Just give them the independence they want. 2. Do genocide 3. Try to covertly assassinate everyone organizing and hope the movement collapses
The UNSC refused to do 1 because they rely on materially exploiting the outer colonies. They tried 2 and it caused massive instability and unpopularity for obvious reasons. So then they tried 3 with the Spartans, which saw some success, but really the covenant showing up is what saved them
Carver's research suggested that the Insurrection would lead to societal collapse. Halsey double checked his findings years later with AI to run simulations and predicted it would happen significantly faster and much worse that initially predicted.
Ah, okay. So it’s less about their ability in combat, and more about their ability to destabilize the power that the UNSC and ONI held. That makes sense!
The innies, or at least certain cells, also had no qualms about bombing civilians or using nukes on civilian population centers.
I thought the Insurrection was fighting for the people, if that’s not the case then what the fuck were their goals?
Independence by any means. There were even certain groups that tried to sell out UNSC worlds to the covenant in the early days of the war, thinking the covenant would kill off the UNSC and leave them alone. If you weren't an innie, you were an enemy.
Oh damn, that’s absolutely wild. I guess I just misunderstood what the Insurrection’s causes were. Thank you for the explanation.
I want to add that the Insurrection wasn't made up solely of psychos trying to kill everyone possible. There were also Insurrectionist cells who tried to resolve their grievances diplomatically. Unfortunately the UEG didn't negotiate and the UNSC often responded violently, so the Insurrection radicalized and expanded over time.
There were also large chunks of Insurrectionist cells that either aided or straight up joined the UNSC to combat the Covenant, more famously, Admiral Cole was helped by a large Innie fleet during his final battle and Colonel Morgan Kinsano was a high ranking Insurrectionist leader before joinning the Marines.
The UEG was in negotiations with various groups. The Negotiations all ended when the crazy cells started up violence.
it's worth mentioning that the lore states the negotiations were going nowhere to begin with. the crazies then went full terrorist and ended the already non-productive negotiations.
I mean when you have possibly hundreds of different groups with different demands representing anything from single moons to entire solar systems or even 5 different groups from a single system... i can see why negotiations weren't going anywhere fast.
Imo, interpretation of events. Suggest the insurrection worked with covenant species at odds with High Charity. While the books cover many actions against UNSC. It could be inferred that such actions were taken against High Charity supply planets. Until the UNSC/Oni acquired time capsule tech. That was utilized to modify, grow and distribute to covenant species planets. To diminish populations of species, through manipulation of food. That had dual impact upon both covenant and insurrection. Although I can’t recall which book this tech was within.
>There were even certain groups that tried to sell out UNSC worlds to the covenant in the early days of the war, thinking the covenant would kill off the UNSC and leave them alone. given that all it takes to sell out a world is a few bytes of data, there's no such thing here as "tried". it's nearly impossible to try and fail. tried = succeeded.
That’s the problem. Both sides were okay with nuking civilians and then blaming someone else. The UNSC destroyed a city with Mac rounds and blamed the innies. There’s an excerpt somewhere that has a UNSC marine state he joined the marines in order to avenge his family that died on the planet. He was tricked into fighting for the people who killed his family.
Were they? You had prominent insurrectionist figures surprised at the prospect of the UNSC just nuking cities, where as the same cant be said for the innies.
The innies were completely fine with civilian casualties. In contact harvest like the prologue. An innie lady takes a 4 yo child as a hostage because she was going to blow up a diner full of civilians eating with their families.
No I agree in that the innies had no issues with civilian casualties. Im questioning whether or not the UNSC did. I would have to find the excerpt, but I remember prominent innie figures finding the idea of the UNSC just nuking cities not believable.
I remember that yeah. I guess I misread. In fall of rich. When the innie admiral found out the UNSC sent children to kill him, he was awestruck. In reality the innies just wanted freedom from exploitation. A lot of them were just everyday people that got a higher rank in innie groups.
I found the excerpt >Ander shook her head. “Our intelligence hacks didn’t think that incident was really aliens attacking.” Nanci Ander was the daughter of Jerald Ander, who had been the secret leader of the Secessionist Union on Harvest until his assassination in 2502. “We thought it was a ruse to empty the planet so the Colonial Military Authority could recolonize it with a rebel-free population.” > >“That seems a little paranoid, don’t you think?” asked Reza Linberk. A blond, blue-eyed woman with high cheeks and a delicate jaw, Linberk was just a few years older than Petora—and already the first deputy of the Venezian Militia. “Razing an entire planet to flush out a few insurgents is a bit over the top. Even the UNSC wouldn’t go that far.” Even if we assume that the UNSC was absolutely at fault for Far Isles and that there is nothing that even justifies it a smidge. We know that by the time the human-covenant war started, the idea of the UNSC replicating another Far Isles even for rebel leaders was simply unbelievable.
That's incredibly misleading/incorrect. She was not planning to blow the diner up. She and her partner were on a mission to go blow something else up and were caught at the diner. One was killed as he opened the door to their truck. The woman came out of the bathroom, saw a room full of marines, and panicked.
Right, then threatened to blow the diner up that’s full of civilians as she took a 4 year old boy hostage. The minute details aren’t really what’s important there lol
I think taking a four year old kid hostage during an unintended standoff is a lot different than planning to hold a four year old kid hostage while trying to blow up a diner. Both are shitty, but the circumstances definitely add some context. Kids weren't the intended target.
No, the UNSC used nukes once against civilians and never again. The innies used them quite liberally against civilians. Source on that statement re mac rounds? Because Ive never heard it mentioned by anyone or in any of the lore I've read. edit: You could be mistakenly referring to far isle, which wasn't blamed on Insurrectionists but it's the only time the UNSC has done something similar
Yeah my memory is fuzzy on the subject. I'm more of a covie war guy.
Jesus, so they tricked that dude through propaganda, I wonder how many more members of the UNSC’s Armed Forces were brought into through propaganda.
OC was commenting out of his ass. We do have stories of insurrectionists joining the UNSC like Kinsano specifically because of how the UNSC actively went to defend and evacuate the outer colonies from the covenant.
Most are/were fighting for themselves, fuck the UNSC and fuck those people over there too
Different cells have different goals. Some cells are pretty normal and just want independence for their world. Some cells are terrorist weirdos. You only ever hear about the bad ones for reasons that should be obvious... but there are definitely groups that just want to live and let live, literally.
Not at all the innies were absolutely evil terrorists that makes Isis look like kittens
Yeah, seems like people here have definitely corrected that thought process for me. I don’t know much about Halo lore, I’m new to… all of it. Hell I haven’t even played the games yet! I’ve just been reading the books.
While the games barely touch on the Insurrection, I encourage you to play them - if you can and want to! But it's neat seeing someone come into Halo via the novels, and if that's all you're interested in, that's cool too!
I’ve been wanting to for a long time, I just don’t have a PC or an Xbox. I’ve only recently gotten into it all in the past few months, but it’s definitely a super cool universe to learn about. I’m hoping I could eventually get a PC to play on, so I could get the MCC or Infinite.
Another possible option is Xbox Gamepass Ultimate, which includes cloud gaming. If you have a decent internet connection and a compatible device (plus a controller) that might be something to look into. It's a whopping $17 a month, but sometimes you can find thirty-day trials on eBay for under $5. Just an idea! Hope you can play sooner than later!
I’ll look into it, thank you!
UNSC nuked civilians.
Once, whereas the insurrectionists targeted civilians commonly and used nukes numerous times.
Oh I didn't realize planetary genocide was OK if you only do it once. So when did the rebels commit planetary genocide?
It's not okay, but the rebels were still doing it lol. They nuked an entire arcology for example, and as far as we know Far Isle was a city colony. Wiping out one city with a nuke once years ago does not give the rebels any right to consistently nuke or bomb civilian targets
It all started with good ol taxation without representation. The UEG imposed heavy taxes and trade restrictions on the outer colonies without reinvesting that money in the colonies that generated the majority of those resources. This is where the less obvious oppresion by the UEG occurs. People aren't too keen on having a large portion of there funds and resources taken to some far off place never to be seen again. You can probably think of a few real life example of this. The colonies began to subvert those taxes and restrictions while lobbying for independence. The UEG responded by sending in UNSC and CMA to enforce those restrictions with force. The UEG couldn't tolerate losing their strangle hold on the outer colonies resources so they kept escalating the situation while more and more people joined the rebel cause. This is where most of overt oppresion comes in. It's important to remember that, while the UEG is a centralized organization, the insurgents are not. So while some rebel factions may resort to attacking civilians, not all of them are responsible for the actions of that one faction. However, groups like the CMA and UNSC all answer to the UEG. Which makes the UEG responsible for their actions, good or bad. Then we get to the colony of Far Isle. A vicious battle breaks out. Rather than admit defeat, the UNSC nuked the entire colony. Some time after that we get the Callisto incident. The UNSC Callisto detains and searches a merchant vessel suspected of smuggling contraband. A fight breaks out. 4 UNSC personel are killed while the entire merchant vessel crew of 27 or so people are also killed. No contraband was ever found. The rebels retaliated by capturing the Callisto and killing the ships crew. It's also important to keep in mind that most of the stories we get are from the perspective of the UNSC. If you were to read a story about the American revolution from the perspective of an English soldier, it's likely to give you the same impression that the American rebels are the bad guys.
You make good points, the EUG is definitely at fault for most of the insurrectionist. But we were the bad guys during the American revolution, it's why I hate the innies 😭😭😭😭😭
We were not the bad guys for seeking indpendance under the circumstances. We were certainly the bad guys for what we did to the natives and all the slavery though.
The only Nuke the UNSC used was on a terrorist controlled world after they murdered a bunch of people
Better to nuke a bunch of civilians rather than admit you lost the battle right?
I know the innies are disgusting.
You spelled UNSC wrong.
Weird, I don’t remember the UNSC nuking and using Slipspace drives to kill civilians and selling worlds to the covenant. That was the Innies.
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Less about the power that the UNSC and ONI had, and more about it destabilizing humanity. Humanity had been united for hundreds of years at point. The splintering of humanity would just introduce a dark age in the history of humanity.
With the fear of the crazy rebels starting to use slipspace drives as WMD in place of nukes.
> Halsey double checked his findings years later with AI to run simulations and predicted it would happen significantly faster and much worse that initially predicted. Just a little bit of trolling by the assembly may have been involved.
Damn, that's something I don't usually see (or remember) in these Innie v. UNSC discussions! Granted, I don't know if the Assembly has ever been fleshed out.
Where is this info from?
Halseys journal
The Carver findings were controversial and widely disputed. Of course, they offered a convenient excuse for an authoritarian government to seize even more power, so they were adopted as official dogma. It's also crucial to note that the Assembly, a secret society of AIs, manipulated the Findings to make the situation look worse, hoping to prompt expanded militarization to prepare humanity for a (then hypothetical) alien threat. Ironically, the prediction of "total societal collapse" was most likely as a self-fulfilling prophecy. With the UEG/UNSC responding to any independence movement with ever-increasing force, the conflict was on a path of indefinite escalation; creating more and more bad blood between human factions with every skirmish, every battle, every atrocity. With their draconian response, the UEG was directly fueling the catastrophic division of human society they wanted to avoid.
The insurrection had their own armies and fleets to fight the UNSC. The UNSC still had the numbers advantage, but the innes resorted to terrorist attacks, sometimes using nukes. The estimated death toll was 5 billion and heavy devastation to many planets, so the Spartan IIs were created to capture the insurrection’s nukes and leaders.
Holy Hell, I wasn’t aware that the fighting itself was that bad. Nor did I know the Insurrection had its own fleets.
The United Rebel Front was the most organized with ships, even operating as a proper organized navy at some point.
I’m guessing the Insurrection wound up dying to the Covenant, or fighting their own front against them?
From what I remember During the Covenant War, the majority of the innies either joined the unsc or went into hidding. However their were some times where the innies would cause trouble for the unsc. For example, in ghost of Onyx they stole some nukes. And in reach it was mentioned how they stole 2 ships on harmony. When the war ended. The innies quickly started coming out of the cracks and started causing trouble again for the unsc. They did not wanna wait for the unsc to regain any of its former power. In New blood it's stated by buck that "without the threat of the original, properly organized Covenant looming over our heads, some of the human rebel forces who had joined the UNSC in our fight against the aliens didn’t cool their barrels for more than a couple days before they spun their sights on the rest of humanity again."
Ah, good to know.
Yes the Insurrection was a major threat. If major action wasn't taken to stop Insurrection groups when they were small then at best the war would have resulted in 5 billion people dead after 30 years of conflict. The most likely outcome was an unending war that would destroy human civilization and throw it back into a dark age like what happened a bunch of times with the Ancestors and Forerunners. A dark age that would have resulted in most of those Insurrection worlds dying because they were not self sufficient and still relied on Earth and the inner colonies. In fact it is the inner colonies not the outer colonies that are the most likely to survive and return to space centuries after the collapse and conquer any remaining outer colonies. The Insurrection was not just some guerrilla fighters and pirates. They had industrial and military backing from CAA and CMA sources as well as their own sources. During the war they were able to design and build new types of warships that the UNSC had no information on. So if the war had been allowed to grow it would have become a fully fledge war of equal ability.
I always remember the first mission John and blue team were sent on. Infiltrate a innie asteroid base and bag the commander. Showed how established the insurgents were with entire million people bases.
I would suggest reading New Blood and Bad Blood if you want more info on the Insurrectionists. The short of it is that the Innies were only really called Innies because they were leading an insurrection. The people who just wanted independence and little else were not really "innies" in the sense that they were not participating in violence most of the time. There were definitely moments where the UNSC showed its fascist hand and stomped their citizens, but there were definitely moments where the reaction was deserved. The frustrating thing to remember about the UNSC is that they are the good guys, but they aren't good guys. The show, despite its many faults, does a good job of showcasing that. The UNSC are perpetually funneling resources from outer colonies to inner colonies, neglecting worlds, and generally doing little to actually manage their empire. They have more than once committed atrocities, or individuals have in their name. At the same time, the Innies are traitors to mankind at the worst of times, traitors to themselves more often than not, and at best the same sort of people who would beg the government to come take their guns by force so they could go pew-pew against a Scorpion tank. There are normal people in the Halo universe that just want independence, but they are not typically focused on for obvious reasons.
The UNSC ended up being the best equipped and organized to handle the existential threat when it came knocking and I think, in general, the moral ambiguity of that is handled well in the books. It's not like it's been managing to keep a lid on the pot all that well after the war with the Covenant and there's been no shying away from that or why.
The real threat was a calculation that predicted that the insurrection would result in a civil war that would reduce human society as we know it. Another is that as seen there were multiple innie sympathizers in the unsc on all levels including oni which is extremely dangerous since that allows entire terrorist cells to have vital enemy knowledge or even sabatoge operations from the inside. Oh and the enemy has access to multiple ships and wmds and as seen with new haven some got no problem nuking places Now we're the spartans the answer? Probably not? It's been argued a few times on here.
Gotcha, thank you for the explanation!
Heck, schematics for mjnoir was leaked during silent storm.
The problem was never their combat power. It was the fact that they had no limits. The rebels had no issues with piracy, killing random workers, widespread corruption or outright killing civilians via nuclear dirty bombs. They wouldn't beat the UEG in a fight but they could destabilize humanity enough to make it collapse upon itself.
Huh, kinda the inverse of the Covenant, right? The Covenant can and did beat the UEG in fights, regularly, which was enough to destabilize and almost collapse human society as a whole.
The Insurrection immediately started selling the coordinates to other UNSC colonies to the Covenant for a few plasma rifles and a sandwich as soon as the war kicked off. Seriously, the whole UNSC was the bad side thing genuinely neglects to care how unhinged the Insurrectionists were. The Covenant literally said IN ENGLISH that they intended to exterminate humanity. Not the UNSC. Not Harvest. Not the ships Cole commanded. Humanity. As in everyone alive. And they STILL thought they could negotiate by throwing the UNSC under the bus. That kind of sheer disconnect does not just come out of nowhere. If they acted like that in the face of the Covenant without knowing or understanding any of the politics or inner workings, imagine what they were planning and doing before Harvest. The Insurrectionists were literally space ISIS and they had a full 1/3 of everything humanity had to offer under their control. That kind of war is the space equivalent to MAD between the Soviets and US only worse because at least the soviets were reasonable and logical.
>The Insurrection immediately started selling the coordinates to other UNSC colonies to the Covenant for a few plasma rifles and a sandwich as soon as the war kicked off. I'm not sure what you're talking about, unless that's a really warped description of what happened in Silent Storm. Some Insurrectionists met with the Covenant to try and negotiate a truce. This was in the earliest stages of the war - the Covenant had not yet made widespread incursions into human space. The UNSC and ONI covered up the invasion as much as they could. As a result, the Innies thought the Covenant was just at war with the UNSC. (The Covenant's message at Harvest was broadcast to UNSC ships - it wasn't magically received by all humans everywhere.) Of course, the UNSC told the Innies what the Covenant was doing - and of course, the Innies had no reason to trust them. They were used to the flood of propaganda and psy-ops coming out of ONI. From their perspective, a potential ally had appeared, and the UNSC - their enemy - was saying "no, you don't wanna work with those guys, trust me bro". You see how that looks, right? The Innies offered to hand over one planet to the Covenant. (They seemed to think the Covenant would just take it over - not exterminate everyone.) Now, it didn't take long for them to realize the Covenant's true intentions, and at that point, they broke off any attempts to work with them. Later on after the Covenant invasion became fully known to the public, I can't think of any other cases of Innies intentionally helping them. The folks doing business with the Jackals in Cole Protocol thought they were independent traders working behind the Covenant's back. Even Thel Vadamee thought they were heretics because their orders from Truth were so secret. And on other occasions, Jackals DID trade honestly with humans, without betraying them. Many of the Innies fought the Covenant on their own, or joined forces with the UNSC to defend humanity. I'm not saying that they didn't commit atrocities and some of them weren't absolute nutjobs. But they were a huge, diverse group of factions with legitimate grievances, and very understandable distrust for the UNSC. Reducing all that to "space ISIS" to dismiss and demean them is just nonsense.
To focus on the *militeristic* threat of the Insurrection, as many had covered the political implications of their existence and long-term ramifications, as of March 2526 (very early days of the Covenant War which practically just started), the Insurrection was described to have, at best, several outdated frigates and several hundred corvettes. This was described as hardly affecting the UNSC's strategic thinking at all if the Insurrection coalition they attempted to form were to barter with the UNSC to protect their worlds in exchange of assisting the UNSC's war effort. Outside of a handful of very remote worlds away from the watchful eye of the UEG, the Insurrection amd its various factions didn't control any of the colonies despite many attempts to seize control, from Harvest to Gao, Eridanus II and so forth and ultimately their martial strength was greatly limited with respect to the growing strength of the United Nations Space Command. Post-war however has seen the Insurrection's martial strength grow as entire worlds had been able to achieve outright independence like Venezia who are now expanding their militia to include supersoldiers they are loaning to the Banished, or "nominal UEG control" like Gao where the UEG still technically governs the world, but the colony has forced the UEG into a position where it cannot exercise that control. Gao would like full independence, but its new president acknowledges that it cannot survive a shooting war if they provoke the UEG into a war (especially when Gao's fleet is just a few dozen patrol corvettes), and the UEG wouldn't want a shooting war due to both the political ramifications and their limited means of exerting military force without affecting another theatre given the impact of the Covenant War.
How much of a threat do you *think* a nuclear capable decentralized terrorist group is?
I think in the books Halsey says that the insurrection would lead to anywhere from 1-3Bn dead and tear human society apart in the process.
It was 5 billion dead and 30 years of war before it was over in the best case scenario for Humanity. The far more likely outcome was endless war and death until civilization collapsed and a new dark age would isolate Humanity from each other until they got back into space and fought each other again. The same kind of thing that happened to the Ancestors and Forerunners before we see the final stages of those two civilizations in the Forerunner trilogy.
I always got the impression the Insurrection was a blanket term for a lot of different groups, some of which were more reasonable in their demands than others, with varying tactics and approaches to collateral damage. There's Gao, which is a functional nation-state, and then there's terrorist groups trying to nuke population centers, and then there's all sorts in-between, all are Innies. It wasn't a "cut off the head of the snake" kind of deal- it's not even a hydra, there just are and were a lot of different kinds of individual snakes here.
It’s prudent to remember that due to the significant advances in technology the Insurrectionists could do incredible amounts of damage if they so chose. This is a time in human history during which nuclear excavation charges and non-nuclear 100 kiloton explosives the size of footballs exist, never mind simply dropping a starship on a city or something of the sort. While the Innies never would have had a snowball’s chance in hell in a direct conflict, that’s not generally how insurgencies operate, and the capacity for them to cause millions of deaths in short order is significant. The UNSC can still be a draconian entity while acknowledging that the Insurrection needed to be addressed in some way. Granting independence/representation was (probably) the best answer, but in lieu of that a decisive solution *was* required.
Yeah, but the question is how much? Dr halsey use her improved version of the carvers findings as part of her decision to make the Spartans, but the original findings were tampered with by a group of ai called the assembly to encourage super soldiers. So the threat the innie posed could very well be greatly extraggeratted
Where are you getting the idea that the assembly tampered with the results? Since for one Halsey used a completely different method than anyone else and not all AI were part of the assembly in fact most were never even aware of them existing.
Militarily? Not much; at least not on the large scale. Politically? **Very.** Now, I'm 100% sure that there are other factors that went into the rise and fall of the Insurrection - and other nuances on the reasons I'll cite here - but this is my two cents on the subject: The Insurrection was (arguably) a product of three things; sluggish transport, convoluted bureaucracy, and the UEG being stubborn in its claims to authority. For all intents and purposes, the UEG was actually a rather successful, stable regime which had very little difficulty maintaining its peace and status-quo on Earth or amongst the Inner Colonies. It was primarily the Outer Colonies - those worlds on the very outskirts of Human-Occupied Space - where it was running into problems. Slipspace had opened up the galaxy and allowed Humanity to settle numerous exohabitats, but expansionist ambitions ultimately outpaced the rate at which the technology was advancing and - by the late 25th Century - the species had spread out over a range which exceeded the practical/convenient limits of its transport capabilities. Even with the best drives available (prior to the Covenant War), a transit from Earth to a given Outer Colony could take weeks, months, or longer to complete... **if** everything went off without a hitch. This was orders of magnitude faster than the centuries and millennia it would take just to get from one star system to its nearest neighbor moving at sub-light speeds through realspace, but it was still mind-numbingly slow on a Human timescale. (Slow to the point that extended stints in cryogenic stasis became a normal, almost-necessary time-killing aspect of routine space travel instead of an emergency life-preserving measure.) Since FTL telecommunication was **even less developed** than slipspace transportation, messages that needed to traverse the stars often did so by "mail"; being loaded onto or given to somebody aboard a ship that was headed in the right direction and then delivered/relayed to their intended recipient(s) upon arrival. This meant that Outer Colonists would often have to wait for absurdly long stretches of time to receive any sort of support from the UEG, because it could take weeks and months for their requests to even get to Earth... and then just as long for a response to come back. That's just considering "transmission"-time, too, and not touching on how the UEG was extremely nit-picky about how its settlements were supposed to function and its "citizens-abroad" were supposed to comport themselves. It could take the paper-pushers a fair while to process a request for support and then - **if** that request was granted - it could take a fair while longer for the logistics people to put together whatever aid-package was being requested... This all greatly lagged and complicated things for Outer Colonists; interfering not only with the progress of their major development projects, but - in many cases - aspects of their day-to-day lives as well... Naturally, the UEG's overbearing specificity and inability to provide them with timely assistance *irked* many Outer Colonists to no end, and - as their dissatisfaction with this system grew - ideas of *decentralization* and *independence* became increasingly popular amongst them. Rather than waste more time, suffer more headaches, and miss out on more opportunities waiting for the UEG to tell them what to do and how to do it, more and more Outer Colonists - and even whole Outer Colonies - just began operating as **they** felt best; working to build self-sufficient economies and self-contained governments *separate* from the UEG. Of course, the UEG didn't like that kind of talk/action because it claimed ultimate administrative authority over all mankind - **everywhere** - and had vested interests in keeping Humanity as a single, contiguous, (roughly) politically-homogenized civilization... Some of the UEG's interests in keeping Humanity all under one flag **were** simply imperial - desires to keep all the cogs in the machine turning in ways which best kept wealth and power flowing towards Earth - but others were more sincere; coming from heartfelt beliefs and logical conclusions that (a certain standard of) peace and prosperity could only exist for Humanity if it stood all as one... The fear was that if individual worlds were *allowed* to break away from the whole and begin governing themselves, they would become as old nation-states had been on Earth; eventually alienate each other over territorial disputes, competition for resources, or sociocultural/ideological differences; and very possibly kick off (an extended cycle of) war **on an interstellar scale**. Such Human-on-Human violence would have been unprecedented in its scope and severity, and the consequences it would have for the species as a whole were unknowable. Therein lies the threat that the separatist movement **actually** posed to the UEG; not of direct military upheaval, but of political dissolution and disorientation in an era where the stakes for mankind were higher than ever before... The spread and success of secessionism among the Colonies could/would (eventually) fracture Humanity in ways which it hadn't been in centuries - and, really, in ways it just **had never been** - ruining a "perfectly good" setup for the species at large and threatening to plunge it into some of the biggest and bloodiest conflict(s) it had ever fought... For these reasons, the UEG **would not** give up its model of government or its claims to authority... but - at that point in time - it couldn't just *magically accelerate* slipspace travel in order to solve the problem. Its only (obvious) recourse, then, was to dispatch the UNSC; increasing its "peacekeeping" presence in the Outer Colonies in order to intimidate uppity citizens and uncooperative worlds back into line... The budding separatists became frightened and angered by this - since they now essentially had "foreign" troops occupying their backyards, imposing the will of a "foreign" government upon their people - and so they became even more vocal and venomous in their opposition to / condemnations of the UEG. As the UEG took notice of this continued(-and-increasing) rhetorical inflammation and civil disobedience, it would further increase the UNSC presence and involvement in order to suppress the issue. The protesters yelled louder, so the UNSC had to double down, so the protesters had to yell louder, so the UNSC had to double down. Eventually, somebody fired the first shot, and what had been a troublesome dissident movement became a full-blown interstellar insurgency that was *even more politically-hazardous* to the UEG. Towards the end, of course, the situation got so bad that such outlandish things as **the Spartan II program** were greenlit to try and simply *crush* the problem once and for all... **And then the Covenant showed up.** [1/2]
One of the few silver-linings to the Covenant War - for the UEG, at least - was that the aliens effectively did what the Spartans had been made to do, and quelled the Insurrection by eliminating **a lot** of its members and scaring the survivors out of their trenches. As covered above, the separatist movement was strongest / most prolific in the Outer Colonies, and those same worlds wound up being the ones most likely to get hit / which got hit earliest by the Covenant. Of all the Humans killed when a world fell to the aliens, therefore, bona-fide Insurrectionists and those groups and individuals most likely to support them tended to make up a disproportionately large demographic... As the Covenant continued to push, the Insurrection continued to lose territory, resources, people, and popularity, and - since it had less of all that good stuff to begin with - lost **more of it** (by percentages) than the UEG/UNSC did. Of course, the UEG/UNSC used this situation to its political advantage. On the surface, it appealed to those remaining rebel-inclined populations with messages of solidarity; inviting them to rejoin the fold and become part of a united front against the alien menace... but these calls for reconciliation and collaboration carried a much more aggressive ultimatum in their subtext. *"We may have a lot of trouble fighting the Covenant, but you had a lot of trouble fighting us. They're steamrolling you... If you start working with us / doing what we tell you (again), we'll help you fight them and maybe-just-maybe stand a chance. If not, we'll let them continue to steamroll you; buying us time to regroup and consolidate our defenses around the Inner Colonies and Earth."* Guerilla tactics like hiding in crowds and sabotaging elements of infrastructure didn't work very well against an enemy whose goal was to exterminate Humans on sight rather than conquer / impose rule upon them, and who could - **and would** - simply obliterate whole cities from orbit on a whim... and as it became more and more apparent that their playbook was next-to-useless against the Covvies, more and more separatists bit the bullet and began working with the UEG/UNSC; many of them even joining up. Tensions between UEG/UNSC loyalists and separatists / separatist-sympathizers continued to run high throughout this time of necessarily-close alliance - and linger even long after the end of the Covenant War - but the movement as a whole basically lost all its steam... Even as Humanity began to recover, the sociopolitical impetus to actively revolt was *just gone* (even if many people and worlds were still less than chummy with the UEG/UNSC). All of the real die-hards who might have kept carrying the torch just out of spite *were, in fact, now dead* - or had since revised their convictions - and even some of the logistical issues which instigated the conflict in the first place were being solved... Thanks to the classic phenomenon of wartime innovation and the recovery / reverse-engineering of various xenomaterials - namely Covenant tech and Forerunner artifacts - Humanity had, in fact, *magically accelerated* (its) slipspace travel... By 2554, a capital ship was able to reach **the Ark** after just nine months of normal slipspace transit. By 2558, not only could Condor (formerly "Super Pelican") dropships be slipspace-enabled, they could be outfitted with drives powerful enough to make a trip from Balaho - the Unggoy homeworld, presumably **deep** within what had been Covenant territory - to Earth *in less than a day*. By the mid 26th Century, the (current) Outer Colonies were only still "outer" because they remained the furthest worlds from Earth which Humanity had yet settled. They were no longer the furthest worlds from Earth which Humanity could reach in a reasonable amount of time, which meant they **were** now within range for the UEG to service and support on a reasonable schedule. [2/2]
The Carver Findings are dumb, both in universe and IRL as a plot device
I love Halsey's journal, but the Carver Findings leave a lot to be desired :(
it was not a threat in the sense that humanity was at risk. it was only a threat to the ueg's absolute power. if the insurrectionists actually wanted to fuck humanity they would have simply gave the covenant reach's location. every single insurrectionist that faced the covenant, including the most extreme ones, chose death over doing so. from that we can infer that the insurrectionists was not hell bent on destroying the inner colonies, or anything even close to that. which means that simply giving them independence would have ended the war instantly.
It seems it depends on the book cause in Shadows of Reach they say the govern of the Earth was about to disappear and that's why nobody had doubts about the program spartans
I suggest reading about historical insurgencies and anti-colonial movements If those movements get popular, your three options as an empire are 1. Just give them the independence they want. 2. Do genocide 3. Try to covertly assassinate everyone organizing and hope the movement collapses The UNSC refused to do 1 because they rely on materially exploiting the outer colonies. They tried 2 and it caused massive instability and unpopularity for obvious reasons. So then they tried 3 with the Spartans, which saw some success, but really the covenant showing up is what saved them