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Description
In the years following the deactivation of the original ORION Project in 2506 the effectiveness of small special forces combating the Insurrectionists became too difficult for the UNSC to manage. As insurrectionist forces become more effective and the military's responses consequently become more forceful, the need for large scale military campaigns became more and more obvious.

Around 2510, the Office of Naval Intelligence began to reexamine the Carver Findings, which had warned of instability in the Outer Colonies years earlier. The report rationalized that the instability would continue to escalate, and unless drastic military measures were taken, would result in a massive war between the Inner and Outer Colonies. ONI's own projections at that time and up to 2525 concluded the same as Dr. Carver's findings. Meanwhile, then-eighteen year old civilian scientist Dr. Catherine Halsey had been improving upon Carver's report on her own. Her independent conclusions predicted an even darker future than Carver's model, with UNSC inaction against the rebel leadership resulting in a minimum of thirty years of war and five billion dead; the maximum was a conflict of indeterminate length potentially leading to the downfall of human civilization. Halsey presented her results to Vice Admiral Michael Stanforth of ONI Section III, finding that they had come to the same conclusions. Determined to prevent the predicted carnage, Halsey agreed to work for ONI, specifically Section III's Special Projects Division, on creating a solution.

Generation II of the ORION Project was initiated in 2511 as the best possible solution to end the widespread insurgency that raged throughout UNSC space. The project was created with several goals in mind. The first goal was to create a group of elite soldiers meant to subdue insurrections in their infancy, without substantial military casualties. The second goal was to minimize civilian casualties and avert civil war. The third goal was to substantially reduce the cost of conventional means of pacification.

Dr. Halsey's proposal for the project detailed radical changes from the original ORION in many different fields. The first and most controversial was the subjects themselves, who were selected by a gene-candidate pool, and must fit into a certain age restriction protocol. They must also have possessed superior physical and mental attributes. The trainees must be instilled with military value, and the understanding of war; something that cannot be taught to enlisted soldiers. This narrowed the candidates down to children who would be raised and taught in the art of warfare and military values, from a young age. Using such controversial means of creating a soldier meant that the project would have to be carried out in the highest form of secrecy.

Though conventional body armor had protected soldiers for centuries, the Gen-II project's second radical change involved integrating the subject with a new powered exoskeleton device, designed to help keep its user safe and provide a powerful means of combating enemy forces. The drawback of this new armor is its requirement for augmenting the subject, effectively turning the participants into human guinea pigs.

Despite the tremendous risk and the unethical means of creating new soldiers, ORION Generation II was greenlit by the top brass within the Office of Naval Intelligence, who concluded that the lives that could be saved far outweighed the risks involved. The project was initially granted funding for 300 candidates, though funding was later reduced to half this number. By 2517, 150 suitable candidates had been identified through DNA gathered from the UNSC's Outer Colony vaccination program, though funding had been further reduced to support only half that number. 75 children, all six years old and of both sexes, were kidnapped. In order to preserve the program's secrecy, the children were replaced by flash clones, which would die soon thereafter due to numerous medical complications associated with flash-cloning an entire human being.

Dr. Halsey's use of cloning, following the dissemination of information on the project to the rest of ONI, came to be regarded one of the most controversial decisions involved with the program. In particular, the decision drew the anger of Admiral Margaret Parangosky, Commander in Chief of ONI, who interrogated Halsey after her capture and demanded to know her reasoning for the use of flash clones. Parangosky viewed the clones as unnecessary, maintaining that Halsey replaced the abductees with clones for personal, moral reasons, believing that she was giving the families closure and thus easing her own conscience.

Halsey was not satisfied with the project's original name of ORION Project, Generation II; thus, she renamed it out of personal preference, as well as to distance the project from the failures of ORION in the minds of the politico and military bureaucrats who controlled the project's budget. In order to pay homage to the sacrifice of the ORION project, she chose to call the project SPARTAN-II. She considered several other "bellicose" names, including Praetorians, Landsknecht, Immortals, Minutemen, Titans, Argonauts, Odysseus, Olympians, Zulu, Kronos, Promethean, Armor, Nemesis, Daedalus, Hercules, Viking, and Hyperion; the latter two were quickly excluded.

After being kidnapped and sedated, the Spartan-II candidates were taken to the colony world Reach, where they began their training under Chief Petty Officer Franklin Mendez and the AI Déjà, who also acted as an aide for Halsey on the program. To marginalize the civilian lives they had once led, their names became a combination of their given names and a number, with family names being discarded. Based mainly within the Reach FLEETCOM Military Complex, the Spartans endured a great deal of hardship during their first years of training: they were placed into situations and drills that pushed their abilities to their very limit and beyond. Their hard training was complemented with high-level education, which included mathematics, science, history, reading, writing, and military tactics.

Although his training methodology was tough, even brutal in some regards, Chief Petty Officer Mendez always instilled discipline, honor, and respect into the Spartans. He taught the Spartans how to kill, but at the same time he taught them the difference between right and wrong. During this time, John-117 rose to be the de facto leader of the Spartans. Mendez trained the Spartans until 2525 when, at the age of fourteen, the they would go through the toughest part of their training: the biological augmentation procedures, which would kill 30 of the 75 conscripted children and cripple twelve others who would "wash out" of the SPARTAN-II program, going on to join the Office of Naval Intelligence. Only 33 survived the procedures without physiological deformities, of whom two would commit suicide in the following weeks upon encountering their flash clones. The bodies of those candidates who "washed out" were placed in cryonic suspension in the hope that they could some day be resuscitated. At least some of the candidates who were crippled may have been physically rehabilitated in later years.

The Human-Covenant War marked a change in objectives for the program; originally intended to quell rebellions, the Spartans were now forced into battle against a superior opponent to the insurrectionists: the Covenant. This new threat accelerated the Spartans' training to its final phase: Project MJOLNIR. With the Mjolnir armor, the Spartans would be the first major UNSC response to the alien threat.[12] The Spartans continuously proved highly effective against all threats; their heroic rearguard and delaying actions saved countless human lives from the genocidal Covenant onslaught. In 2547, the SPARTAN-II program was revealed to the public in an effort to boost morale among the UNSC. The Spartans' prowess was not lost on the Covenant, who came to fear, and in the case of the Sangheili, respect the Spartans as Demons.

Inevitably the small number of Spartan-IIs dwindled as casualties were sustained. As the exploits of the Spartans were a major propaganda boom to the UNSC, Section II of the Office of Naval Intelligence issued Directive 930, which stated that Spartans killed or wounded would be listed as "missing in action" (MIA) or "wounded in action" (WIA), thus maintaining the illusion of the Spartans' invincibility. By August 27, 2552, 25 of the 28 remaining Spartan-IIs assigned to NAVSPECWEAP, except Gray Team, had been recalled to Reach, some from combat, to receive new orders for Operation: RED FLAG, a mission that HIGHCOM hoped would end the war. They would commandeer a Covenant vessel, locate the Covenant homeworld, and return with captured Covenant leadership to force a ceasefire. The artificial intelligence construct Cortana, carried within John-117's Mark V Mjolnir armor, would serve as the strike force's hacker and technology specialist.

However, all preparations were interrupted and subsequently canceled by the Covenant's invasion of Reach. In the ensuing disaster, most of the Spartan-IIs were killed, although some took shelter in ONI's CASTLE Base. Two escaped aboard the UNSC Pillar of Autumn, one of whom was place in cryostasis aboard the ship after sustaining life-threatening injuries during the battle on Gamma Station. The Pillar of Autumn soon arrived at Halo Installation 04, which John-117 ultimately destroyed to prevent the spread of the Flood. Following the Battle of Installation 04, the survivors returned to Reach and were able to rendezvous with the remaining Spartans. The survivors then carried out a raid that resulted in the destruction of a Covenant fleet anchorage, stalling a Covenant plan to invade Earth. SPARTAN-IIs would go on to play pivotal roles in the Battle of Earth, the Battle of Installation 05, the Onyx Conflict and the Battle of Installation 00. Ultimately John-117 would eliminate the Covenant leadership with the help of the Flood and Thel 'Vadam, effectively defeating the Covenant and ending the war. However, he ended up trapped in space on the back half of the UNSC Forward Unto Dawn and was declared missing in action.

Sixteen Spartan-IIs are known to have survived the Covenant War: John-117, Fred-104, Kelly-087, Linda-058, Naomi-010, Jai-006, Adriana-111, Mike-120, Leon-011, Robert-025, August-099, Randall-037, Otto-031, Victor-101, Margaret-053, and Roma-143; the last five have since been killed. The early composition of Red Team: Douglas-042, Jerome-092 and Alice-130, spent most of the war in cryo-sleep and were not awakened until 2559, nearly six years after the war's end. The members of Gray Team were left drifting in space after their latest operation in late 2552 and went to cryo-sleep. In mid 2558, their lifeboat was recovered by a Sangheili fleetmaster, Rojka 'Kaasan, who held them in stasis until their release a few months later.

After being transferred to highly covert ONI Kilo-Five unit in 2553, Naomi-010 continued to serve on highly classified operations as of 2558. Though being missing in action since 2532 and discharged from service by ONI in 2546, Randall-037, now a Colonel of the Sedran Colonial Guard, participated in a mission to capture the smugglers of a highly dangerous element used as a weapon in a terrorist attack, and sacrificed himself to ensure the operation's success. At least three members of Omega Team managed to survive the war, though their current status is unknown. Following the ceasefire, the surviving Spartan-IIs were offered the choice of integrating into the newly formed Spartan Operations branch along with the remaining Spartan-IIIs. Some Spartan-IIs are known to have taken part in the training of Spartan-IV personnel.

In 2557, after being missing in action for nearly five years, John-117 stopped the Ur-Didact's attack on Earth after linking up with the UNSC Infinity on Requiem. John subsequently reunited with Blue Team who faced the Didact again shortly afterward; after defeating the Promethean for the second time, the team continued to serve in the field in a number of classified operations. Team Black was stationed on Installation 03, until they were killed by the Didact, dwindling the known number of active Spartan-IIs at the moment, down to eight.

On September 1, 2558, Gray Team were awakened from cryo and found themselves in the middle of a battle between two Sangheili factions, a Jiralhanae clan and the citizens of Suraka on the planet Carrow. The Spartans joined forces with local militia and remnants of one of the Sangheili groups to protect civilians from the Jiralhanae invaders. Together they managed to destroy an underground Forerunner facility housing hundreds of Sharquoi under the control of Brute Chieftain Hekabe, preventing their deployment to other inhabited worlds. After their return to the UNSC, Gray Team were offered a choice to join a specialized interspecies strike team under the Office of Naval Intelligence, to continue operating deep in the Joint Occupation Zone as before. The Spartans reluctantly agreed to work for ONI, asking for a prowler of their own.

In October, 2558, Blue Team tried to prevent the rise of the Created: a faction of rebellious AIs and Promethean forces led by Cortana and Warden Eternal, who used Forerunner Guardians to enforce the Mantle of Responsibility on the galaxy. However, their attempts proved unsuccessful.

In 2559, after 28 years of drifting in space the UNSC Spirit of Fire found its way to the Forerunner Installation 00, also known as the Ark. Awakened from cryo-sleep, the members of Red Team, in an attempt to establish contact with the UNSC, encountered on the surface of the Ark a hostile mercenary faction known as the Banished, led by the Jiralhanae warlord Atriox.

As of April, 2559, there are fourteen active Spartan-IIs, of whom only the members of Blue and Red teams remained under NAVSPECWAR's operational command, while Gray Team and Naomi-010 continued operating under authority of the Office of Naval Intelligence. The status of Omega Team remains unknown.

Description
In the years following the deactivation of the original ORION Project in 2506 the effectiveness of small special forces combating the Insurrectionists became too difficult for the UNSC to manage. As insurrectionist forces become more effective and the military's responses consequently become more forceful, the need for large scale military campaigns became more and more obvious.

Around 2510, the Office of Naval Intelligence began to reexamine the Carver Findings, which had warned of instability in the Outer Colonies years earlier. The report rationalized that the instability would continue to escalate, and unless drastic military measures were taken, would result in a massive war between the Inner and Outer Colonies. ONI's own projections at that time and up to 2525 concluded the same as Dr. Carver's findings. Meanwhile, then-eighteen year old civilian scientist Dr. Catherine Halsey had been improving upon Carver's report on her own. Her independent conclusions predicted an even darker future than Carver's model, with UNSC inaction against the rebel leadership resulting in a minimum of thirty years of war and five billion dead; the maximum was a conflict of indeterminate length potentially leading to the downfall of human civilization. Halsey presented her results to Vice Admiral Michael Stanforth of ONI Section III, finding that they had come to the same conclusions. Determined to prevent the predicted carnage, Halsey agreed to work for ONI, specifically Section III's Special Projects Division, on creating a solution.

Generation II of the ORION Project was initiated in 2511 as the best possible solution to end the widespread insurgency that raged throughout UNSC space. The project was created with several goals in mind. The first goal was to create a group of elite soldiers meant to subdue insurrections in their infancy, without substantial military casualties. The second goal was to minimize civilian casualties and avert civil war. The third goal was to substantially reduce the cost of conventional means of pacification.

Dr. Halsey's proposal for the project detailed radical changes from the original ORION in many different fields. The first and most controversial was the subjects themselves, who were selected by a gene-candidate pool, and must fit into a certain age restriction protocol. They must also have possessed superior physical and mental attributes. The trainees must be instilled with military value, and the understanding of war; something that cannot be taught to enlisted soldiers. This narrowed the candidates down to children who would be raised and taught in the art of warfare and military values, from a young age. Using such controversial means of creating a soldier meant that the project would have to be carried out in the highest form of secrecy.

Though conventional body armor had protected soldiers for centuries, the Gen-II project's second radical change involved integrating the subject with a new powered exoskeleton device, designed to help keep its user safe and provide a powerful means of combating enemy forces. The drawback of this new armor is its requirement for augmenting the subject, effectively turning the participants into human guinea pigs.

Despite the tremendous risk and the unethical means of creating new soldiers, ORION Generation II was greenlit by the top brass within the Office of Naval Intelligence, who concluded that the lives that could be saved far outweighed the risks involved. The project was initially granted funding for 300 candidates, though funding was later reduced to half this number. By 2517, 150 suitable candidates had been identified through DNA gathered from the UNSC's Outer Colony vaccination program, though funding had been further reduced to support only half that number. 75 children, all six years old and of both sexes, were kidnapped. In order to preserve the program's secrecy, the children were replaced by flash clones, which would die soon thereafter due to numerous medical complications associated with flash-cloning an entire human being.

Dr. Halsey's use of cloning, following the dissemination of information on the project to the rest of ONI, came to be regarded one of the most controversial decisions involved with the program. In particular, the decision drew the anger of Admiral Margaret Parangosky, Commander in Chief of ONI, who interrogated Halsey after her capture and demanded to know her reasoning for the use of flash clones. Parangosky viewed the clones as unnecessary, maintaining that Halsey replaced the abductees with clones for personal, moral reasons, believing that she was giving the families closure and thus easing her own conscience.

Halsey was not satisfied with the project's original name of ORION Project, Generation II; thus, she renamed it out of personal preference, as well as to distance the project from the failures of ORION in the minds of the politico and military bureaucrats who controlled the project's budget. In order to pay homage to the sacrifice of the ORION project, she chose to call the project SPARTAN-II. She considered several other "bellicose" names, including Praetorians, Landsknecht, Immortals, Minutemen, Titans, Argonauts, Odysseus, Olympians, Zulu, Kronos, Promethean, Armor, Nemesis, Daedalus, Hercules, Viking, and Hyperion; the latter two were quickly excluded.

After being kidnapped and sedated, the Spartan-II candidates were taken to the colony world Reach, where they began their training under Chief Petty Officer Franklin Mendez and the AI Déjà, who also acted as an aide for Halsey on the program. To marginalize the civilian lives they had once led, their names became a combination of their given names and a number, with family names being discarded. Based mainly within the Reach FLEETCOM Military Complex, the Spartans endured a great deal of hardship during their first years of training: they were placed into situations and drills that pushed their abilities to their very limit and beyond. Their hard training was complemented with high-level education, which included mathematics, science, history, reading, writing, and military tactics.

Although his training methodology was tough, even brutal in some regards, Chief Petty Officer Mendez always instilled discipline, honor, and respect into the Spartans. He taught the Spartans how to kill, but at the same time he taught them the difference between right and wrong. During this time, John-117 rose to be the de facto leader of the Spartans. Mendez trained the Spartans until 2525 when, at the age of fourteen, the they would go through the toughest part of their training: the biological augmentation procedures, which would kill 30 of the 75 conscripted children and cripple twelve others who would "wash out" of the SPARTAN-II program, going on to join the Office of Naval Intelligence. Only 33 survived the procedures without physiological deformities, of whom two would commit suicide in the following weeks upon encountering their flash clones. The bodies of those candidates who "washed out" were placed in cryonic suspension in the hope that they could some day be resuscitated. At least some of the candidates who were crippled may have been physically rehabilitated in later years.

The Human-Covenant War marked a change in objectives for the program; originally intended to quell rebellions, the Spartans were now forced into battle against a superior opponent to the insurrectionists: the Covenant. This new threat accelerated the Spartans' training to its final phase: Project MJOLNIR. With the Mjolnir armor, the Spartans would be the first major UNSC response to the alien threat.[12] The Spartans continuously proved highly effective against all threats; their heroic rearguard and delaying actions saved countless human lives from the genocidal Covenant onslaught. In 2547, the SPARTAN-II program was revealed to the public in an effort to boost morale among the UNSC. The Spartans' prowess was not lost on the Covenant, who came to fear, and in the case of the Sangheili, respect the Spartans as Demons.

Inevitably the small number of Spartan-IIs dwindled as casualties were sustained. As the exploits of the Spartans were a major propaganda boom to the UNSC, Section II of the Office of Naval Intelligence issued Directive 930, which stated that Spartans killed or wounded would be listed as "missing in action" (MIA) or "wounded in action" (WIA), thus maintaining the illusion of the Spartans' invincibility. By August 27, 2552, 25 of the 28 remaining Spartan-IIs assigned to NAVSPECWEAP, except Gray Team, had been recalled to Reach, some from combat, to receive new orders for Operation: RED FLAG, a mission that HIGHCOM hoped would end the war. They would commandeer a Covenant vessel, locate the Covenant homeworld, and return with captured Covenant leadership to force a ceasefire. The artificial intelligence construct Cortana, carried within John-117's Mark V Mjolnir armor, would serve as the strike force's hacker and technology specialist.

However, all preparations were interrupted and subsequently canceled by the Covenant's invasion of Reach. In the ensuing disaster, most of the Spartan-IIs were killed, although some took shelter in ONI's CASTLE Base. Two escaped aboard the UNSC Pillar of Autumn, one of whom was place in cryostasis aboard the ship after sustaining life-threatening injuries during the battle on Gamma Station. The Pillar of Autumn soon arrived at Halo Installation 04, which John-117 ultimately destroyed to prevent the spread of the Flood. Following the Battle of Installation 04, the survivors returned to Reach and were able to rendezvous with the remaining Spartans. The survivors then carried out a raid that resulted in the destruction of a Covenant fleet anchorage, stalling a Covenant plan to invade Earth. SPARTAN-IIs would go on to play pivotal roles in the Battle of Earth, the Battle of Installation 05, the Onyx Conflict and the Battle of Installation 00. Ultimately John-117 would eliminate the Covenant leadership with the help of the Flood and Thel 'Vadam, effectively defeating the Covenant and ending the war. However, he ended up trapped in space on the back half of the UNSC Forward Unto Dawn and was declared missing in action.

Sixteen Spartan-IIs are known to have survived the Covenant War: John-117, Fred-104, Kelly-087, Linda-058, Naomi-010, Jai-006, Adriana-111, Mike-120, Leon-011, Robert-025, August-099, Randall-037, Otto-031, Victor-101, Margaret-053, and Roma-143; the last five have since been killed. The early composition of Red Team: Douglas-042, Jerome-092 and Alice-130, spent most of the war in cryo-sleep and were not awakened until 2559, nearly six years after the war's end. The members of Gray Team were left drifting in space after their latest operation in late 2552 and went to cryo-sleep. In mid 2558, their lifeboat was recovered by a Sangheili fleetmaster, Rojka 'Kaasan, who held them in stasis until their release a few months later.

After being transferred to highly covert ONI Kilo-Five unit in 2553, Naomi-010 continued to serve on highly classified operations as of 2558. Though being missing in action since 2532 and discharged from service by ONI in 2546, Randall-037, now a Colonel of the Sedran Colonial Guard, participated in a mission to capture the smugglers of a highly dangerous element used as a weapon in a terrorist attack, and sacrificed himself to ensure the operation's success. At least three members of Omega Team managed to survive the war, though their current status is unknown. Following the ceasefire, the surviving Spartan-IIs were offered the choice of integrating into the newly formed Spartan Operations branch along with the remaining Spartan-IIIs. Some Spartan-IIs are known to have taken part in the training of Spartan-IV personnel.

In 2557, after being missing in action for nearly five years, John-117 stopped the Ur-Didact's attack on Earth after linking up with the UNSC Infinity on Requiem. John subsequently reunited with Blue Team who faced the Didact again shortly afterward; after defeating the Promethean for the second time, the team continued to serve in the field in a number of classified operations. Team Black was stationed on Installation 03, until they were killed by the Didact, dwindling the known number of active Spartan-IIs at the moment, down to eight.

On September 1, 2558, Gray Team were awakened from cryo and found themselves in the middle of a battle between two Sangheili factions, a Jiralhanae clan and the citizens of Suraka on the planet Carrow. The Spartans joined forces with local militia and remnants of one of the Sangheili groups to protect civilians from the Jiralhanae invaders. Together they managed to destroy an underground Forerunner facility housing hundreds of Sharquoi under the control of Brute Chieftain Hekabe, preventing their deployment to other inhabited worlds. After their return to the UNSC, Gray Team were offered a choice to join a specialized interspecies strike team under the Office of Naval Intelligence, to continue operating deep in the Joint Occupation Zone as before. The Spartans reluctantly agreed to work for ONI, asking for a prowler of their own.

In October, 2558, Blue Team tried to prevent the rise of the Created: a faction of rebellious AIs and Promethean forces led by Cortana and Warden Eternal, who used Forerunner Guardians to enforce the Mantle of Responsibility on the galaxy. However, their attempts proved unsuccessful.

In 2559, after 28 years of drifting in space the UNSC Spirit of Fire found its way to the Forerunner Installation 00, also known as the Ark. Awakened from cryo-sleep, the members of Red Team, in an attempt to establish contact with the UNSC, encountered on the surface of the Ark a hostile mercenary faction known as the Banished, led by the Jiralhanae warlord Atriox.

As of April, 2559, there are fourteen active Spartan-IIs, of whom only the members of Blue and Red teams remained under NAVSPECWAR's operational command, while Gray Team and Naomi-010 continued operating under authority of the Office of Naval Intelligence. The status of Omega Team remains unknown.