Human-Covenant War: Difference between revisions

*The "''Great War''", a name for the war used by [[Petra Janecek]], was originally used for the [[Wikipedia:World War I#Names|First World War]] prior to the outbreak of the [[World War II|Second World War]] in 1939.

*[[Avery Johnson]] was the only human to witness both the beginning and end of the Human-Covenant War, as he was present when [[Harvest]] was attacked and saw the Prophet of Truth's death, which signified the end of the war. He was also the first human to kill a member of the Covenant.

*Admiral [[Preston Cole]] questioned the Covenant's apparent difficulty of finding Earth; he pointed out that they could have simply picked up human radio signals and triangulated the source. Cole theorized that the Covenant's systematic destruction of human colonies before assaulting Earth may have been due to an internal scheme within the upper tiers of the Covenant hierarchy that prevented Earth from being targeted sooner; that the destruction of the Outer Colonies before Earth was part of a religious ritual; or that the Covenant were not particularly interested in humanity's homeworld strategically, but for some other, unknown reason. Cole suspected that members of the Covenant military may not have been informed of the particulars of these underlying schemes; in order to prevent hypothetical "rogue elements" within the Covenant military from attacking Earth without authorization from the Covenant leadership, Cole recommended ONI to obfuscate human radio signals in slipspace.<ref>'''Halo: Evolutions - Essential Tales of the Halo Universe''', "The Impossible Life and the Possible Death of Preston J. Cole", ''page 469''</ref> Cole's speculations appear to have been at least partially correct; the Prophet of Truth had a far-reaching plan to increase his personal power, which involved keeping the other Hierarchs and most of the Covenant ignorant of key information, including the location of the human homeworld, until the optimal moment to strike Earth. Truth's plans were partially compromised when the Prophet of Regret discovered the location of the Ark Portal on his own and proceeded to attack Earth, unaware of the human presence.<ref name="tentwenty"/> Despite Cole's theories, however, the possibility of triangulating Earth's position from radio signals does not appear to have occurred to the Hierarchs, as evidenced by Truth's more convoluted plan to have Kig-Yar led by [[Reth]] acquire navigation data leading to Earth from [[the Rubble]],<ref>'''Halo: The Cole Protocol''', ''page 285-286''</ref> and the fact that Truth did not discover Earth's location until 2552.<ref name="tentwenty"/>

*The length of the Human-Covenant War (28 years) is a reference to the number [[seven]]: 28/4= '''7'''.