: Yeah I don't think people always connect with the fact that the Halsey who
: started the SPARTAN Program might have been super-smart, but I doubt she
: was much more mature than your typical college-aged young adult—even with
: book smarts, there's no making up for experience, and I think her distance
: from the actual horrors of the insurrection meant she had a very clinical
: mind that might have made it easy to distance herself from the full scale
: of what she was doing, and made it very easy to rationalize.

I think that's the core of why Halsey is a sympathetic character at all -- because she was so young and naive when she started. She couldn't wrap her head around the true ramifications of what she was doing and when she finally did, she was in too deep to back down. This is literally the very basis of her internal conflicts in TFoR -- it wasn't until the project was put to practice that the weight of the moral baggage involved truly hit her. And if she'd quit at that point she would've just been replaced with someone less competent.