: After watching the new trailer and hearing the general (commander, officer,
: etc) say "he keeps waking up these things," or something along
: those lines, it got me thinking: 1 - chief knows the location of each
: guardian waking up, and is racing to reach them to program them not to
: attack humanity, or to convert them to be on our side

: 2 - some cataclysmic event is coming (precursors?), and he is trying to wake
: up as many as possible to help in the upcoming war

: 3 - some combination of 1 and 2.

: What do you guys think??

My own guess is that the Chief has advance warning, possibly due to the Librarian activating the genetic fiddling in his genome, and is trying either to stop them activating or to evacuate the area, save as many people from being killed as possible. ONI has misinterpreted his movements to be him deliberately activating them, either to use against the UNSC or against some other enemy with the casualties as collateral damage.

As for what the Guardians could be...I don't know. Why are they only waking up now, when some of them were on planets like Meridian that were glassed by the Covenant, who should have registered their existence with Luminaries? What do they want, what were they build for? No clue. I wondered at first whether they might be something to do with the Precursors, either Precursor technology or something the Forerunners built to counter them, but that was mostly in response to early rumours that the Flood and Precursors would be separate enemy factions in the game (a rumour I now highly doubt.) My guess is that we won't find out everything in Halo 5, but that it will be the new ongoing enigmatic technology/faction to be unravelled across the series of games 343i want to make - like how we didn't know everything about the Halos in the first game, but found out more over CE, 2 and 3. Maybe the Chief has no idea what they really are ether?