: To add my voice to this, and both your other posts and Archillen's are a hard
: act to follow, I hate the Spartan IVs because nothing interesting is being
: done with them precisely because they're former ODSTs who went through a
: painless augmentation process. They feel like some fanfic author tried to
: upstage the earlier Spartan programs by combining all of Humanity's cool
: supersoldier projects and omitting all their drawbacks.

: This is spelled out in their introduction in The Thursday War. Adult
: volunteers are being turned into Spartans because the augmentation process
: no longer requires puberty. Karen Traviss was clueless as usual and
: presented it as a moral choice, as ONI repenting of its earlier sins and
: casting out the evil influence of Dr. Halsey. But if you can apply the
: augments to adults in the post-war world, there is zero reason to use
: children. It's not a moral choice because the UNSC is sacrificing nothing
: by using adults.

: The Spartan IVs have none of this. They don't reflect on the needs and
: compromises that drove the previous programs, they're just here to kick
: ass and chew bubblegum.

: The fact that the genetic markers are apparently no longer required feels
: like a cop-out. To me, the genes Halsey looked for never made the Spartans
: some kind of master race. Didn't even mean that they'd look alike. I just
: thought that the markers indicated "I am going to have exceptional
: cognitive abilities and a physiology robust enough to survive radical
: alterations to my muscular, skeletal, and nervous system." The
: absence of those markers and puberty should have consequences, because
: Spartan augmentations are extreme changes to the human body.

: Meh. Maybe all the Fours were bit by radioactive spiders.

: Getting back to the unprofessionalism of the Spartan IVs, it goes way beyond
: the casual nature of the ODSTs. We've gone over this again and again and
: again, but the Spartan IVs are incompetent. Palmer is singularly unfit for
: command and is a danger to other soldiers when she takes to the
: battlefield. Miranda Keyes was bad enough, but now they've cloned her and
: made an entire branch of supersoldiers from her DNA. Watching them in
: action, it feels like their success is owed more to the ineptitude of
: their enemies than any tactical ability.

: Take care of that and tone down the dudebroity until they resemble Buck's
: squad, and I'll tolerate the Spartan IVs.

While the fan fiction comparison is a very apt one, the Spartan IVs also feel like a safe business decision. It's like they wanted to create a sanitized and risk-free version of Spartans to appeal to an audience as wide as possible. This was, as you pointed out, completely without regard to known in-universe constraints, and it robs them of what truly made them Spartans instead of just guys in power armor.

Worse, as you also said, the Fours are not utilized in interesting and creative ways which might be able to make them stand on their own. Fluff tells us that the SPARTAN-IIIs got folded in with the Fours. How will the Threes, who are still very much SPARTANs in the tradition of the IIs, interact with the dudebro Fours? We may never know, because all we get is safe and boring superhero action with the IVs while the IIIs have been pretty much forgotten about. Or swept under the rug, as it were. The ethical issues that come with them might even offend somebody.

Now, I'm not saying they should've made the IVs into another generation of brainwashed child soldiers. I'm saying the IVs were unnecessary to begin with. While the IIs' numbers are quite low, there's an insane amount of untapped potential in the IIIs. There are about 300 Spartan-IIIs whose fate hasn't been disclosed to this day, and Noble Team's introduction opened the floodgates for possible surviving Threes from the previous generations as well as S-III teams with MJOLNIR armor.

Not that there ever needed to be a huge indeterminate number of Spartans; back in the day, when Spartans were called in, you knew it meant something because there were so few of them. Now redshirt Spartans die in droves in every minor scuffle. And if the excuse for the IVs' addition was War Games, they never needed a whole new Spartan class just to have a "canonical" wrapping for multiplayer because they didn't need to canonically explain multiplayer in the first place.

If they absolutely needed to add a new Spartan project, they could've at least tried to make the Fours more interesting and unique on their own right. Perhaps make them more cyberized and amp up the level of mind-machine integration to compensate for the inability to chemically augment adults. They could add symbiotic AIs (a la Chief/Cortana but more extreme), or limited gestalt intelligence with shared sensory information on a fireteam level at least, a broadened individual sensory experience from armor instruments, drones, etc. This would strengthen the bonds among Spartan groups but alienate them from baseline humans. You could also play with the way the squishy thing in the armor is becoming more and more redundant and even a liability with parts of cognitive processing being outsourced to more efficient systems in the armor, or permanent cyber parts used to augment the brain and nervous system. You could even have exoskeleton parts grafted directly on the Spartan's body to replace most of the chemical muscle augmentation. But all that, of course, might make general audiences uncomfortable and we can't have that.

And why did the Spartans need their own military branch? That bothers me to no end. It's like if the US turned the Navy SEALs into a branch.