: If you need more Spartans, it only follows that you need to let more people
: in. When they're not all orphans of the Covenant War told that they're
: going to exclusively be retaliating against Covenant combatants, it's
: certainly going to make a big difference. I don't think it's bad writing,
: I think it just genuinely fits in with the new fiction of how the S-IVs
: are recruited and the conflicts they're made for.

: Actually, now that I think about it, the S-IIIs who became S-IVs and then had
: to turn their guns on humans might be the most likely to defect to the
: Front, since they were trained to kill Covenant and had that hatred burned
: into them for so long.

Actually, we know from Ghosts of Onyx that the S-IIIs were sent to quell human rebellions too. I think it was just the early generations but still. I doubt the UNSC removed that possibility from their training doctrine since there were clearly humans stupid enough to keep eroding humanity from within, apparently having missed the memo about the whole "threat of total extermination" thing.

Noble Team also had experience fighting rebels, and Emile loved it so much the UNSC had to hold him back. Hell, innies were apparently a big enough problem on Reach for ONI to suspect them, not the Covenant, when the relay station went down.

So I doubt the IIIs' loyalty is in question. Even if some of them were uncomfortable about it, any S-III would be loyal to their team first and foremost and peer pressure would take care of it. The only scenario where I could see an S-III having a problem with fighting other humans would be if that happened on their own homeworld, but seeing as having their homeworlds be gone was pretty much their entry ticket into the program...

With that in mind, I don't see how integrating the IIIs with the IVs is a good idea. The IIIs have been isolated from normal people for most of their lives and taught to be utterly loyal to their team and the UNSC to the point that the very thought of rebellion would be entirely foreign to them. We don't know how much the IIIs and IVs are actually allowed to mingle, but I could see so many IVs defecting having a very negative effect on how the IIIs see them and wrecking any attempts to build a healthy working relationship between the two generations.

You know, that's story material right there. I want to see how the IIIs are doing and how they react to things like the rebelling S-IVs or the way their hard-earned ranks are robbed from them because equality!1!!1!!!.