Project DEMOPHILUS

Began shortly after Doctor Catherine Halsey's SPARTAN-II program, Project DEMOPHILUS was the umbrella under which several development and training programs were carried out in an effort to replicate, continue, and improve on Halsey's work on the original SPARTAN-IIs. The brainchild of veteran military scientist Doctor Herschel Schmidt, DEMOPHILUS was designed to recreate the SPARTAN Program without the influence of Halsey, which he and many others within the Office of Naval Intelligence considered a dangerously unpredictable element. Under his leadership, DEMOPHILUS and its subsidiary programs led the way in both the production of Spartans and the advancement in their underlying technologies, eventually paving the way for the SPARTAN-IV Program following the Human-Covenant War. After the war's conclusion and the advent of the SPARTAN-IV Program, DEMOPHILUS was shut down, though many of its attached personnel and assets vanished soon after, forcing Admiral Margaret Parangosky to arrest Schmidt and place him in the infamous .
==History==
===Origins===
DEMOPHILUS found its beginning shortly after Halsey proposed her idea for a second generation of the decommissioned Project ORION, codenamed SPARTAN-II. Enthralled by her ideas and vision but wary of her loyalty, Doctor Herschel Schmidt, a career military scientist who had found his start working on the second phase of ORION, proposed an alternative idea. According to Schmidt's plan, Halsey's batch would be the "control group" from which Schmidt would base his own group off of, learning from her mistakes to improve his own results. Parangosky, sharing her mistrust of Halsey with Schmidt, agreed to his proposal and cut Halsey's funding in half shortly after she had identified her candidates, under the guise of sectional budgetary revisions, transferring it to the new Project DEMOPHILUS.
===SPARTAN-II===
Following the splitting of Halsey's budget, DEMOPHILUS agents moved quickly to secure the candidates Halsey had decided against, or was unable to conscript, bringing them to HLIDSKJALF Base on the industrial Inner Colony of New Carthage. Using agents carefully implanted in the SPARTAN-II Program, Schmidt and his staff painstakingly reconstructed Halsey's training regime, from its exercises to its diet and sleep protocols, modifying it as needed. Using the predicted effectiveness of the SPARTAN-IIs, Schmidt and his team came to the conclusion that team structures only made Spartans marginally more effective combat units and decided that if they were deployed individually, they could engage the same targets as teams with less risk of multiple casualties. As such, the exercises were modified to focus more on solo combat and operations rather than the heavy emphasis on teamwork that Halsey pushed.
Having to rely on smuggled data packages from Reach caused the DEMOPHILUS branch to fall behind Halsey's schedule by at least six months, with augmentations expected to take place at the end of 2525. Following the Reach Spartans' own augmentations and horrendous casualties, Schmidt held off until Halsey had developed additional protocols for both the base augmentations and rehabilitation protocols for the washouts before proceeding. As such, final training extended into the first half of 2526, and by the time preparations were ready, several Outer Colonies had already fallen to the alien hegemony known as the Covenant. Following their augmentations, which saw a significantly higher survival rate than the Reach branch thanks to improvements Halsey had developed over the past year and a half, they were equipped with suits of the new MJOLNIR Powered Assault Armor/Mark IV and deployed against Insurrectionist targets across human space while the rest of the UNSC shifted focus to fight the Covenant.
===SPARTAN-III===
In the years following the initial deployment of both Halsey's SPARTAN-IIs and his own, Schmidt grew increasingly certain of the tactical and strategic value of Spartans in the war against the Covenant, which continued to grow more desperate as the aliens drew closer to the Inner Colonies. While still in the planning and preparation phase for the long delayed SPARTAN-II Class II, Schmidt discovered the existence of the concurrently operating SPARTAN-III Program, devised and led by Colonel James Ackerson. Despite his extreme displeasure with the overall strategic goals SPARTAN-III was designed to accomplish, he was extremely impressed with the quality of the SPARTAN-IIIs of Alpha Company. Upon learning of the 300-man funding limitations and the large number of candidates who would not be chosen for the company, Schmidt offered generous compensation from DEMOPHILUS's own funding in exchange for access to these designated washouts, which Ackerson was quick to accept.
The Alpha Company washouts were transported from Onyx to HLIDSKJALF Base on New Carthage, where they completed their training and were augmented in accordance with rather than the modified iteration of used with the original class of DEMOPHILUS Spartans. Just like their brethren within Alpha Company, the Alphas of DEMOPHILUS suffered no ill-effects from their augmentations and were officially activated in January, 2537. Unlike their contemporaries in the main company, who were equipped with the cheaper and overall less effective , those SPARTAN-IIIs graduated by DEMOPHILUS were instead equipped with MJOLNIR, massively increasing the cost of the project, but also increasing the effectiveness of these Spartans by magnitudes. Shortly after being declared fit for duty, they were assigned and deployed to various combat zones both within the Outer Colonies and the now-besieged Inner Colonies, where they would distinguish themselves and, ironically, outlive their comrades in Alpha Company.
Following the activation of Beta Company shortly after the destruction of Alpha Company in , DEMOPHILUS once again became involved with the program, offering more funding for access to Beta's eventual washouts. Unlike with Alpha, deep-cover operatives within the SPARTAN-III Program, implanted following DEMOPHILUS's discovery of the competing project, actively manipulated the placement and rankings of several candidates, ensuring that several better performing candidates were left out of the official company. This act, while condemning other candidates to death, would ensure the short term survival of many more skilled operators. These candidates would, just like with DEMOPHILUS's Alpha washouts, be augmented with the same updated CHRYSANTHEMUM protocols as mainline Beta Company, being deployed roughly concurrently with the second class of the SPARTAN-II Program. Rather than MJOLNIR Mark IV, these Spartans would be the first to be equipped with the new , specifically designed by the program's in-house engineers to be lighter and significantly cheaper than baseline MJOLNIR, while still meeting basic performance standards.
===SPARTAN-II, Class II===
===Project THESPIA===
===Post-War and Disbanding===
Category:Demons of Hope
Category:SPARTAN
Category:Biological augmentation programs