Operation: RAGNAROK

Operation: RAGNAROK was one of several plans drafted by the UNSC to strike back against the Covenant during the Human-Covenant War in order to cripple the Covenant's ability to wage war. Widely described as fanciful and unrealistic, RAGNAROK never progressed past the early drafting stage. The concept evolved from earlier projections of interstellar war between peer polities, particularly in the context of MAD scenarios in space. The earliest ideas that would eventually be realized as the RAGNAROK plan was thrown around during the Insurrection, following the Carver Findings, and resurfaced during the Covenant War as an ultimate vengeance weapon, a final resort in the event of a prolonged war in which the majority of the human population had been mobilized to fuel the UNSC war machine. Rather than being a realistic battle-plan, in practice RAGNAROK served more as a case example to prove a point what sorts of miraculous resources would have been needed to actually cripple the Covenant for those harboring hopes of a full-fledged invasion of the Covenant Sphere.

Overview
In its most refined stage, Operation: RAGNAROK would have entailed a multimodal shock-and-awe assault against key Covenant worlds followed by an immediate, decisive fleet action. The initial strike would involve largely drone-driven ships carrying both kinetic and nuclear payloads, along with debilitating electronic warfare agents and covert special force insertions targeted at alien base worlds and industrial centers. The prelude for the mission would involve long-term surveillance and reconnaissance of Covenant space by advanced prowler squadrons - which also did not and still do not exist in the numbers or crew capacity required for such an undertaking.

Operation: RAGNAROK would consist of mainly AI-driven ships carrying thousands of sub-vessels with slipspace drives of their own. The motherships, with their advanced drives (which did not exist at the time of the plan's creation), would cross the gulf to the Covenant sphere, and be synchronized to exit slipspace in waves in different parts of the Covenant dominion. They would then let loose their sub-vessels, which in turn would bloom outward in the hundreds. In star systems they would let loose their payloads of kinetic rods (most containing scatter submunitions) and nuclear weapons. Saturation and shock and awe would be key; the entire assault would have to take place within days at most. In the wake of the initial attack would come the conventional UNSC fleets, to face any remaining resistance and mop up targets the drone ships missed. Even then it would be a long shot, but the plan would rely most on the shock and debilitating effect of the strikes to give the UNSC time to mount its offensive.

Eventually, the project was buried for myriad technical, logistical, informational, and finally political reasons. The most obvious obstacle, beyond the plan relying on nonexistent technologies and industrial resources, was the UNSC's minimal knowledge of Covenant space. Even the maps provided by the Concord of Reconciliation after the war were incomplete especially in terms of strategic targets and could not be fully counted on, and even a few key worlds missed would almost certainly mean a unified, zealous retaliation that humanity could never withstand. After the post-war Years of Disquiet, the notion of a MAD scenario against the entire Covenant collective was rendered wholly obsolete as the UNSC's economic and political cooperation with the Concord became established. Still, various assault plans remained in development against anti-human splinter factions, though until much later, these too would remain non-viable against all but the smaller and more proximate groups.