“Make the units better with new technology. Make more of them. And make them cheaper.”

The SPARTAN-III program was a secret project initiated by the Beta-5 Division of the Office of Naval Intelligence's Section-III in order to produce cheap and expendable super soldiers to fight for the survival of humanity and the United Nations Space Command's colonies.

The SPARTAN-III program was both the successor and supplement to the SPARTAN-II program. Created and engineered by Colonel James Ackerson of the Office of Naval Intelligence, the SPARTAN-III soldiers were to be the next generation of supersoldiers. Composed primarily of vengeful orphans from fallen colonies, they would be cheaper to arm, train, and produce; being chosen from a wider pool of candidates, they would also be more numerous than their SPARTAN-II predecessors. They would rely on superior battle tactics, teamwork and sheer numbers, rather than advanced technology, special augumentation, and equipment to achieve their combat effectiveness.

The SPARTAN-IIIs were designed to be better trained, cheaper, and expendable compared to the SPARTAN-IIs. They would be trained in companies of 300 to 330 at a time, and then sent on suicide missions that the UNSC could not accomplish even with the elite Orbital Drop Shock Troopers. Though the casualty rates of the SPARTAN-IIIs stood at 100 percent on some missions, to ONI, all the operations were strategic successes. They were trading lives for time against the larger and technologically superior Covenant Empire. ONI hoped that in time, enough Spartans would survive to train more and more future Spartans, swelling the ranks of available super soldiers from only thirty SPARTAN-IIs in 2531 to a hundred thousand SPARTAN-IIIs within ten to twenty years.


So far there are only two main teams for the Spartan-III Program, Alpha Team and Beta Team.

UNSC Fleet Command