User:RelentlessRecusant/Operation: PURPLE WILLOW

Operation: PURPLE WILLOW was a strategic campaign of the UNSC Office of Naval Intelligence, utilizing elements of the UNSC Navy and UNSC Fleet Intelligence.

It was a campaign to initiate a massive deep reconnaissance (DR) high-throughput screen of planetary systems, nebulae, or radio sources in the Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way galaxy, towards the Galactic Core and Sagittarius A*. It was prompted after the discovery of Carinae-312 and Anomaly Sixty-Two-Alpha in NGC 3576]] by the UNSC Beneath Shoreless Waves, a UNSC guided missile frigate (FFG) on military reconnaissance operations to identify Brute renegade strongholds in the Covenant Borderlands. The subsequent Forerunner contact and the Memory Crisis led to millions of UNSC military and civilian casualties at the hands of the Covenant, but despite the bloodshed that is invariably associated with the discovery of Forerunner artifacts, the UNSC Office of Naval Intelligence is significantly interesting in finding more Forerunner constructs besides the Halo installations.

Hundreds of UNSC FLEETINTEL reconnaissance assets have been randomly deployed to the Sagittarius towards the Galactic Core with the intent to uncover more Forerunner constructs. However, despite forty years of continual deep reconnaissance (DR) and countless expenditures, not a single Forerunner construct has believed to have been found. Despite this, a stealth reconnaissance frigate that was attached to PURPLE WILLOW, the UNSC Beckon Dusk Forth, has been missing in action (MIA) as of 2590, and there is considerable opposition to the extremely costly and massive reconnaissance program, which has yielded no results and resulted only in the loss of an expensive reconnaissance frigate and the believed death of an Admiral's daughter, Madeline Son.