Project DEMOPHILUS

"While Doctor Catherine Halsey is undoubtedly a genius, I feel we should regard her more as a liability than an asset. Despite her incredible intelligence, she has shown as disregard for ONI protocols and a general lack of true loyalty to the Office. While I have no question that her SPARTAN program will prove exceedingly useful, I believe they would be even more useful free of Halsey's handling. Because of this, I propose a secondary initiative to create our own group of SPARTAN-grade soldiers to use as we please."

- Doctor Herschel Schmidt's proposition to Admiral Margaret Parangosky.

In the early 26th Century, the brilliant Catherine Halsey developed a program to create biologically enhanced supersoldiers to combat the rising insurrectionist movements in Humanity's Outer Colonies. Despite gaining clearance and funding from the head of the Office of Naval Intelligence and its Section III, elements within the organization doubted her loyalty to ONI and thus sought to subvert her in varying ways. Ones of these individuals was Doctor Herschel Schmidt, a veteran military scientist and unquestionably loyal to the UNSC and ONI and, unlike others, did not wish to interfere with Halsey's work. Recognizing the value of the SPARTAN-II Program, he sought to use her research to make his own group of SPARTAN-grade soldiers. The result was Project: DEMOPHILUS, a top secret branch of the main SPARTAN-II Program, utilizing candidates left over after Halsey's selections for her own program. After the emergence of the Covenant and the deployment of the SPARTAN-IIs to combat, DEMOPHILUS Spartans were used to fulfill the program's original purpose of eliminating the remaining insurgent groups in the colonies, many of which had gone underground following the arrival of the Covenant.