Unrestricted Prowler Warfare

Unrestricted Prowler Warfare is a space naval strategy with the ultimate objective being to destroy enough merchant ships to effectively starve an enemy into submission.

Comparisions
The concept of Unrestricted Prowler Warfare is fundamentally similar to that of 20th and 21st Century unrestricted submarine warfare: Use a stealthed craft, difficult to detect, to hunt down a fleet of enemy merchant ships and destroy them using extreme force. Controversially, in both cases, the attacked craft cannot surrender, allowing the Prowler or submarine to do the maximum possible damage. The objective was to destroy enough merchant ships to effectively starve the enemy into submission.

Differences
While a submarine can be detected by passive or active sonar, Prowlers face no similar problems, the vacuum of space obviously preveting the passage of sound. Furthermore, advanced metamaterials render the craft almost totally invisible to radar. However, truly stealthed spacecraft were for a long period in the 21st and 22nd Centuries considered impossible, for the simple and apparently insurmountable problem of waste heat. While a submarine can conceal its heat signature in the comparatively warm surrounding water, the temperature of outer space is approximately three degrees Kelvin above absolute zero, and the fusion reactors used to power all UNSC spacecraft obviously run at far hotter temperatures going into the hundreds of thousands of degrees. If the designers of a spacecraft do not wish for the crew to be cooked within minutes of operation, they will design the spacecraft with radiators to remove waste heat. This is fine in the case of large capital ships, since given the right construction, radiators can be armoured, but unacceptable in the case of Prowlers, as the radiated heat will cause the Prowler to stand out like a beacon during an infra-red scan.

Therefore, the only solution, apart from switching off the Prowler's reactor and thus rendering all electronic instruments aboard useless, was for Prowler's to mount a large "steath sail", a circular plate totally covering the bow of the Prowler, coated with metamaterials to prevent detection by radar or any other sensor, and shot through with coolant conduits to mask the heat signature. There are disadvantages to this: The sail must be able to collapse and be stored within the Prowler, lest it interfere with the slipspace field during FTL transit, and so it cannot be very heavily armoured, which renders it vulnerable to damage from space dust particles. Furthermore, the sail can only cover the bow aspect, and so the Prowler risks detection if a spacecraft come up from its flanks or rear. The sail is also completely opaque, both to sensors and light, and so external cameras and sensors must be mounted on the outside of the sail when it is deployed, and if one of these is damaged, it opens a hole in the sail's area of coverage which may well be detected.

History
During the Blood Covenant Campaign of the War of Vengeance, UNSC Prowlers acted against Blood Covenant convoys. This part of the war was very reminiscent of German tactics in the Battle of the Atlantic in World War II or the latter part of World War I, with the use of massed groups of Prowlers, unhealthily dubbed "Wolf Packs", against convoys. The main steps in this tactic were as follows:


 * A number of Prowlers were dispersed across possible paths of a convoy. The campaign was made extraordinarily easier for the UEG since they had broken the Blood Covenant's frankly laughable encryption codes for classified messages. Since departure and estimated arrival dates were known, the UEG did not have to waste countless resources and thousands of hours of precious time constantly staking out routes.
 * A Prowler sighting the convoys would signal its course, speed and composition to the local Central Command.
 * The Prowler continues to shadow the convoy, reporting any changes.
 * Once the destination of the convoy is determined by putting the convoy's current travel time and slipspace velocity into the distance-time equation, the rest of the pack is ordered to close to the convoy's destination.
 * When the pack is formed, a field of HORNET Mines is layed in the path of the convoy.
 * When the convoy reverts from slipspace, it flies straight into the path of the minefield. The surviving ships are finished off with a barrage of fragmentation and nuclear-shaped charge missiles from the Wolf Pack.

The campaign was enthusiatically championed by Admiral Carolyn Webster, Commander, UNSC Prowler Corps. As the UEG's campaign of Unrestricted Prowler Warfare became more and more agressive and harmful to the Blood Covenant's ability to supply their dependent colonies, the Blood Covenant was forced to commit more ships to convoy escort duty. As a result, ships were stripped out of the defence fleets of important planets in order to fill the gaps left by losses to Prowlers. This allowed the alliance to destroy a disproportionate amount of ships to their own losses, which were far less than those they would have encountered in open battle with the Blood Covenant. Nearly 150 billion tonnes of shipping were lost to UNSC Prowlers over the course of the war. Over three dozen Blood Covenant colonies were starved into surrender without a fight by the Prowler campaign.

Controversy
Many vocal public figures challenged the campaign as underhand, cowardly, and dirty, and even lashed out at Prowler Corps officers as taking the comfortable option and dodging away from battles, despite having no real idea of the incredible strains crews were under. Even the Sangheili Armed Forces chose not to launch a similar campaign of their own, seeing such "sneak attacks" as cowardly and dishonourable, although they grudgingly admitted that it had results.

Effects on Prowler crews
Prowler Corps personnel were put under incredible strains during operations. The long hours of shadowing convoys or waiting for news from another Prowler could be tense and boring, and in the case of shadowers, frightening, given the prospect of detection. The strain often led to conflict between crewmembers, sometimes leading to an exchange of blows. In combat during Wolf Pack actions, crews were put under just as much stress as their regular Fleet counterparts, sometimes more given the ease with which a relatively fragile Prowler can be destroyed after it is detected. The Office of Naval Intelligence recognised that these factors could well lead to post-traumatic stress disorder later in life and so crews were given a month of leave after every three operations, a policy which only heightened some people's views of the Prowler Corps as a "soft option".

Quotes
"After the war, some in the Liberal Party wanted Webster to be shot as a war criminal. Of course, they quickly forgot about that after FLEETCOM drafted a study on what the war might have been like if we hadn't gone for Unrestricted Prowler Warfare. The sheer casualty numbers and estimated length boggles the mind, to say the least."

- Rear Admiral Michael Pomare, UNSC Navy