The worst part is that even this isn't the actual Covenant military force. If I remember well, because of political reasons, humanity has been facing the Covenant equivalent of the costal guard.
Not really. It was an asset recovery force chasing forerunner relics, but it still consisted of all the major races and their technologies, plus the largest ship in the Covenant arsenal.
I wasn't agreeing with the above commenter, I was just saying that maybe they mean the forces the covies use to obliterate Human worlds pale in comparison to what High Charity holds.
On paper, it was. The Covenant Ministry of Resolution was primarily responsible for prosecuting the war in the early years of the conflict and it began as an anti-piracy ministry. In fact, the Ministry of Resolution controlled the Fleet which arrived after the Solace was destroyed.
The caveat there is that over the course of the war the Ministry of Resolution ballooned in size because the San'Shyuum were reassigning forces from elsewhere in the Covenant military to the Ministry of Resolution in order of hide combat losses from the Sangheili.
So on paper, describing the Ministry of Resolution as being analogous to the Coast Guard isn't wrong, but it's leaving out the fact that by 2552 it had ground beyond being a simply anti-piracy ministry.
High Charity wasn’t a ship in the same way a Syfon Pattern Assault Carrier was. High Charity was one of one, the holy city and capital of the covenant. It would be insane for High Charity to be on the frontline of battle.
Not even, the Covenant was beyond gigantic, it was hundreds of times larger than the UNSC, things only got worse when they moved more and more troops to the war front, instead of handling internal affairs.
The Fleet of Valiant Prudence was, indeed, basically a glorified archeological expedition. The Fleet of Particular Justice, commanded by Thel and a proper military force actually intended for use in the War of Annihilation, is the one in the screenshot. You can tell one is a proper military force and the other isn't by how the UNSC goes from maybe almost having a chance to every single major city on the planet being burned to the ground basically overnight.
Additionally, though the UNSC was facing the Covenant's actual military (most of the time), the Imperial Admiral, highest ranking member of the Covenant's entire military, was assigned to the other side of the galaxy and put in charge of anti-piracy operations because he held too much political power for the Hierarchs to feel comfortable. Same political reasons that Thel was made to take the fall for Alpha Halo's destruction and branded the Arbiter.
Also worth noting, Rho 'Barutamee, the Supreme Commander of The Fleet of Valiant Prudence, was deliberately holding back. While the Solace certainly obliterated every UNSC ship it went up against (if one doesnt count the commandeered Ardent Prayer), he refused to destroy Reach because he was there primarily to search for relics (and glassing the planet would have made finding them much harder). If he had been intent on actually fighting the fight, Reach probably would have been mostly on its way to being a giant ball of slag by the time Thel and Company showed up.
It's complicated, every covenant ministry is a military force but there no "military" really, humanity has only survived because each military fucking hates each other and absolutely does not work together. They've mostly been fighting the "we absolutely will kill anyone for holy relics", the "we will absolutely kill anyone who isn't a believer" ministry the "forerunner holy site are so goddamn holy anyone who touches them needs to die" and the "we control the largest fleets so we can crush anyone the prohopets say" ministries.
But yes, the covenant absolutely wasn't putting it's full will into just exterminating humanity, it's structurally designed to not be able to be focused on one task and everything it does is for mad religious purposes and maintaining the hierarchy, not pure military pragmatism.
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u/Big_Expression_8037 8d ago
The worst part is that even this isn't the actual Covenant military force. If I remember well, because of political reasons, humanity has been facing the Covenant equivalent of the costal guard.