No evidence of this. Yes it's lower numbers than they had, but it's higher impact + higher survival rates = higher efficiency.
With the cost of hundreds of Mjolnir suits - which less than a decade earlier had been as costly as a small battle-group (And that was with the benefit of the resources and procurement of a much larger UEG at the time) - hundreds of augmentation batches and the preceding thousands of hours of R&D time to create them, thousands of hours of surgical and observation time post-augmentation and a massive chunk of the UNSC fleet budget for a decade to build the Infinity. It's patently obvious they are a huge drain and it's certainly not cost efficient. It produced one ship that couldn't crack a moderately defended ex-Covenant stronghold world.
It costs the US Government $2.5 million every day to keep a carrier group afloat (On top of the initial ~$13 billion price tag), yet you think that something like the Infinity, being 3km longer than the vast majority of the UNSC's other vessels (So that's like the US Navy trying to build a carrier that's not 337m long, but 1.2km long), carrying cutting edge equipment from a Forerunner slipspace drive to the largest shipboard MAC ever built, and 17'000 crew-members (Three times larger than an entire US Navy carrier group alone), isn't going to cost a huge amount of money for the UNSC? We've not even thrown in the Infinity's escorts yet either for all those crew costs.
How so? There's no indication they are dependent on any such thing.
Where does the Infinity get its Archer missiles from? Where do the missile manufacturers get all the components to build those missiles?
Where does the Infinity get it's nuclear ordinance from, and how are those built? What's the procurement like for their components? Who refines the fissile materials?
The Infinity also has to source ammunition and weapons for its Marine compliment, spare parts for all the repairs that must go on across a 5km long ship, filled to the brim with cutting edge equipment much of which is still experimental and therefore prone to breakages and bugs. It has to feed 17'000 crew-members and carry enough medical supplies. It has to source Warthogs, Pelicans, Mammoths, Longswords, and it has to procure fuel for them all. The Spartan's Mjolnir armor is a fusion of advanced computing technologies, sensor tech and materials science which all has to be brought together.
None of this stuff just get's cranked out in a simple logistics chain.
All ships in the universe can only be in one place at one time - this doesn't make them all equal. The Infinity is far from equal, with greater armaments and navigational capabilities than any other UNSC ship, as you well know.
That's why you favor more ships, rather than a small handful of super units (Or in this case, one super unit).
It was hit multiple times by a PLANETARY GLASSING BEAM and survived. That's not "useless", it is uniquely powerful and resilient, something humanity could well have done with during the war.
Why are you telling me that it was hit by a glassing beam? That's not a supporting point. Such weapons aren't exactly rare in the Covenant's fleets.The Infinity was mission-killed by a standard piece of Covenant tech. Am I supposed to be impressed, and think that Infinity could do anything to a Covenant world that had two or more of these canons? Or to a Covenant fleet that had them? I'm not impressed at all.
This doesn't make sense - you've already said in your original post that the top-down did work. You say it was ill-advised, but that it had an impact.
I said that the top-down approach was unnecessary and ill-advised, not that it worked. It didn't work.
No it isn't, not at all. It is the argument that WAR is a zero-sum game, and commits to the EVIDENCE that the last conflict between the two species was a genocide, and as such it would be foolish to allow the next conflict to be the same.
The two species are not at war following the collapse of the Covenant. The UEG continued to be at war with specific factions that had Sangheili in them. So you are absolutely viewing race relations as a zero-sum game here, especially in the long term given the rest of your reply below, and in spite of my best attempt to explain why it is incorrect, you continue to view them as contiguous political units as well.
Unfortunately almost everything I have said regarding this issue has been missed in its meaning, and I'm not prepared to type all that out again.
Suggesting trade & finance etc. can prevent war has only ever proved true of known civilisations in the short/medium-term. In the long-term, there's always war. That's not a fallacy, it's just basic history.
That's a silly oversimplification of the world. Europe is going through its longest stretch of peace in the history of the continent following WWII, and much of that has been owed to the economic integration that began with the establishment of the European Coal and Steel community that sought to integrate the foundational industries of France and Germany's militaries (Coal and Steel production), and place them under the supervision of a supranational entity that both nations controlled. The expansion of the ECSC into the Common Market and eventually the European Union has made Western Europe the most politically stable place on the planet, when historically there was seldom a time of peace prior to WWII.
This is a really, really odd statement given the central pillar of the Halo universe. It was called the Human-Covenant war for a reason.
The Human-Covenant war has nothing to do with anything I've said.