User blog comment:SilencedSkies/The Illusive Man: Good, Evil or just bad writing?/@comment-260563-20120730041142/@comment-260563-20120811022417

What I'm getting at is that both Cerberus and the UNSC were equally reprehensible when they did their super soldier schlick. Even if you were to justify the Spartan program, couldn't the money for that have gone to naval improvements? Creating more weapons like the Sabre fighter that could destroy Covenant fleets with ease, and there would be no need for Spartans to be mass produced. Hell, just have a team of Sabres hit a Covenant Assault carrier, have ODSTs led by a Spartan capture it, then take it back home for study and reverse engineering. But no, mass producing Spartans to buy time was what they went with. And as always, the Spartans excelled at ground combat, but the Covenant navy wiped out the human defenses. So much for super soldiers.

And yet Cerberus gets flak for the same thing, despite them targeting grown men instead of children for the experiments. I guess even the Illusive Man found experimenting on human children reprehensible, as was evidenced when the Cerberus team on Pragia went rogue. And yet nobody gives the UNSC flak for what they did, despite the fact that using the money they threw at the Spartan program to develop better naval weapons would've helped them beat the Covenant navy and helped them end the war on their terms, either forcing the Covenant to a truce or to surrender.