James Ackerson (Earth-5875)

"I do get the feeling that Ackerson would gladly assign members of his own family to a suicide mission if he could find an appropriately high value target to send them against."

- - Kurt-051 to Chief Petty Officer Franklin Mendez

Colonel James Ackerson was an officer of the UNSC Marine Corps and employed member of the Office of Naval Intelligence who served through the First Contact War. Ruthless, ambitious and almost entirely devoid of morals, Ackerson was the mastermind behind the SPARTAN-III Program, as well as the biggest and most formidable enemy of Dr. Catherine Halsey. A tactical genius, he survived three consecutive battles against the Covenant, and was thus contracted by ONI to ease its relationship with the Marine Corps.

Early life
Born on Cleveland, URNA, on Earth, James Ackerson was a fan of fantasy literature alongside his younger brother, Ruwan Ackerson - they mostly enjoyed the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, J. K. Rowling, and George R. R. Martin. They would create their own fictional fantasy universe, of which there was the fabled Key of Osanalan.

After enlisting in the UNSC Marine Corps during the Secession, he trained in a Unified Combined Military Boot Camp at Cyrus 7 alongside Gael Twyker.

SPARTAN-III Program
"So you want to trade lives for time? Yes, ma'am. Isn't that the job of a soldier?"

- - Admiral Margaret Paragonsky and Colonel James Ackerson Two years after the activation of the SPARTAN-II Program by Dr. Catherine Halsey, Ackerson took notice to build a supersoldier project of his own design, which he dubbed the "SPARTAN-III Program". After gaining access to the DNA profiles of the SPARTAN-II candidates, observing the living clones used to replace the trainees, and later having their bodies retrieved to perform autopsies after their deaths, Ackerson drew many conclusions based on the successes and failures of the SPARTAN-IIs. Later, he abandoned the use of clone replacements in his program duo to the obvious ethical concerns over cloning, which he deemed one of the failures of Halsey's project once he presented his program to the Office of Naval Intelligence.