The United Nations Space Command Colonial Alert & Readiness Conditions (COLCON) was an alert system developed by the UNSC in 2531 due to the arrival of the Covenant and the start of the Human-Covenant War. The protocol was established at the end of the Harvest Campaign; which had taken five years to recover. By this time, the war had been in its sixth year, and dozens of colonies had already fallen to the Covenant onslaught.