Imperial Guard (Warhammer 40,000) - Overview

Overview

The Imperial Guard (previously the Imperial Army) is a colossal fictional military organization, consisting of many hundreds of thousands of armies throughout the Imperium, and forming the vast bulk of the Imperium's military machine. Unlike the Space Marines, who are an elite unit that rely upon precision strikes against the enemy's critical assets to carry the day, the Imperial Guard relies on massed assaults made up of endless waves of infantry and armor to achieve victory. It is this battlefield strategy that has earned the organization the moniker "The Sledgehammer of the Emperor". It also earns the Guard the reputation as a meatgrinder, whose commanders are more than willing to spend their soldiers' lives for the smallest of gains or in the most suicidal defensive actions.

Each Imperial Guard regiment is raised from a single world and numbers between 500 and 750,000 fighting soldiers, supported by a huge array of light and heavy armored vehicles. Each regiment also has its own entourage, consisting of support staff, camp followers, suppliers, tech-priests, doctors, religious leaders and the like. When thousands of regiments are grouped up into large fighting forces, they are issued far larger assets such as theatre- or even planetary-scale artillery, thousands of super-heavy tanks regiments, and even hundred strong groups of Cohorts of Praetorian-class landships that dwarf the Leviathan command vehicles from thousands of Munitorium armory, fortress, and staging worlds. Although a player may field a mixed force of these armor, artillery, and infantry units on the table-top, in the game universe, the composition of any one regiment is fairly uniform; that is, an infantry regiment will contain thousands of foot soldiers with only a minimal number of support vehicles and an armored regiment will consist of little else save its tanks. This policy was put in place by the Imperium to prevent, or at least minimize the damage from, large scale mutinies in the wake of the Horus Heresy, as no one regiment constitutes a complete, self-sufficient fighting force in its own right.

Regiments are drawn from all types of planets of the Imperium from Fortress worlds such as Cadia, where the entire populace is raised under arms from birth, to Feral and Medieval worlds, and the contributions of some planets over the ten thousand years of the Imperium run into the billions of regiments, if not more. The Imperial Guard are constantly at war, freeing worlds from Chaotic or alien influence, or defending them from the same.

The Imperial Guard rely upon the Imperial Navy for transport to and from war zones. The Imperium's naval and ground forces are kept strictly separate such that a mutinous general will not have access to an integrated military machine. That was not the case with the pre-Horus Heresy Imperial Army, which had no such strict distinction.