What motivates people to join the Imperial Guard?

[DogWelder]

This is something that interested me when considering the gigantic scale of logistics in the Imperial military. Of course conscription is described as a viable means of raising troops during major campaigns but I feel that requires an extraneous amount of resources that are not necessarily available all the time.

 

Reading Salvation's Reach, I observed that there seems to be a benefit system that serves as an incentive for citizens to join the Guard:

 

‘Are you and Captain Daur married? Sometimes it’s done in secret, I know. Perhaps before we left Menazoid Sigma?’

 

‘Married?’ Elodie asked. She swallowed. ‘No. No, we’re not.’

 

Commissar Fazekiel frowned, her face sad.

 

‘Then we do have a problem. These papers, which you have signed, are part of a certificate for viduity benefits. The sort a wife would be able to claim after the death in service of her partner. A widow’s pension, mamzel. If you’re not married, then this is an illegal claim. An attempt to defraud the Munitorum. Unfortunately, this sort of fraud is quite common, given the large number of Guardsmen in service.’

 

This sort of recruitment tactic makes the most sense for me. Dying gloriously for the Emperor sounds great and all but you need something more tangible to encourage those trillions of people to abandon their families/everyday lives and join the Imperial Guard. A hefty widow's pension would be a strong motivator as it would give the countless masses in the Imperium's underclass to leave their family or spouse better off financially should they die in combat.

[Grotsmasha]

IIRC, it also possible for guard regiments to be gifted/earned settlement opportunities to new/re-conquered planets. I believe the is what the Tanith (or maybe just Gaunt was promised).

 

Cheers,

Jono

[walter h]

there could be many viable reasons, today we have families who have all served, like my own . There might be those fleeing debt, or the possibility of leaving the world ahead of prosecution, or even because of prosecution. There were those who went to ,Vietnam because the judge gave them the choice of prison ,or service. Take your pick.

[Marshal Loss]

The same things that have motivated people to join armies and leave their homes throughout history.

• Propaganda (glamour, religion, xenophobia)
• Reliable pay, respectable career
• Low skilled work, opportunities to better yourself, break the cycle & leave awful planets
• Chance to "see the world" (galaxy in this case). Just look at late 5th c. Athens after the Archidamian War to see how a youthful population can be pumped up at speed
• Loot
• As Grotsmasha noted, land/benefits (particularly common in societies with population congestion and a well-settled class system)

It's not really difficult to see how people would be convinced to leave their ordinary lives and join the guard. Very few would be doing it to die for the Emperor. For parallels, see 5th & 4th c.Greece & Napoleonic France for the best examples imo; numerous books that aren't necessarily aimed at a scholarly audience have been written that cover this very phenomenon. These concepts are easily applicable to 30k/40k.

[Closet Skeleton]

Most Imperial citizens live pretty miserable lives, who wouldn't want to leave a Hive City.

 

Most studies that claim humans aren't naturally warlike focus on humans not being mentally prepared for killing without training, but most defensive wars have very high volunteer rates and 'natural killers' in war time are more likely to be people used to looking after younger siblings than they are to be aggressive psychopaths. Wars with low volunteer rates tend to be long drawn out hard to explain conflicts, with most draft dodgers being in standing peace time militaries. The Imperium's wars are mostly defensive and its opponents are often not even human, so that would probably mitigate the unending war exhaustion.

[Ranulf]

The others pretty much have most of the reasons covered already.

 

In some worlds of the Imperium, tradition would play a part (Vostroyan for example) alongside some worlds where a caste system is in place. Press-ganging and forced conscription would fill the ranks on other worlds. 

 

-Ran

[Halfpint100]

Armagedon has mass conscription, vostroyan has the first born male that has to serve (after a night of drink and 'passing on their genes' to willing females), valhallan's want to get off of their ice ball. Cadians all serve and see it as an honor, catachans see it as a way to show the world how tough they are. Death korps volunteer to remove their shame and shown their faith! Tallarn want to show their faith and are probably the most pious of all the regiments (usually).

 

No idea about elysians, I don't know their fluff

[MrDarth151]

Considering even the most low-balled estimations of Imperium's population, propaganda alone should give you more recruits than you know what to do with.

 

I mean, think about it. Imperium has a propaganda machine that worked 24/7 for the last ten thousand years. It has a million worlds. The highest daily recruitment numbers I know of for Imperial Guard put daily recruitment in billions.

 

Now, I will give you some numbers to put into perspective.

 

Let us assume that the Imperium has only a million worlds. This might very well be untrue, as writers like to throw around bigger numbers from time to time.

 

Let us assume that, on average, said worlds have the same population as modern day Earth. That would give us roughly seven quadrillion, six hundred thirty-one trillion, one hundred thirty-eight billion, three hundred thirty-eight million people, rounding to millions. This is one is also low estimate, as we have statements to the effect of Terra alone having population in quadrillions.

 

Let us assume that the daily recruitment is a healthy five hundred billions of people per day.

 

That gives us 0.006552102 percent population recruited a day.

 

WWII figures for comparison.

 

According to The National WWII Museum in New Orleans, for period of 1941 to 1945, 38,8 percent of servicemen and servicewomen recruited to US army were volunteers. That makes, roughly, six millions, three hundred thirty-two thousands of volunteers for period of five years, more or less. That gives us roughly three thousand, four hundred and seventy recruits a day, against population of, let's say, one hundred, thirty-eight millions and four hundred thousands, rounding the 1944 population numbers, because I'm lazy.

 

Which gives us 0.002507225 percent population recruited a day.

 

And keep in mind: This is under condition that I throw the daily recruitment of the Guard to the highest number I know of, and take some of the lowest numbers I know of for the Imperium populace. In reality, no-one even tries to make Guard recruitment that high. The lowest, most inefficient number I know of comes from the latest Wraight book placed on Terra, where a guy is proud to recruit a million of quadrillions of Terrans for an army to relieve Cadia in just ten years. Which is not great. And by not great, I mean that every single third world country is more efficient at recruiting people than this. Not even trying to mention major powers during WWII.

 

Because the only way we can make Imperium lose is to make them terrible at warfare after ten thousand years of experience.

 

My griping aside: It basically means that even if you just count on idiots and glory hounds, you will still get trillions of guardsmen. At least. It's part of the reason the fact that everyone insists on using WWII numbers for interstellar total war annoys me ever so slightly.

[Wargamer]

In Rogue Trader, conscription was used to fill the ranks of the army. Avoiding conscription was punished by service in a Penal Regiment.

[Plasmablasts]

Given the above discussion, perhaps the question should be reframed as “Why is recruitment into the Guard so inefficient?” A few thoughts:

 

A lot of the Imperium’s population seems to be tied up in the Hive worlds. Working lives in these Hives are depicted as gruelling long shifts in occupations which seem to be passed on through families. Resources are very tight and regulated and that regulation may extend to marriage and reproduction. Hence, these Hive worlds may not carry large “surplus” populations suitable for mass mobilisation without significant detriment to materiel production. Less developed worlds, e.g. feudal and feral worlds, can probably manage higher recruitment rates per capita, but smaller absolute numbers.

 

Also, recruitment into the Astra Militarum doesn’t reflect the full mobilisation of a population, as there will also be recruitment into the Planetary Defence Forces.

 

Finally, recruitment into the Guard is limited by the capacity of the Navy to carry the regiments off their founding planets.

[Kinstryfe]

Figure too that there are huge numbers of nonmilitary support for the Astra Militarum as well, and the numbers may look slightly better. You have entire world economies basically slaved to making munitions or armour or food for the AM, plus intersegmentum shipping and logistic lanes to move and track all that product. I'd imagine nobody in the Imperium actually has any idea how many troops there even are. That's probably another reason why the Imperium isn't unstoppable in the Galaxy. They have Trillions, Quadrillions, or more troops but are pretty much slinging them around as the bureaucracy decides, and there's no way it's anywhere close to efficient. That's all before warp shenanigans are factored in, too.

 

To the original thought, I think most of the reasons have been summed up already. Think of any reason on Earth that people join military organizations, and I'm sure those and hundreds more apply. If you can think of a reason, I'm sure there's a world or regiment who practices it

[Trevak Dal]

I think the vast majority are conscripted. They wouldn't need Commissars as much if they were all volunteer.

 

This isn't like how the United States' military was, where it's all volunteers who are either patriotically or economically motivated. This is a endless warmachine that needs more grist for the mill, so it's thrown into the taxes/tithe of many worlds.

 

I'm sure there are patriotic volunteers, like all of Cadia pretty much were like the Starship Troopers ad breaks, "We're doing our part-are you?" Until...well plot happened.

[MrDarth151]

I think the vast majority are conscripted. They wouldn't need Commissars as much if they were all volunteer.

 

That's not entirely true. Commissars, contrary to popular belief, are not solely disciplinary officers. They do stuff like mediating between regiments, ensuring that local planetary politics and culture do not interfere with the duties of their soldiers, inspire people, deal with propaganda and incompetent officers, and it is entirely possible for an officer to be a volunteer and be incompetent, and well, there is this thing that treason is hardly dependent only on whether or not the man in question was conscripted or volunteer. And for that matter, if you think discipline problems are limited to conscripts, you would be mistaken. Those still happen, even in professional, career military cadres.

 

Idealist are just as likely to be turn traitors, especially when you have a supernatural element in play, and your entirely loyal commanding officer can turn in a manner of weeks, because Chaos.

 

Having commissars in the regiments is just a common sense. It's not like a regiment composed entirely of volunteers does not need them. Hell, Death Korps of Krieg still get those, and those guys are some of the most loyal around.

[Frater Cornelius]

 

[...]

 

Having commissars in the regiments is just a common sense. It's not like a regiment composed entirely of volunteers does not need them. Hell, Death Korps of Krieg still get those, and those guys are some of the most loyal around.

 

 

Well, the DKoK want to die for the Emperor. They need a Commissar to keep them in line and follow an actual battle plan instead of rushing into the nearest enemy force :D

[Preliminary Bombardment]

Figure too that there are huge numbers of nonmilitary support for the Astra Militarum as well, and the numbers may look slightly better. You have entire world economies basically slaved to making munitions or armour or food for the AM, plus intersegmentum shipping and logistic lanes to move and track all that product. I'd imagine nobody in the Imperium actually has any idea how many troops there even are. That's probably another reason why the Imperium isn't unstoppable in the Galaxy. They have Trillions, Quadrillions, or more troops but are pretty much slinging them around as the bureaucracy decides, and there's no way it's anywhere close to efficient. That's all before warp shenanigans are factored in, too.

 

To the original thought, I think most of the reasons have been summed up already. Think of any reason on Earth that people join military organizations, and I'm sure those and hundreds more apply. If you can think of a reason, I'm sure there's a world or regiment who practices it

I think inefficiency is a huge part of it. Despite being galaxy spanning, computing is still highly limited due to AI turning evil on a regular basis. I believe one of the Gaunts Ghosts book said in passing there was something like 5 civil servants in the Munitorium for every active Guardsman pushing paper around. Plus add in the fact that you need to say a prayer to the machine god each time you press a las gun off the conveyor belt it's easy to imagine how slow and useless the Imperial war machine is most of the time.

[Nostromo]

Military Sci-fi novels are a good reference for that question.

Starship Troopers: military service is the prerequisite to get civil rights afterwards - and the permission to reproduce

Alien Wars: life in ghettos with nobody ever getting enough - and not disgusting - food

 

And there is of course the classic: obligatory military service

[Kinstryfe]

I think Commissars make sense. They're raised from orphans to be the standard of Astra Militarum procedural rulings. Each regiment runs a bit differently from others, and it's often portrayed that regiments from different worlds often have an almost ganglike competition with each other, so having someone there to push the Gold Standard of operations on them makes sense, if only to make sure everyone is on the same page. Commissars are basically the HR department of the Astra Militarum.