Imperial Army

I agree that GDW has been somewhat inconsistent on how the Imperial
military worked.  Here's my two bits:

Steve Charlton [email removed] writes:

>In my campaigns, the main military arm of the Imperium is the Imperial Navy.
>The Marines are part of the Navy, just as in the United States.  The
>Imperial Army does not normally exist, except as Army-level HQ and support
>units stationed at convenient locations.

I disagree about the Imperial Army.  IMHO, they're a fairly important and
much under-noticed branch of the Imperial military.  The Marines may be
the shock troops and Rapid Deployment Force, but much of the day-to-day
scut work falls to the Army.  They pick up the jobs the other services
miss.  They are the "UN peace-keepers" that keep fighting on balkanized
member-worlds from getting out of hand.  They're the occupiers who help
maintain civil order in the former Solomani Sphere.  They're the planetary
Coast Guard, who perform search and rescue missions when necessary.
In areas of unrest, they're responsible for the defense of member-worlds
within the 1/10 diameter limit.  When necessary, they're the troops that
go in behind the Marines to secure the planetary foothold they've made,
and follow it up with the type of force the marines aren't meant to deliver.
If there's a big public-works project to be done, the IA Corps of Engineers
are called in.  Note that at least seven of the eleven regiments of the
Imperial Guard were IA units, with the IISS and Marines providing one
each and a special formation of Aslan another.  (Note that these IA
forces under the General Staff staged the coup that unseated Styryx in
favor of Gavin.)

The IA is supported by the powerful, high-tech worlds, although recruiting
is universal.  Like the IN, Colonial Reserves and planetary or even
national armies are permitted...as long as certain unofficial but well
understood guidelines are followed.  In fairly safe regions of the realm,
they aren't very visible.  In the Marches and in the Solomani Rim, they
are a more common sight.

Note that the IA is a joint command, as mentioned in _Mercenary_.  It
isn't just the army, but also the aerospace force and wet navy.  The
idea is that the main mission is defense of individual worlds.  Because
of thise focus, levels above the individual world command are less
important in the IA than in, say, the IN, which is interested in the
defense of entire subsectors and sectors.  Furthermore, individual
units, while loyal to the Imperium as a whole, would typically be more
closely related to their host world than an IN command is, due to the
need for coordination between planetary government and the Imperial
defense forces.

The joint command system in the IA also means that, depending on the
mission and the composition of the troops, it is equally likely that
one would see a Vice Marshal as a Major General, for instance, in an
overall command position.  Wet navy forces would tend not to be
deployed as freely off-world as land or air forces, of course.

In terms of inter-service rivalry, notice that some of the peacetime
IA missions are broadly similar to missions that might be undertaken
by IISS Contact & Liaison teams.  This sort of dove-tail overlap
seems to be characteristic of the way the Imperium operated its'
military forces.

On another note:

>I'm lazy, so I like the cheesy simplicity of CT starship combat or the
>abstract comfort of High Guard.

Cheesy!  Heck, it was great, once you got past the trigonometry.  You
could play it with a handful of index cards, a calculator, some
mimiatures, and enough flat space.  (Oh, I suppose a tape measure and
dice would be useful too....)  Portable, quick, clean rules.
Although owners of the 1977 rules might notice that ranges seem to have
increased just a bit in the modern era. :)  At least we're now using
the metric system.

  Steve Bonneville
  [email removed]