[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Eltharon

These marines sit high in the area of pure badassery. Are they sort of 40k Space Marine analogues or something similar?

40k Space Marines I don't know much about, but I think the answer is "no".

Imagine that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation had a monopoly on interstellar transport, the guilty conscience of Alfred Nobel, and complete naval supremacy. Suppose further that it was run by fanatics who had been trained from infancy, with TL10 psychology, for utter dedication to the cause of preventing mass deaths. Further, suppose that its leash were being held by the General Assembly of the United Nations, except that the general run of countries was like the sample that get representatives on the Human Rights Commission. Dial everything up to ten along with the tech level, and the result is a bit like the Empire in FLAT BLACK.

The Imperial Marines are the Empire's sole military force. They recruit and train about ten thousand per year, which is to say about twelve per planet per year. And therefore they can afford to set their recruiting standards very, very high. They can afford not only to insist on very high standards of capability and talent, but also on very high psychological standards. They choose only people whom they can trust with a gun, not only to shoot people who need shooting, but also not to shoot people who don't need shooting.

Imperial marines' careers start (no younger than eighteen) with a year of training at sector HQ, followed by a year of training with their unit, followed by up to twelve five-year tours of duty. Owing to excellent TL10 health care and anti-agathic treatments, marines at mandatory retirement age (eighty) are physically and mentally equivalent to a fifty-year-old wealthy person in the USA today. The average career lasts 45 years, and the median Imperial marine is a 43-year-old veteran of 25 years experience, who has served in five different military trades.

The Empire doesn't have land borders to defend, and it doesn't have ground battles to fight. So it doesn't really need heavy combat troops, beside which the Senate wouldn't let it have them anyway. Imperial marines are not intended or equipped for open battle. Imperial marines units are rotated through three kinds of postings. On arriving in a sector, it is split up into platoon-sized to company-sized detachments for the warships in the Sector. After five years the units are re-posted as security details in the Imperial residences (sort of like embassies) in the colonies of the sector. Five years after that the regiments are re-united for five years in the Sector Reserve. And five years after that it is off to another Sector. At least, in theory that's how it goes. Operational realities always screw up the neat patterns of rotations.

On shipboard rotations Imperial marines board and inspect non-Imperial orbital habitats and (non-interstellar) ships. They do space-based recovery and rescue as needed. They visit distant worlds and meet strange people, and from time to time they drop in (either in assault shuttles or by the dreaded "meteoric drop") for direct action raids.

On security detail rotation marines guard Imperial facilities, undertake counterterrorism and antiterrorism operations if necessary, rescue hostages as necessary, do crowd control on protesters, etc, etc.

On sector reserve rotations Imperial marines provide security (and engineers, and hospitals) for Imperial humanitarian emergency operations. The are sometimes sent in to carry out counter-insurgency operations when colonial governments request such help. And every now and again the conduct or spearhead a regime change operation pursuant to an Intervention Act approved by the Senate.

Since the Empire exists to prevent mass deaths (and since guys in suits are no match for TL10 robot tanks and robot attack aircraft) marines operations are usually planned to target materiel, C3I systems, etc. They emphasise small units, stealth, surprise, individual initiative etc.: classic commando operations. And they have a big emphasis on operating in urban environments where targets are close to innocent civilians, ruling out orbital bombardment.

The Empire has only very few marines per planet: only about one battalion per planet, and two thirds of those are typically not available. That means that it cannot afford to have a spectrum of different specialised units for different tasks the way the USA has Special Forces, Rangers, Delta Force, Navy SEALS, those Air Force recovery commandos, USMC Force Recon, LRRPs, Psyops, and all the rest. On the other hand, the Empire doesn't do some of the things that parts of US SOCOM does.So the Imperial marines are generalist but not universal special operations troops.

Is that sort of thing analogous to 40k Space Marines?