Board Thread:Warhammer 40k General Discussion/@comment-27642965-20160211003725/@comment-44249-20160603014649

88.171.97.94 wrote:

Thanks for correcting my false opinions about the Imperial Guard, though I still think they lack sometimes good commanding officers - in fact, I think my opinions mainly come from the point of view of people who don't play the imperial guard. But to be fair in the books it is quite mixed - sometimes they use proper tactics and kick ass, sometimes they are just thrown into the meat grinder just for the Space Marines to save the day. We don't really know the standard.

There honestly isn't a standard; things can and do go both ways with the Imperium's regular military (I'm not factoring the Space Marines and Sisters of Battle in this) and, as you guessed, it basically does come down to the quality of the officers in the chain of command. On the one hand you have people like Lord General Zyvan from the Ciaphas Cain books, portrayed as a pragmatic officer who values his soldiers' lives and has a proper understanding of combined arms. On the other end of the scale there's plenty of Guard generals who got promoted more on connections than competence and actually manage to fail at simple human-wave tactics.

There's also a third category of people like that twat in the early Gaunt's Ghosts novels who had a personal vendetta with Gaunt and repeatedly sent the Ghosts, a unit designed as something akin to USMC Force Recon (i.e. light infantry specialized as forward scouts and raiders, whereas Ciaphas Cain's Valhallan 597th are line infantry with mechanized support) into deathtraps and pitched battles on purpose, intending to get them all killed.