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This is a hypothetical that assumes you have command of the Imperium's entire pre-heresy military; Astartes, Custodes, the Imperial Army, the Sisters of Silence, and whomever else I might be forgetting.

As it's a hypothetical, it is also not meant to be taken seriously in relation to the real world. Now with that said...

Which of our real-life countries, in this modern era of 2023, would pose the biggest issue when it comes to the ideal of global unification? I can think of a few - the three so-called "super powers" come to mind, but I'm interested to hear other opinions.

Ideally the point would be to achieve the end-goal with as little bloodshed as possible. Sadly, humans being humans, it might not work out that way.

So, any thoughts?

I'd say the superpowers are your least problem - they're militarily powerful and have nukes, but they've also got a chain of command and a structured organization, which means they can be subjected to a decapitating strike, browbeaten, threatened or bribed to submission, or even conviced to make the democratic or autocratic decision to submit themselves to Unity voluntarily. Potentially, they can be conquered without firing a single shot.

Contrary to that, the countries that would pose the greatest problem for a bloodless Unification would be the ones that have barely any actual goverment at all, or large zones that are under sectarian, criminal or warlord control. You can't really convince some drug lord in the jungle or mountain passes that hardly even knows who reigns in a nominal capital that he has to lay down arms and join the Imperium or perish, and even if he does that does not really influence the warlord a couple valleys over, so you'd be forced to rein them in by force, and one by one, in a drawn out campaign of suppression.

Probably some country in Africa with a lack of modern infrastructure. The US/China/Russia are easy to force into compliance, if the mere threat of the Imperium's power is not sufficient total surrender should be obtained with a few demonstration lance strikes on minor towns. A few thousand casualties are a negligible price to pay and once the point has been made surrender orders can be swiftly issued to the entire country. But where there isn't modern infrastructure you'd have to spend vast amounts of effort just to contact people and inform them of their new rulers.

If the Imperium was seeking to initiate Global control of present day earth with their 40k tech and morality, I don't think they'd have a problem with anyone.

They'd tell people they are joining the Imperium. If people refused, they would vaporize an entire continent from orbit, and then ask again.

When the Imperium wants control of a planet, they take it, no matter who or how many they have to exterminate in order to make that happen.

Tsagualsa wrote:
I'd say the superpowers are your least problem - they're militarily powerful and have nukes, but they've also got a chain of command and a structured organization, which means they can be subjected to a decapitating strike, browbeaten, threatened or bribed to submission, or even conviced to make the democratic or autocratic decision to submit themselves to Unity voluntarily. Potentially, they can be conquered without firing a single shot.

Contrary to that, the countries that would pose the greatest problem for a bloodless Unification would be the ones that have barely any actual goverment at all, or large zones that are under sectarian, criminal or warlord control. You can't really convince some drug lord in the jungle or mountain passes that hardly even knows who reigns in a nominal capital that he has to lay down arms and join the Imperium or perish, and even if he does that does not really influence the warlord a couple valleys over, so you'd be forced to rein them in by force, and one by one, in a drawn out campaign of suppression.

I think this is true, assuming the unifier wanted literally everybody on board. Big pockets of the imperium have lawless areas that essentially govern themselves (that's literally the plot to Necromunda), so I could see the Imperium landing in Kabul, getting the de jure compliance, and then not caring what's going on in the valleys.

I agree broadly that the best candidates are place that are currently ungovernable, but I'd focus more on places with open warlords and civil war than criminal gangs. The first two that really come to mind are still Afghanistan or Somalia. the Kurdish territories would be rough. It wasn't that long ago you'd put Ireland on the list...

I mean, the USA are basically Cadia already, they spend more money on their military than all other countries in the world combined and their whole population seems to be under arms...

Or Switzerland. Even the Nazis forgot to invade Switzerland.

This permutation of the NeoAigaion character is gratifying.

Tsagualsa wrote: threatened or bribed to submission, or even conviced to make the democratic or autocratic decision to submit themselves to Unity voluntarily. Potentially, they can be conquered without firing a single shot.

And this also, it’s nice to see like a person with good takes have a good take. It seems like the normal bribe to use on one country would be giving them dominion over another country. The Inperium can bully one country into changing its government to collaborate with another country, and make the top country the new Imperial governor.

PenitentJake wrote:If the Imperium was seeking to initiate Global control of present day earth with their 40k tech and morality, I don't think they'd have a problem with anyone.

They'd tell people they are joining the Imperium. If people refused, they would vaporize an entire continent from orbit, and then ask again.

When the Imperium wants control of a planet, they take it, no matter who or how many they have to exterminate in order to make that happen.

This in the inverse kind of post where it isn’t that good.

PenitentJake wrote:
If the Imperium was seeking to initiate Global control of present day earth with their 40k tech and morality, I don't think they'd have a problem with anyone.

They'd tell people they are joining the Imperium. If people refused, they would vaporize an entire continent from orbit, and then ask again.

When the Imperium wants control of a planet, they take it, no matter who or how many they have to exterminate in order to make that happen.

Ideally I wouldn't want to vaporise literal continents. After all they have more than just humans on them.

I'd ask nicely first, and if that didn't work, then resort destabilisation (Alpha Legion would be good here). I'd ask again, and if THAT didn't work, then I'd regretfully resort to full hostile takeover via military action. After all, what use is a globally-unified Earth if a few nations don't want to join? (rhetorical question) The entire point is that the species be united like never before. No longer shackled by such archaic concepts as "religion" or "ethnicity".

Want to take over a planet with minimal destruction to infrastructure? Send the 8th. It's their specialty, after all.

I agree with Tsagualsa, the problem would not be organized countries with a good government but ones that are, or have recently, been in a civil war.

To my mind one of the great questions of the 20th-21st Century is why could the United States defeat and significantly alter the culture of Japan but not do the same in Vietnam or Afghanistan.

Now of course there are many reasons, these are 3 countries and 3 wars fought over an 80 year span. But one reason is the development of guerilla/terrorist tactics of resistance developed by Mao, perfected by Ho Chi Minh and practiced with great effectiveness by the Taliban and others.

(this is in NO WAY and endorsement of any of them)

Essentially their guerilla warfare plan is to forgo uniformed soldiers and an organized military and battles over prepared targets. Instead guerillas are party of society and strike at soft targets behind the front lines. The enemy is forced to lash out at society in general, which in turn generates more insurgents.

In the movie War Machine Brad Pitt has a great bit where he explains how if you have 10 insurgents and kill 4, now you have 20.

So a decade after the pacification fleet shows up in orbit the Imperium is building schools, medicae centers, servitor lobitimization plants whatever, with aid from sympathetic governments and their security services. The governments that dared to raise their hand against the Imperium are ash, their successors are much more cooperative.

The real resistance, that the Imperium cannot stamp out are the people willing to hide in the hills and eat bark, and the ordinary people who live ordinary lives, until they day they toss a grenade into the window of a passing Imperial truck.

Countries awash in guns and explosives and people who know how to best use them as armed resistance will not be pacified.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:

The real resistance, that the Imperium cannot stamp out are the people willing to hide in the hills and eat bark

Oh, the Imperium can absolutely deal with those guys. Remember, it is NOT tied by ANY kind of restrain, moral, materiel, or otherwise. They are not tied by reason either. Some randos are hiding in a forest? Nuke the forest! One nuke? Are you kidding me? Twenty nukes saturation bombardment! Then again! Then again, because the third time is the charm! Does it destroy the entire region and millions of people, turning half the continent into a radioactive wasteland? Who the fugg cares, the randos are dead, mission accomplished, let's enslave a few million people and send them into the wasteland to clear it up with toothbrushes or something.

Guerilla warfare assumes that the occupier is reasonable and has some kind of measurable willingness to escalate and de-escalate. The Imperium lacks either of those, it is pretty much the anathema to guerilla warfare.

 AtoMaki wrote:

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:

The real resistance, that the Imperium cannot stamp out are the people willing to hide in the hills and eat bark

Oh, the Imperium can absolutely deal with those guys. Remember, it is NOT tied by ANY kind of restrain, moral, materiel, or otherwise. They are not tied by reason either. Some randos are hiding in a forest? Nuke the forest! One nuke? Are you kidding me? Twenty nukes saturation bombardment! Then again! Then again, because the third time is the charm! Does it destroy the entire region and millions of people, turning half the continent into a radioactive wasteland? Who the fugg cares, the randos are dead, mission accomplished, let's enslave a few million people and send them into the wasteland to clear it up with toothbrushes or something.

Guerilla warfare assumes that the occupier is reasonable and has some kind of measurable willingness to escalate and de-escalate. The Imperium lacks either of those, it is pretty much the anathema to guerilla warfare.

Alternatively, if the tithes are met... They won't even care.
Let's say Earth is required to send food and troops, as its main tithe. If sufficient foodstuffs and people are sent to the Imperial war machine... There's a good chance that they won't care whether Earth is hunky-dory, rainbows and sunshine, or an apocalyptic hellhole that's barely scraping by.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
To my mind one of the great questions of the 20th-21st Century is why could the United States defeat and significantly alter the culture of Japan but not do the same in Vietnam or Afghanistan.

Because one was a war of annihilation and the other two had political goals beyond the destruction of the enemy. Against Japan the definition of victory was simple: defeat Japan's conventional forces and end their occupation of conquered territories (territories that hated Japan), and the US was willing to use indiscriminate destruction of civilian targets as a means of accomplishing that goal. Turning every single Japanese city to glass was a perfectly valid strategic option, and the use of nuclear weapons was just a more psychologically impressive version of the firebombing the US was already using. But in Vietnam and Afghanistan the goal was to maintain the existence of an unpopular government against its own population, with political constraints that prevented the use of overwhelming force to destroy the enemy. If the goal in those wars had simply been to destroy the enemy and end their ability to threaten other nations victory would have been trivially easy (though at horrifying civilian cost).

In the case of the Imperium vs. the real world we're in the WWII situation. The Imperium might prefer to take the planet intact for the practical reason that it is of more value that way but from a moral point of view the Imperium is perfectly fine with mass civilian casualties. It's very hard to run a guerilla campaign when the giant miles-long cathedral in orbit will wipe your entire home town off the map with a single shot if you show any signs of refusing to comply and escalate to annihilating entire cities if they start to run out of patience.

Also, remember that the US won the war in Vietnam. They defeated North Vietnam's conventional army and forced a surrender. South Vietnam didn't fall until after the US said "mission accomplished" and left the country, at which point the unpopular government had no allies left and was swiftly defeated.

The real resistance, that the Imperium cannot stamp out are the people willing to hide in the hills and eat bark, and the ordinary people who live ordinary lives, until they day they toss a grenade into the window of a passing Imperial truck.

And then the cathedral in orbit fires a lance strike into the town, killing a hundred thousand people in an instant and making the consequences of disobedience very clear. The next time some idiot gets ideas about throwing grenades into trucks he is promptly killed by his fellow citizens because nobody wants to trade a hundred thousand people for a minor annoyance to the invader. The whole "20 more guerillas" thing only works if you're brutal enough to make people mad but not brutal enough to make the cost of disobedience too horrifying to consider. The Imperium has no moral issue with that second level of brutality, and has such an overwhelming advantage in military power that there is no hope of inflicting more than the most minor of inconveniences on the occupier. Throwing a grenade into a truck and killing some random people on the ground won't do anything to the death cathedral in orbit.

There’s this weird conviction that the reason insurgencies are successful is because occupiers are bound by rules. This just doesn’t hold up. France in Algeria, the soviets in Afghanistan, the nationalist in china, hell, the Nazis in Yugoslavia… these are all situations where the occupier has few if any qualms about using brutal violence, and still lost.

You reach a point where the level of brutality required approaches annihilation or genocide, and at that point, what’s the point of holding the people?

You're not wrong, but the Imperium of Man doesn't see the issue. You unify under them, or they kill as many of you as necessary to get the job done.

They don't even need to resort to the ultra-heavy handed examples given in prior post.

Step 1: Destroy the nuclear powers ability to deploy their nuclear arsenal. Not because it is a major threat, but because it will set back use of the planets resources after pacification.

Step 2: Offer the remaining world governments an opportunity to submit to Imperial Rule.

Step 3: Make an example of a few choice dissenters. The United Kingdom would be a great choice. It is right in the middle of the First World. Then offer another opportunity for all remaining holdouts to submit to Imperial Rule.

Step 4: If too many dissenters remain, utterly smash one of the dissenting great powers. Toss up between the United States and China. Provide a Final Opportunity to submit to Imperial Rule.

Step 5: Start destroying any government that still resist. Utterly and publicly in true Imperial fashion. Keep going, sparing only those governments that come groveling to your feet.

Step 6: Setup shop, putting whoever was smart enough to join with you early as local assistance to the new Imperial Governor.

Step 7: Use forces to root out any significant signs of remaining resistance. This is the Imperium. No problem destroying buildings to get a few armed holdouts. No problem firebombing cities that dare to step out of line. Start with examples, move to wholesale destroy as necessary.

Who was the biggest problem? Remote decentralized areas like Afghanistan where you have to go village by valley to get everything under control.

 Polonius wrote:
You reach a point where the level of brutality required approaches annihilation or genocide, and at that point, what’s the point of holding the people?

There isn't. But the Imperium is perfectly willing to exterminate the existing population and replace them with loyal settlers. Conquering a planet intact is preferred because an intact planet has more value but if the choice is genocide or not having that planet at all the choice is inevitably going to be genocide. The Imperium has no moral issue with killing a billion people as a demonstration to the survivors of why further resistance is suicide, and after the first demonstrations of the Imperium's willingness and ability to annihilate targets from orbit how are you going to convince anyone to continue a guerilla war? Here's a gun, go shoot some Imperial bureaucrats and a few murders will totally be worth the instant annihilation of your entire city and everyone you know. Who is going to be suicidal and stubborn enough to make that trade? And who is going to cooperate with them instead of immediately turning them in to the Imperial authorities to save their own lives?

The only real-world examples that even approach the ruthlessness and brutality of the Imperium are the Nazis and Japan. Neither of them were driven out of their conquered territories until they were defeated by conventional armies. And neither of them had anywhere near the Imperium's ability to retaliate against suspected resistance forces and/or collaborators. Sure, the Nazis could send a squad to round up a town and send them off to the death camps but that squad could be ambushed and killed, the resistance could try to evacuate the town and hide everyone, etc. If you fight back against the Imperium someone on the giant death cathedral in orbit pushes a button and you along with a hundred thousand of your fellow citizens cease to exist. So if resistance didn't work against the Nazis or Japan then why would it work against a far superior enemy?

A lifeless or mostly lifeless rock isn't worth the resources spent to pacify it, so the Imperium would do well to handle things with a soft touch. The technology exchange they could promise to the masses, and the life extension they could offer to the elites should win over much of the planet without bloodshed. Beyond that, they could remove key figures and replace them and or brainwash them.

The hardest part would be getting over our reaction that we aren't alone and aren't even the only humans in the galaxy.