The God Emperors PDF! The Planetary Defence Force Keeping The Imperium Safe

greetings and salutations friends and welcome back to more war 40K lore where today we are going to have a look at the unsung heroes of the 41st Millennium the poor bastards who get even less of the credit than the god Emperor's Imperial Guard namely his planetary Defense Forces or PDF for short and man do they really not get the credit that they deserve as usually when you hear about the PDF it is as the butt of some joke or news of their near immediate Annihilation at the hands of the enemy or perhaps most insultingly of all it is usually the PDF that becomes the enemy falling prey to chaos or Gene stealer infestations or just simply sing for that big booty tow GF and even in the most charitable of interpretations the PDF's task is little more than to make the guard look good either by saving their yolal asers from the fire or by showing off all the fancy Imperial Guard toys they have like personal Vox beads or sparkly L Weaponry meanwhile the PDF will be lucky if they get an auto gun or a bolt action rifle or a massive backpack carried Vox Caster that we is about as much as the guy forced to hump it around the field and yet as the God is to the estares the PDF is to the god they may not receive much in the way of credit and that certainly are nowhere near as many songs and legends and books written about them but without local Defense Forces the Imperium would collapse there would be no one to fight off Pirates Raiders small chaos cultists or to Simply maintain public order in trying times as much as the estares are The Sword and the Imperial Guard The Shield the PDF is the glue without whom the entire fabric of Imperial society would simply collapse into lawlessness and Anarchy for it is the PDF at the end of the day that enforces The imperium's Authority across countless millions of Worlds and not in a legalistic sense mind you obviously enforcing local law is the jurisdiction and the responsibility of local law enforcement and occasionally the adeptas are bies making sure that the spirit of Imperial law supersedes all no the PDF is instead Authority and represents the government's absolute Monopoly on violence at least in theory as there are certainly many Imperial worlds where there are significant percentages of the population that endeavor to challenge aforementioned Monopoly but that merely means that your PDF isn't large enough not to mention of course the occasional presence of significant external forces also looking to uh question that Monopoly Pirates Raiders chaos cultists tyranid cultists Invasion forces splinters of fleeing defeated main strength enemies be they the remnants of chaos fleets or tanid splinter fleets there is a myriad of threats lurking out there in the cold darkness of the vast empty expanses of the 41st millennium's void and the Imperial Guard for all their countless billions simply can't be everywhere at once but the PDF through simple virtue of being the local Defense Force well they can and so will stand ready to meet any Foe and any threat at any time though they do so in a wide variety of ways and to a wildly differing degree of capability but before we get into the literally unlimited number of different PDF formations in terms of equipment organization leadership style and tasks let's again reaffirm what the PDF is there their first and foremost task is to maintain imp Imperial governance and the second task spawned from that task is to defend the planet against hostile threats external as well as internal these two tasks determine broadly the capabilities that the PDF must have regardless of its type or organization or equipment or Y fortunately the two tasks share a great deal of similarities it's just usually the difficulty of achieving those tasks that tend to be the separating Factor as most obviously what a PDF requires is military might pure and simple and virtually every other concern comes secondary to this requirement for again there are absolutely worlds on which the PDF's tasks are significantly more diverse than simply being the biggest bully boys on the blocks on some planets they will have a policing role making sure that the laws are followed they might be there to keep up morale amongst the populace they might be Toy Soldiers whose near sole duty is to remind the people of a glorious past to parade past them in beautiful uniforms there might be worlds where the PDF is little more than an irregular and occasionally raised militia where the soldiers the rest of the time simply work alongside the rest of the populace and so on and so on but military might first and foremost is always the main requirement even in the case of the pretty Toy Soldiers they're going to be equipped far better than the average civilian or gang member or organized criminal as there's the problem with many a world in the 41st Millennium the external threats are of course dangerous and will get to those in a moment but the internal ones can often be just as bad imag imagine a hive world for example the average Hive is going to have literally actually millions of hardened career criminals armed to the teeth living in the underhives luckily the vast majority of these underhives are further subdivided into hundreds if not thousands of Waring gangs Clans tribes Cults you name it so they will rarely ever pose any actual threat to the middle or the upper Hive usually it's more than enough for the adept's arites to send down a little bit of a raid now and then to Cull their numbers or kill any gang leader that's getting a little bit too influential but there is always the possibility no matter how minute that all of those downtrodden and heavily armed masses might one day look up and think has an awful lot of us and those towers do look damn shiny from down here in which case local law enforcement and a few thousand arites are not going to be enough what you need is an Army and the PDF provides though even then it is often not enough there are many worlds in the 41st Millennium that exist in a perpet ual state of Civil War which the Imperium really actually doesn't care over much about many worlds fight Wars and finish them without the Imperium ever getting involved or ever wanting to get involved sometimes these can be minor local disputes say for example a particularly tyrannical local Governor that is elected to crack down on his people's privileges with Armed Force so long as the people don't actually get back in control or anything and the tithes continue to get paid the Imperium isn't going to Care over much on occasion it might be the other way around where the populace will rise up and overthrow their oppressors this tends to be the point at which the Imperium does get involved because well killing the local Governor leads to a bit of an interruption in governance as I'm sure you can imagine though even then if the planet can get get back on its feet rapidly enough and continue to offer up the ties that the imperial want well they'll simply just change the name of the person responsible and in some cases outright states of planetary Warfare can exist for decades at the time with entire local Nations waging near unending War upon one another for territory for power for some ancient Feud or or whatever this is the battleground of the planetary Defense Force and so long as the emperium is not overly inconvenienced it will simply stay out of it now as for the capabilities of the PDF it does often depend on the world in question and the scale of the threat that it is expected to face if a planet is far behind any currently active lines of combat for example then the worst thing that they likely to have to face off against is organized gangs now that can be bad enough as you might very well have an entire population's worth of gorilla Fighters constantly rising up against the governor requiring continuous suppression operations but they're likely to be relatively lightly armed you know solid slug Weaponry auto guns maybe some stubbers here and there or the very occasional LZ weapon in which case Cas all the PDF is going to need for local Force superiority is a handful of old battered apcs and maybe a couple tanks produced either from a local Forge World or potentially even locally sourced as there are many worlds who produce their own War gear now this is not um sanctioned necessarily but neither are there any laws against it if a planet wishes to produce a tank then go ahead nobody's going to stop them and most planets aren't going to have the technology required to make a decent armored vehicle anyway though I admit this is where one of the inconsistencies of the 41st Millennium does rear its ugly head because if we have a large scale War that's been raging on a planet for a significant amount of time then naturally both sides will be attempting to develop an edge in this war being it by developing new tactics new Weaponry new machines Etc this is simply just how Humanity has always functioned now obviously there have been extraordinarily long periods of time where very little innovation has actually happened but if this world is on the level of say World War I for example then building an armored vehicle is absolutely well within their grasps of course the adept's mechanicus and the text priest are going to keep a very tight Trin on most forms of technology indeed damn near all forms of technology but if this war drags on for long enough it seems very weird that the locals wouldn't figure out how to make bigger and better tanks eventually hell considering the explosive technological development that we have seen in our own timeline Whenever there was a World War on it seems very unlikely that a planet wouldn't actually come up with something quite intriguing given a decade or two of conflict but this is a point a little bit beyond the remits of what we are currently discussing as usually these PDF forces will be equipped with either if they're very lucky guard Surplus Machinery ancient chimeras or Scout salamanders maybe even the occasional battered to back Lan Russ but usually they will be provided with non-imperial guard standard equipment as there are actually several different patterns of Tanks of artillery pieces of apcs and ifvs available throughout the Imperium these are the locally produced Staples of many a forge world but since they are not up to Imperial Guard standard they are not actually provided to the guard unless there are particularly extenuating circumstances or points of preference many an Imperial Guard regiment for example is very picky about their LZ guns most will be issued with a good oldfashioned Triplex pattern but take the Elian drop Troopers for example due to the nature of their specialization they have developed the acatan pattern Mark 4 lasgun a Bullpup style variant meanwhile the death core of C of course prefer the lucious pattern number 98 now PDF troops are rarely if ever given this degree of preferential treatment obviously but this still means that there is a great deal of shall we say offbrand Weaponry scattered throughout the Imperium one example of an actual tank like this would be the 1870 rer battle tank found in the Sabbat worlds produced on the Forge World of uresh and fielded in significant numbers by the chaos cultists who happen to take over the planet still this would absolutely be a locally produced pattern of tank that might be issued either to uh local Imperial Guard regiments if enough Leman russes were not available and definitely to local PDF forces and though something like the 070 is inferior to the full on standed pattern Leman Russ it is obviously still a massive advantage over lower hives scum suckers but that's hardly a very high hurdle to clear either in fact many worlds like this where the greatest danger is essentially organized criminals will turn to the criminals themselves to Source their planetary Defense Forces again if you're not expecting to be invaded from the outside world and your main concern is the maintenance of Imperial rule on the planet well you might as well cheap out on it a little bit and if you can get the local warlord to provide you with your army for free or at the better least far cheaper than the administratum why not do so there are even of course example planets that are not ruled directly by a single Governor but something closer to councils and in the case of a extraordinarily crime infested Hive World Planet well a gang of criminals all agreeing upon General policy is just as effective as a governor right at least as far as the Imperium is concerned as long as the tithes yet again keep flowing and this isn't even the most low tech form of PDF you could see you might think that you know officially state governed and sponsored gangsters would be about as low as it gets not at all there are federal worlds in the Imperium there are feudal worlds where the local Governor might raise militias of literally spear wielding Maniacs or people armed primarily with swords or cudgels even this actual medieval Mob Could Be a PDF now there will usually be a hard nucleus an elite core surrounding the governor himself who will have access to relatively modern quote unquote Weaponry autog guns at least or preferably a few LZ weapons and they will be more than enough to keep order on a feudal Planet 100 LZ men will turn back near any number of peasants with pitchforks after all but just like the Imperial Guard can't be everywhere those hundred honor guards of the governor can't cover an entire planet and so yet again the PDF medieval Edition is required and so long as that's good enough then well it's good enough simple as you don't need squadrons of chimera apcs if a bunch of dudes on horses will do the job of course this is not always going to be the case as if you are in an area where external threats or internal ones of a more persistent and hostile nature are present a bunch of dudes with swords probably aren't going to work anymore say you are on a planet with a long and dubious history of chaos corruption you're going to want to maintain a significant PDF force to be able to counter any chaos cultist activity or maybe we're talking about a planet that once upon a time suffered an orc Invasion see the issue with Orcs is that even after you've defeated them and eradicated them they still stick around as even the tiniest quantity of spores can persist in almost any environment and give rise to new hordes of green skins the planet Valhalla the famous ice world that is the home of the valhallan ice Warriors is still plagued with occasional bursts of green skin violence to this day and the valhal did a pretty thorough job of cleansing them the first time around in these cases the PDF forces need to be a great deal more substantial probably in terms of simple numbers rather than equipment if you've got a uh lowlevel but consistent threat like these what you need is essentially a larger and more heavily armed police force vast bodies of men capable of carrying out patrols and Punishment Expeditions into say the lower levels of underhives or into deep jungles or into vast ice wastes you'll still be able to make do with good oldfashioned auto guns or even bolt action rifles and occasionally a bit of Transportation equipment trucks or apcs or Scout salamanders maybe some light armored vehicles but what you need first and foremost is bodies these planets tend to have PDFs that make up a fairly significant portion of the total population of the world making them ideal recruiting worlds for the imperi I God as well Valhalla yet again is an excellent example of this after the valhallans defeated the Orcs they realized that well first to fight the Orcs to begin with they needed a large and self-created Army and after they beat them well the ORS never really went away and so they kept raising PDF regiments and since the Imperium is always in need of fighting men it looked at Valhalla and went well you seem to be getting a large quantity of fighting men there and you don't seem to have anything of value really to pay the tithe with so how about we make a deal every few decades or so you scrape off the cream of the crop the best of the best and you form a handful of regiments for us simple elegant even allowing even a harsh damn near unhabitable ice world to contribute to the Imperium and on particularly lucky occasions they might even get a package deal as with the valal once again they provide fighting men that are extraordinarily Hardy and capable in Arctic conditions they also export of course their unique great coats heated and specially insulated to provide warmth in even the most ridiculously of cold environments now as a Norwegian I feel HonorBound yet again to point out that what you'd really want in extreme cold conditions is layered clothing of good oldfashioned jackets and pants rather than a great coat which tend to be somewhat Breezy but hey the valhallans were at the end of the day designed by a bunch of British people a race who is famed far and wide for the fact that they panic and think the sky is falling when the roads get covered in an inch of snow so you know details details but it goes quite some distance to prove that the PDF can produce quality and often does in fact on some Worlds the PDF is considered so prized that they are not allowed to be used for Imperial Guard recruitment rather the PDF is maintained as a permanent High Readiness high efficiency standing arm such was the casee with the veran primary of the world of vast the vervan primary were not only equipped with lasgun but also with entire regiments of Imperial Guard standard Leman rusters they even had their own local version of the commissariat and of course they were ensconced behind enormous curtain walls and they were possessed of tremendous artillery capabilities the vavan primary would be the equal of near any Imperial Guard formation in all but experience granted this is uh by far the rarest of PDF troops as usually the best of the best like with the valhallans are recruited into the guard as an understanding with the rest of the Imperium as is the case with the maccabian militia where the finest soldiers are recruited and it is viewed as a tremendous honor to be recruited into the maccabian jeries a very powerful and renowned Imperial God regiment and this incidentally really is the greatest and most honorable Duty and tradition of the planetary Defense Forces as they can actually Trace their history all the way back to a point preceding that of the Imperial God or even the Imperial Army as they recall during the Great Crusade as the very first planetary Defense Forces well they were none other than Terror Defense Forces the so-called old 100 regiments that fought alongside the god Emperor and his Thunder Warriors to conquer Terror they also then left the planet alongside the emperor to begin the conquest of the Imperium but they were in essence initially PDF formations many of them even returned to being PDF formations as several of these regiments were granted settlement rights on conquered planets this is a process through which particularly accomplished and honored regiments are granted the privilege of disbanding on a world and then intermingle with the civilian populace becoming the new owners of that world making it their new home world in fact and thus the regiment would have returned to its old position as a planetary Defense Force not all of the original 100 regiments however were so rewarded many were considered too effective too good or in some cases too damaged or dangerous to be granted this ultimate reward and a handful even exist all the way in to the modern day 41st Millennium as a regiment of incredible pedigree and renal few and far in between though they might be these more Elite PDF formations that eventually become Elite Imperial Guard regiments tend to be the result of Worlds with either a very long history of high level violence like C for example the home world of the death core a world that decided to secede from the Imperium but was stopped from doing so quite uh brutally by a commissar who decided the best way to Halt the rebellion was to dump the world's nuclear Arsenal on top of the rebels and to his credit it worked it absolutely did it reduced their numbers to the point where the Loyalists could fight back and after many many years of grueling Warfare C was an imperial world yet again with a lot of spare regiments to send off into space other planets might have um exceptional circumstances or specializations the Elian drop Troopers for example incidentally I've done law videos on most of the ements already in case you want to look into them but in the case of elesia it is a world that is very very high above very tall and so using grab shoots to travel around is entirely common giving the people ofia a near unique Mastery of the grab shoot and a fantastic head for Heights add in extensive training and expertise in the specialist form of warfare required to operate in close consort with heavy gunships and you've got the makings of an elite regiment you might even have PDF formations that are closer to the veran primary but not quite so entrenched far more Elite than your average PDF but not quite so dedicated shall we say this would be for example the agria PDF they due to their proximity to the eye of Terror of course need to be at a bar higher level of Readiness than pretty much any other PDF formation throughout the Galaxy thus they too are equipped with their own tanks they even produce their own Specialty Vehicle the Leman Russ Eradicator with a locally manufactured pattern of its main battery Nova Cannon nevertheless they remain decidedly a PDF formation and due to the focus on getting L guns out to the regular guard regimens they are in turn equipped with a simple auto gun the agripinaa type 2 now it's a locally produced Mark and probably Superior to most auto guns but it is nevertheless just a good old-fashioned solid slug weapon but the vast majority of PDF formations of course won't be anything quite so fancy or unique they won't have a big mission like protecting the Imperium from the eye of Terror there won't be elite troops like the alians that probably not even going to have any particularly marketable skills like the valhallans the vast majority of PDF regimens are going to be equipped with locally produced Weaponry bolt action rifles in some cases singleshot lass locks outright muskets or locally produced auto guns whatever can be made cheaply and easily on the world in question their uniforms will be nothing fancy unlike the Von primary their task will be simple to maintain control over a world in the god Emperor's name and their daily jobs drudgery patrols exercises endless trainings for a war that in all to your likelihood will never come and in terms of fancy stuff like armor or even more fancy an Air Force well they're going to have something old probably H produced there's even mention of a world in double eagle that you use so-called wolf cubs which sound an awful lot like the me163 from our own history which if that's true then that is a tragic little vehicle indeed and when deployed the PDF is more likely to be fighting against their own Imperial citizens than invading chaos forces or tyranids or TOA or dark El or anything else they're most likely to be putting down civilian uprisings unrests quelling food riots or if things gets very very interesting maybe destroying a local chaos commune of a couple hundred members and still seeming insignificance of their task not withstanding the PDF are the Bedrock of the Imperium so the next time you're reading about the Glorious exploits of the Imperial God or the adep as estaris spare a thought for the PDF as well until next time I've been Arch thank you all very much for listening and I do hope to see you all again soon have a good day

Channel: Arch

Views: 80,385

Keywords: arch, PDF, 40k, Planetary Defence Force, the imperium of man, the god emperor, thearchcast, the archcast, warhammer lore, warhammer 40k lore, warhammer, 40k lore, lore, 40k explained, imperium of man, games workshop, warhammer 40000, chaos, imperium, space marine, emperor of mankind, imperium of mankind, imperial guard

Id: bbHFTvFZ7ZM

Length: 32min 26sec (1946 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 18 2023