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Chapter 706 New Army
Now the Tibetan issue is placed before Hong Tao. If the tea monopoly system is changed, it will not only affect the Ming Dynasty bureaucratic capital, but also infringe on the interests of many Tibetan chieftains and monks.

If the western Sichuan region also gets into chaos, it will be too much to handle. So we can only endure it for ten or eight years, and wait until the threat from the north is completely resolved and we have enough troops, then we can turn around and solve the troubles in the southwest.

That's right. If you want to completely solve the problems in the southwest region, there is only one way, force. Any other idea is a beautiful fantasy. Only war can effectively integrate different cultures and beliefs. There will never be peace unless one side is defeated.

"Your Majesty, Sun Chengzong is training the new army in Lanzhou, but there is not enough military equipment, including muskets and artillery. The General Staff checked the inventory of the Navy and Army warehouses, and discussed it carefully with Minister Wang of the Ministry of Industry. The conclusion is not optimistic.

The current output of Haihe Machinery Factory and Luanzhou Machinery Factory cannot meet the needs of all new troops. Can we first train 20,000 new troops, and then increase the number to 50,000 after the expansion of Luanzhou Machinery Factory and the increase in output? "

The issue of salt and tea came to an end for the time being, and Yuan Keli breathed a sigh of relief, but when he saw the book in front of him, his brows immediately frowned again. When he was the governor of the navy, shipping, and customs, he was not as tired as the chief of staff.

Just preparing logistical supplies for the navy, army and new army was enough to make one's brain boil. But as soon as he saw the emperor's face, he was too embarrassed to mention the difficulties. In the past, when there was no general staff to assist the navy and army, the emperor was responsible for all the logistics himself.

"...The production capacity is insufficient... Wang An, go ask Wang Zhizhen to move a thousand muskets from the Jinyiwei. Zhang Ran, the Imperial Horse Administration should also move out five hundred guns and ten field cannons. The insufficient ones should be supplemented with steel crossbows first. Not only can the number not be reduced, but another 30,000 should be added and placed in Ningxia Prefecture for training.

Tell Sun Chengzong that I don't want him to train all the troops into the army, but to emphasize the old leading the new. During the training process, select qualified soldiers and focus on training, and the requirements for the rest can be slightly lowered.

If there is a shortage of weapons, two or three people can use one gun, and two to three hundred households can share one cannon. At the same time, the cavalry of the original border army should be taken seriously. The army does not need cavalry. As long as the coordination is good and the tactics are appropriate, they can still play a role.

The General Staff should also revise the new army training manual as soon as possible based on the feedback from the new army staff. Li Ruzhang, select more sergeants, squad leaders, and centurions from your unit to go to Lanzhou and Ningxia Prefecture to assist Sun Chengzong. Two years, no, one and a half years, the army must be formed in one and a half years!"

After repelling the counterattack of the Ordos tribe in Guihua City, Sun Chengzong was transferred to Lanzhou by the emperor to train the new army. The reason why it was called the new army instead of the land army was mainly to distinguish the difference between the two.

Previously, the army soldiers were all recruited from the civilian population, with a small number of marines and Liaodong border troops. However, 50% of the new army this time came from the Ming border troops, 30% were recruited from factories and mines, and only 20% came from the army, most of whom were officers, gunners, and staff officers.

Hong Tao used to think that the Ming border troops should be kept out of service if possible. Although they had rich combat experience, they also developed many bad habits, such as drawing empty salaries and killing innocent people to claim credit. In addition, they had great flaws in their willpower and were easily defeated when faced with adversity.

But after fighting with Zhang Bingzhong's Datong border troops in Xinghe City, Hong Tao suddenly realized that he might be wrong and had generalized the Ming border troops.

Border troops are different from each other. There are both lax and sloppy troops and elite troops who are very capable of fighting. As long as they are given enough respect and treatment, and equipped with advanced weapons and tactics, they may not be unable to fight tough battles.

So a bold idea came up, to let the army train the new with the old, and try to train more combat-ready soldiers in a relatively short period of time. The combat effectiveness can be inferior to that of the army, and even not good at field battles, as long as they can rely on forts, city walls, and trenches to defend against enemies of similar numbers. In this way, the pace of military reform can be accelerated, and a large number of border troops and garrison troops can be eliminated, freeing up some military expenses and a large number of labor forces.

"Your Majesty, Lanzhou and Ningxia Prefecture are far apart and the journey is inconvenient. It is not easy to supply food and fodder for 80,000 people."

The emperor's solution could indeed solve the urgent problem of insufficient weapons, but it made things even more difficult for Yuan Keli. The border area was already crowded with a large number of frontier troops who were waiting to be fed, and suddenly there were tens of thousands more, which increased the logistical pressure several times.

"Then build the road! Haven't you been worrying about what to do with the disbanded garrison troops and the transport troops? Now you can send them to the Transportation Department. Also, Wang Sheng's men should not have been killed yet, so send them all to build the road as well. Whether they can save their lives depends on luck!"

If Yuan Keli hadn't mentioned the logistics supply, Hong Tao would have really forgotten about it. In addition to luring and killing the traitors and foreign enemies during this trip, he also personally experienced the road conditions at the border, and then came up with the idea of ​​building a road network between the border and the second-tier major transportation hub cities.

According to the defense deployment designed by himself, in the future, on the northern border of the Ming Dynasty, the passive defense mode will no longer be based on the Great Wall. Instead, heavy troops will be stored in about ten fortified cities, and an active defense mode that can attack and defend will be adopted.

However, no matter how strong a city is, if you want to defend it, you must first ensure that its logistics are sufficient, and at this time, roads become the top priority. Without an efficient road network, the active defense mode is like a mirage.

So the emperor gave an order, and starting from the summer of the 13th year of Jingyang, more than 60,000 engineering teams that had just been incorporated into the Transportation Department began to set out northward one after another.

In order to pay for this huge expenditure, everyone from the Ministry of Revenue to the Imperial Treasury and then to the Customs started to dig into their pockets, taking out every ounce of silver they could squeeze out and turning it into hammers, steel drills, explosives, cotton clothes, food, livestock, and wages for the engineering teams.

According to the emperor's intention, the Transportation Department planned four routes to be built at the same time. The first route was from Xi'an to Lanzhou, passing through Qingyang Prefecture, with a total length of 1400 li; the second route was from Xi'an to Ningxia Prefecture, but the starting point was in Qingyang Prefecture, which meant that a section of the road was shortened, with a total length of 760 li.

The third road runs from Taiyuan, Shanxi to Shahukou, with a total length of 640 miles; the fourth road runs from the capital through Xuanfu to Datong, with a total length of 650 miles.

The four roads together are nearly 3500 miles long, which sounds difficult, but in fact it is not that complicated. All four roads are expansions. There were originally roads, and a large part of them were government post roads. Now it is just a matter of changing the dirt road to gravel, widening the road surface, and repairing the bridges along the way.

But it was not as easy as imagined, because the emperor set higher standards and required that all roads must be able to accommodate two four-wheeled carriages moving towards each other at the same time. This greatly increased the difficulty of the project.

Because they have to pass through mountainous areas to a certain extent, some places originally followed the terrain and had steep slopes or were relatively narrow, so now they have to find a way to lower the slope and widen the road.

(End of this chapter)