Steel, Guns, and the Industrial Party in Another World-Chapter 726: Reforming the Royal Army
TL: Rui88
Led by Claude, the Alda instructors, under the generous treatment of King Rodney XVIII, were all highly enthusiastic about their work.
They went deep into the military camps, eating and living with the officers and soldiers recruited by the king for half a year, diligently summarizing and analyzing the various problems currently facing the kingdom’s army, as well as suitable solutions.
The instructors soon realized that their experience in the Northwest Bay could not be completely copied here.
It had to be admitted that the system Paul Grayman had implemented for his own army was definitely an “elite” path in this era.
Tight organization, sufficient training, coupled with ample material supplies, and a great deal of education.
The last point was particularly important. After passing the initial start-up phase, Paul’s cultural requirements for his soldiers were no longer satisfied with just being literate.
He increased the educational investment in the army. In addition to strengthening their reading and writing skills, soldiers also had to learn mathematics and other subjects, which seemed incredible to outsiders.
This was especially true for the more specialized branches, such as artillery, surveying, meteorology, and engineering, as well as many civilian positions. The knowledge they had to master was considered quite profound by ordinary people, the kind of things that only wealthy and leisured scholars would study.
Paul even had his officers and soldiers read poetry and watch plays to cultivate their character.
Many people were puzzled as to why the Marquis would invest so much in a group of “consumables” who could lose their lives on the battlefield at any moment.
This was indeed difficult to understand, even for Paul himself. He was merely acting on the stereotypical knowledge from his previous life, vaguely aware that enriching the minds of soldiers, improving their culture, and broadening their horizons would definitely contribute to enhancing their combat effectiveness.
But as for how exactly it contributed, all Paul could think of was that they would learn new things faster and execute orders more quickly.
Was there a situation of over-investment? Perhaps investing 50 would have a similar effect on the army’s combat effectiveness as investing 100?
Who cared? He had won several wars anyway, so he would just continue this way for now.
Perhaps Paul was not aware that on a deeper level, he had a certain “compulsive” trait. For things he loved and considered important, he hoped to bestow perfection upon them in every aspect.
People have a thousand faces, and hearts have a thousand changes. Individual soldiers might be a mixed bag, but under uniform discipline and the same cultural education, the army as a whole should possess noble character, a selfless spirit, and a loyal heart. The army should not only be a guardian but also an artist, an explorer, and a model for the nation. When they retired from the army and returned to their local communities, they could use the various skills they had learned to benefit society.
Absolute perfection was certainly impossible, but that didn’t stop him from striving towards it. It was also impossible to do everything at once, but even a small step forward was progress.
As for whether this would cultivate a group of revolutionaries, Paul felt that the internal contradictions under his rule had not yet intensified to an irreconcilable degree.
If that day ever came, he would deserve it. One shouldn’t refuse to do the right thing out of fear. Besides, if that day did come, whether it was a last-minute scramble or stubbornly sticking to the old ways, both would be worse than making proactive changes now.
One can imagine the vast difference between the current Alda army, tirelessly “nurtured” by Paul, and the other armies of the time.
However, this was also due to the long-standing peaceful environment in the Northwest Bay, at least before the Kent family was eliminated and the orcs invaded. Only under such conditions could Paul have the leisure to slowly play at “nurturing.” Most importantly, although the Alda army was a standing army, its scale had long been modest, and the burden it created was still bearable.
But things were different here in Crystal Shrine.
What kind of army did King Rodney XVIII need? The most important thing was certainly that it could fight as well as the Alda army, but even more crucial was that it could be formed quickly and on a large scale. Furthermore, it had to be able to replenish its numbers and recover to a combat-effective level quickly after suffering heavy losses.
Clearly, simply copying the Northwest Bay’s model would be something the king’s treasury could never support, not even with the help of military scrip.
The instructors had to make many trade-offs with the system they were familiar with. Using the prototype that Paul Grayman had hand-built in his laboratory as a reference, they had to design a mass-produced model that was easier to manufacture and more versatile. 𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎
For example, the cultural requirements for soldiers were greatly reduced, with only basic literacy being sufficient. Some knowledge was only required for the elite with specialized needs to master.
But some necessary elements were indispensable. They divided the king’s army, just as they did in the Northwest Bay, into first-tier units, second-tier units, and reserve units.
The training intensity of the first-tier units was completely on par with that of the Alda army. The training intensity of the second-tier units was reduced according to the situation, and the reserve units were not full-time soldiers. There were also differences in equipment and supplies for armies of different levels.
The royal demesne was also divided into military service districts, and through the king’s edict, the officials of the Crownlands were ordered to conduct a census of the population within their jurisdictions, creating files for people of all age groups, especially for young men.
It sounded simple, but for the current kingdom government, it was a massive project that could not be accomplished overnight. But it was worth it. If the army could be replenished in a timely manner after suffering heavy losses, the phenomenon of a single battle deciding the outcome of an entire war would no longer occur.
In the process of day-to-day training, the Alda instructors compiled their experiences and wrote a guiding pamphlet to record the precautions that infantry needed to pay attention to in their daily training.
At the beginning, it was just a thin booklet, but as the king’s army improved, its contents were gradually detailed. And because the connection with the Northwest Bay was deepening, many new pieces of equipment, including gunpowder weapons, successively appeared in the king’s army. Thus, more and more new content was added, eventually turning it into a thick book that covered everything from formation, training, combat, to daily conduct—the Infantry Regulations.
Compared to Paul Grayman’s army-building, Rodney XVIII’s, while a step backward in terms of quality, or a low-spec version of the Alda army, was a method more suited for a country with vast territory and a large population to quickly build a powerful fighting force on a massive scale. Later historians generally regarded it as the beginning of the large-scale modernization of human armed forces.
That Infantry Regulations, along with the successively published Military Discipline Code, Conscription Act, War Mobilization Act, and Wartime Economic Control Act, together outlined the basic structure of a massive war machine.
This efficient war machine was emulated by many countries. They all used Ordo’s Infantry Regulations and the aforementioned series of documents as blueprints, making minor modifications for the formation of their own new armed forces. And this system repeatedly proved its high versatility. Regardless of how the imitators’ level compared to that of the Ordo army they were imitating, they invariably crushed their own country’s traditional armies.
